Attendance FAQ - What happens when ?

We understand that attendance is a key part of MySchool, configured once a year on rollover, it will follow the settings for your scholastic year. However, we appreciate that things can change during the year, and this may create issues due to bad dates, wrongly withdrawn students, changing schedules, or simply a school closure. Here are a few questions that may help you troubleshoot your attendance issues.

My Teachers can't take attendance, no course is showing in the dropdown

• Check their enrolment in the course. Are they enrolled as a Teacher? Is the class level set to class or course attendance? 
• Does the course exist in this scholastic year?
• Check the course schedule tab to make sure the correct term is applied. Only is schedule terms work with attendance.
• Check the timetable configuration for the class level. Is the period in which the course is scheduled set to is lesson, is roll call?
• If you are using day mapping. make sure the days are mapped correctly in the timetable.
• If you have a regular week and have rolled over. You need to contact our support team to reset the calendar days.

Can we have both class-level attendance and course attendance?

• The answer is yes, BUT NOT for the same class level. So your junior levels may have class attendance and senior course attendance. 
• Class attendance still needs to have a timetable created and applied. A lesson would need to be scheduled into the roll call attendance period.
• Our advice is to create a homeroom or assembly subject and course, and maintain course attendance for all class levels.

Can I change the order of the attendance statuses after attendance has been entered?

• Use the attendance configuration screen and drag the statuses to reorder them. 
• We can only have 2 statuses showing in full on the take attendance screen, whereas the others are available within the drop-down list.
• You can deactivate a status, but this will apply to all historic data reports. 
• You cannot delete a status that has been used
• You must never change the label of the status to change the ordering. Each status has an ID, the text label is there as a reference for users to choose.

Why is the period not showing in administrative updates when I want to take attendance?

• The period must be is roll call and is lesson in the period configuration
• It does not need a course scheduled, but we strongly advise reporting that all free roll call periods should have a course assigned. even if the course is 'Private study' or 'free period'.

Teachers can't take attendance from My Schedule

• The ability to take attendance from My Schedule is directly linked to the user group permission 'Take course attendance'. 
• Go to user groups and make sure the user group in question has this enabled.

How do I enter half-day attendance?

• This is dependent on your timetable configuration. if you only have one roll call period then this is impossible. If two roll call periods are set then one can be present and the other set to absent to represent this in reports. If you take attendance on each course then this must be entered individually.

Can I take attendance for days in the past?

• There is a system limit set to 255 in the future and in the past. This can be changed by the support team. 
• You can change system dates and time travel to complete attendance for previous years if this is needed.

A student still has attendance data even though we unenrolled them from the course

• Yes, that is correct. It is a design feature to reduce data loss with enrolment. The attendance data will always remain with the student even though they have been removed from the course. 
• To rectify this, they must be reenrolled into the course, and attendance status can only be nulled with administrative updates

Our ES audit is not calculating the correct amount of hours. How can we fix it?

• For our BC schools, the ES audit works best from a weighted calculation. The requirements are that 2 roll call periods are counted per day. For this, we set the calculation method as weighted. Please contact the support team to make sure this is set up for your instance.

• This means that attendance would need to be registered twice a day per student. The full-minute calculation would be 360 minutes / 60 = 6 Hours if a present status was entered. 
• To include the absences in this report, then the status must be set to 'Absent' AND 'Not excused'
• The calculation can be set to pick up and calculate exactly on the period start-end times, but each period must be set as is roll call/Lesson, and have an attendance status entered ( either Present/Absent/Excused absence).

Absences are not showing on our report cards

• Suppose you have added the attendance stats via the assessment report configuration. The first checkpoint is to ensure the report card has been added to the correct assessment term, and desired class level.
• Is the student enrolled correctly in an appropriate class and the attached courses?
• Check your statuses to see if they are configured to be 'Not excused', 'Is late' or ' Present' 
• Also, check to see if the period selected as roll call is checked as being 'Is lesson'. The report will only pick up periods if both are ticked.
• If the attendance has been selected as part of the subject specifications, then check to make sure the courses have the correct term added, and that the attendance assessment type has been assigned to the correct term.

How do we class an absence as excused? We don't want it to impact attendance negatively.

• In the attendance configuration screen, you must set the relevant status, to be absent, but uncheck the Not excused column. This makes the absence show but it won't affect reports and calculations.

We have everything set up correctly, but still the course teacher has no option to take attendance. What else do we have to do?

• There is no distinction between the main course Teacher and the secondary course teacher, however, if you have designated a Teacher within the schedule for a specific period or ad hoc lesson, then they are the only ones allowed to take attendance.

Can I change my Roll call periods during the scholastic year?

• It is possible to swap roll call periods. The status will not be deleted from the old roll call, however, this may affect reports, as the new roll call period will be applied from the start of the scholastic year. This may leave gaps if attendance is used for grade reports etc.
• We normally advise not to change attendance settings during the year, but if it is needed, then use Administrative updates to enter statuses into the new roll call period and remove old attendance statuses.

We have a student who has duplicate periods in their schedule, how can this happen?

• Timetable configuration is built on a class level. There may be cases where students from grade 9 follow a course from grade 10. This will cause double periods to be listed in administrative updates if they use a different one.
• To reduce this, administrators can use the advanced features to show only periods with a course and only roll call.

Can I have an alternating weekly schedule?

• Yes, this is possible with day mapping in the timetable configuration. You can create multiple 'same days', which are mapped individually to specific calendar days.

• If you wish to change period configurations then we need to use the ALT period configurations in the timetable configuration. Contact our support team for help with this.

What do the colours mean in the attendance grid on the student's and guardian's portals?

• Green means that all roll call periods have a present status entered.
• Red means that the student was absent for all the roll call periods
• Yellow - Orange - The system will try to work out a severity warning. If one period is classed as absent or late then this will show as lime green, whereas more than half of the periods classed as absent, will be orange.

Do you have email alerts that notify the guardians of a student's absence?

• We do have a menu header that can be added to the guardian portal. There is no system notification for this.
• There is an SMS that can be sent on a daily basis, which will pull information from the various registers if the student was classed as absent.
• Attendance configuration needs to include the attendance status to be included in Coms.

Can you import our custom schedule?

• We would need to assess the complexity of the schedule. Each course has a unique ID code, you can see this in the URL bar when you view a course.

• Each period also has a unique code. We can help you identify this. 
• Contact our support team to discuss how to send us this information in Excel. 
• If you wish we can import schedules with Asc, Untis, and Timetabler as third-party software.

How do you suggest we can manage our attendance?

• The same with any data management, we would advise you to install a process which is transparent for all your users. 
• A simple process for attendance management is 
  1. Determine who is responsible for the roll call periods (teacher/learning assistant/admin team). 
  2. Make sure these users understand the different statuses and the triggers connected.
  3. Use the SMS system to update parents on a daily basis, and make sure your statuses are configured to only signal cases where there is no information for the absence.
  4. Run the attendance audit once a week, administrators can prompt the users to complete their attendance. The tool will only work for a week period.
  5. If your front desk or admins have contact with the parents, encourage them to enter absences using admin updates. They can lock the status so that roll call Teachers are aware, but they cannot override the absence when taking attendance.
  6. Use the comment boxes for clear communication between departments.
  7. Run attendance history reports regularly, this will avoid problems if you have audit requirements, or annual reports to submit.