Taking attendance

Attendance covers students and staff, marked by hand or captured by biometric device. Go to Attendance → Dashboard for the day’s position.

The attendance dashboard summarises present, absent and late learners.

Marking a student register

Go to Attendance → Register.

Choose the class, stream and date before marking the register.

1. Choose the class and stream.
2. Confirm the date. It defaults to today; you can only mark dates inside the current term.
3. Mark each student Present, Absent or Late. Most registers start with everyone present, so you only mark the exceptions.
4. Add a reason against an absence where you know it.
5. Select Save.

Saved registers can be reopened and corrected on the same day. Later corrections are possible but are recorded as amendments, so the original stands in the audit trail.

Students view

Attendance → Students shows attendance from the student’s side rather than the day’s: one learner’s record across the term, which is what you want when a parent queries an absence.

Staff attendance

Staff are marked under Attendance → Staff and Attendance → Teachers, or captured automatically by a biometric device at the gate.

Staff attendance feeds HR — it is what leave balances and any attendance-linked payroll rules are checked against.

Absence notices

Attendance → Absence Notices is the queue of explanations. A notice can come from a parent through the parent app, or be entered by the office from a phone call or a letter.

Parent-submitted absence notices waiting to be reviewed.

Working the queue means matching each notice to the absence it explains, so the attendance record shows authorised rather than absent. An absence with no notice after a few days is the one worth a phone call.

Events

Attendance → Events covers days that are not ordinary school days — trips, sports days, public holidays, exam days. Recording them stops those days counting against attendance percentages and stops the system chasing absences for a day nobody was expected.

Events that affect attendance calculations.

Enter the term’s known events at the start of term.

Settings

Attendance → Settings controls how attendance behaves:

• Which sessions are marked — once a day, morning and afternoon, or per lesson.
• The cut-off time after which an arrival counts as late.
• Whether an absence triggers an automatic SMS to the guardian, and its wording.
• Which staff are notified about persistent absence.

Absence SMS

Where automatic messaging is on, guardians of absent students receive an SMS after the register is saved.

Caution

Turn automatic absence SMS on only once registers are being marked reliably and on time. An unmarked register is treated as nobody present, and a school-wide “your child is absent” broadcast at 9am is a hard message to retract.