In many countries, indicators related to educational contexts, inputs, processes, and outputs serve as important benchmarks for allocating funding to educational institutions. Educational monitoring provides a valuable approach for gathering data on these indicators. This review offers a critical analysis of the current state of educational monitoring of school attendance in Germany, emphasizing the need for a more comprehensive monitoring system including such data. We provide an overview of the current state of research, propose a theoretical framework, and outline the key requirements for effective monitoring. From this foundation, we examine existing empirical evidence on the impact of monitoring school attendance. Our findings indicate that comprehensive and ongoing monitoring is essential for preventing and reducing student absenteeism. Moreover, we emphasize that consistent attendance monitoring is vital for educational policy and practice, offering considerable potential for school improvement. It functions as an early warning system, helping to identify students at risk of academic failure or dropping out. By systematically tracking attendance, schools can implement basic preventive measures and tailor interventions to address the specific needs of at-risk students, ultimately fostering academic achievement and engagement.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an important international study of 15‐olds' knowledge and skills. New results are released every 3 years, and have a substantial impact upon education policy. Yet, despite its influence, the methodology underpinning PISA has received significant criticism. Much of this criticism has focused upon the psychometric scaling model used to create the proficiency scores. The aim of this article is to therefore investigate the robustness of cross‐country comparisons of PISA scores to subtle changes to the underlying scaling model used. This includes the specification of the item‐response model, whether the difficulty and discrimination of items are allowed to vary across countries (item‐by‐country interactions) and how test questions not reached by pupils are treated. Our key finding is that these technical choices make little substantive difference to the overall country‐level results.