Running a Sunday school group: from attendance to individual progress

A Sunday school needs four things from one app: a private group for each class, a register you can take in two minutes, one individual goal per child, and parent updates that arrive without you chasing anyone. The Church of England's Statistics for Mission has tracked a long fall in the number of under-16s in church on a Sunday — which means the few who do come are worth keeping, and a Sunday school that can actually see who turns up and who is progressing is in a far better position to keep them.

What app do Sunday school teachers use?

The short answer: one private space per class, with attendance, each child's progress, and parent messaging in the same place — rather than spread across a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a chat app.

Most Sunday schools arrive here the long way round. They start with a WhatsApp group for parents, a paper register a volunteer fills in at the door, and a lesson plan that lives in the leader's folder. By the time a parish has two or three classes running, nobody can answer a simple question — has this child been coming, and are they actually getting anything out of it — without three people checking three different things.

The fix is not more software. It is fewer surfaces. When the register, the child's goal, and the parent update sit in one group, taking the register can do three jobs at once: record who came, build the term view, and prompt a gentle note home when a child drifts.

What does a Sunday school actually need from one app?

Four capabilities cover almost every Sunday school, from a single mixed-age class of nine to a parish running four age bands across a Sunday morning.

1. A private group per class. Each class or age band is its own closed space. The children, the lessons, and the parents attached to it are scoped to that class and invisible to the others.
2. A fast register. A tap-down attendance list taken at the start of each session, with a term view per child. This is the safeguarding and reporting backbone, and the thing a parish safeguarding officer will ask to see.
3. One individual goal per child. A single, concrete target — "learn the books of the New Testament in order", "lead the opening prayer once this term" — that the child, their parent, and the leader can see, and nobody else.
4. Parent updates that push. Absence notes, progress nudges, and a weekly "this is what we did, here's how to carry it on at home" summary, delivered as notifications rather than a feed.

Notice what is not on the list: a giant parent chat, a rota builder, a donations module. Those have their place, but they are not what separates a Sunday school that feels cared-for from one that feels like crowd control. The four above are.

How should a Sunday school take the register?

Take it digitally, in the same app that holds the goals and parent updates, and take it in under two minutes.

A clipboard has one virtue — it is fast — and several costs. It has to be transcribed if anyone ever wants a figure from it, it lives with whichever volunteer carried it that week, and it cannot do anything when a child stops coming. A child marked absent on paper is a blank in a box. A child marked absent in the app, two weeks running, can prompt a quiet note to their parents — which is exactly the kind of pastoral follow-up that keeps a wobbling family connected.

Churches running children's work in England are expected to keep proper records and follow the Church of England's safeguarding guidance, and an accurate attendance record is part of that. The honest reason most parishes keep a sloppy one is that the paper version is a chore nobody owns. A two-minute digital register that produces the term view automatically removes the excuse.

How do you track each child's progress without it feeling like school?

Set one goal per child, make it concrete and owned by the child, and keep it private to the child, the parent, and the leader.

The temptation is to import the language of the classroom. But a child comes to Sunday school to belong somewhere and to learn the story they are growing up inside, not to be assessed. "Set a goal" does not have to mean a target grid. It can be one line the child helps write: "say the Lord's Prayer from memory", "bring a question about the reading", "welcome the new boy in our group". When the child owns it, it stops being homework and becomes something they want to tick off.

Keeping it private matters more than it sounds. We'd argue strongly against any kind of public progress board in a faith setting: the moment a child's spiritual learning is visible to the whole group, the quietest child stops trying and the loudest performs. Scope each child's goal to the child, their parent, and the leader. Celebrate the shared wins out loud — the whole class learned the Christmas reading — and keep the individual ones quiet. This is the same private-by-default logic that runs through every well-run private group; we cover it in our guide to member privacy modes.

How do you keep parents in the loop without a noisy chat?

Make the update a push tied to events the Sunday school already records, not a feed parents have to remember to open.

Parents do not read church newsletters and they do not scroll back through a chat for the bit about their own child. They do read a short notification that says their daughter learned the parable today and could be asked about the lost sheep at tea, or that their son has missed the last two weeks. Tie the update to something concrete and the chasing disappears.

We'd argue against the most common move, which is adding every parent to one big group chat. It feels efficient and is the opposite. One parent's question about the nativity costumes becomes forty notifications for thirty-nine families who did not ask, the genuinely important safeguarding message scrolls away, and the leader turns into a switchboard. Keep the parent-facing surface quiet and event-driven, and route real conversations to the leader privately.

The deeper prize is continuity. A Sunday morning is 45 minutes; the week is everything else. The Sunday schools that form lasting faith are the ones where the lesson reaches the kitchen table, and a one-line "here's what we did, here's how to carry it on" note does more of that than any amount of in-class polish.

A worked example: Rachel Okonkwo leads the Sunday school at a parish in Sheffield — 24 children across a 5–7s class and an 8–10s class, taught by four rotating volunteers. In Bitir she runs two groups, one per class. Each child has a single termly goal they helped write. A volunteer takes the register in the first two minutes; a child absent two weeks running sends their parents an automatic note, which Rachel follows up personally. Each Sunday afternoon she posts a two-line summary to each group with one question parents can ask at home. Her message load went from a constant trickle to a few minutes on a Sunday, and the term register now writes itself.

What is the most common Sunday school setup mistake?

Running one group for the whole Sunday school instead of one per class.

It looks simpler — one place, everyone in it — and it is the thing that makes a Sunday school feel chaotic. The 5–7s parents see announcements meant for the teenagers, the register mixes children who were never in the same room, and each child's goal sits in a stream of unrelated ones. Split by class from the start and every group stays clean: the right children, the right parents, the right goals.

The only Sunday school that should run a single group is the one with a single mixed-age class, where the group is the whole thing. The moment a second class exists, it earns its own group. The same rule scales to a larger weekend school — one group per class, never one for the building — which is the heart of the supplementary school toolkit. Children's and youth ministers we speak to often put it the same way: "the day I split the under-8s from the teenagers was the day it started feeling manageable."

Related reading: how a parish youth ministry runs six discipleship groups for 74 teenagers on one app, and how a Nottingham church renamed its weekly check-ins "faith journals" and got teenagers answering.