Jan 23, 2018

The Student Attendance Register has two main components:  The roll marking and the absence notice processing.

Roll Marking

Simplify – when the staff member logs into SAR they are prompted with a list of classes they teach.  They select a class and the list of students in that class appear on the screen.  Each student is accompanied with a simple ‘Present’ / ‘Absent’ toggle, and the default value of this is based on the last status of that student.  If the student was absent at their last roll marking, then they will by default be marked absent currently.  When the staff member toggles the status to ‘Present’ the system will then record the student as being seen in this class at this time.

The extent of the absence is defined as the time they are first identified as ‘Absent’, through to the next time they are marked ‘Present’.  SAR records this using the actual dates and times (we don’t record half-day or full-day absences).  The definition of a half-day absence within SAR is arriving at school after 11am or leaving school before 1pm.

The aim of Roll marking is simply to record student absences.  It is designed to be used in the classroom at the time of the class.

The absence information can also be imported into SAR using one of the defined import formats.  Currently the system supports the following import formats:

• OneSchool
• SIMS
• Comma Separated Values (CSV)

We are regularly adding additional formats so if your format isn’t listed here please check with us.  Alternatively, you can supply a sample of the format you wish to have imported and we will implement support for this format into the system.

Absence Notice Processing

The purpose of this component is to evaluate the absences defined, identify those that require us to send a notice, generate the notice and log a record of the action taken.

There are plenty of options available to you as you configure the notices that you want to send, along with the various events that can trigger a notice.  Therefore we recommend that you are clear about what notices you want the system to send, and when the system should send them.

NOTICES: You define your own notices.  These can be short text messages, longer messages sent as an email, or a printable letter format.  When creating the notice you will have a number of special tokens you can enter into the notice text – when the notice is generated the special token is replaced by the value applicable for the notice being generated.  For example: the special token “%STUDENT-NAME%” is replaced by the student’s name.

TRIGGERS: The trigger is a combination of rules that will be tested against an absence to determine whether a notice should be generated.  A simple trigger may generate a notice when an absence happens.  A more complicated trigger may generate a notice when a student has been absent for 5 days in a term without explanation.

ACTIONS: If a trigger condition is satisfied by a particular absence we can then send a notice.  The Actions (defined on the right of the triggers) specify which notice to be processed and who it should go to.