Attendance is always high on a school’s list of priorities. But with Covid-19 increasing the number of absences – over 200,000 pupils across the country were recorded as absent on a single Thursday in March, for instance – tracking attendance is more important than ever.
For disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils, carefully monitoring attendance is vital. Here, SIMS can help identify and compare pupils’ attendance enabling teachers and senior leaders to identify potential gaps and put interventions into place to mitigate. First:
- Via the ‘reports’ menu route, choose either ‘attendance’ or ‘lesson monitor’
- From here, choose ‘group reports’ | ‘group attendance by vulnerability report’
This takes you to a screen with a number of options that allow you to customise the data included within your report. The options include:
- Date Range: choose the date range you would like your report to reflect
- Star Fields: choose the relevant pupil category you wish to include within your report, free school meals or medical condition, for instance
- Group Type: select the relevant group type you wish to include, i.e., across the whole school or within a specific year group
- Extra Codes: you can choose to include additional codes within your report. For example, you may want to include information relating to medical appointments or illness due to covid. This is optional and you can choose to include up to two codes within the report
- Click print to complete your selections and run your report, either as a webpage or as a local file
The data will be presented back as a small table, with attendance and absence broken down as raw numbers and as a percentage. This enables you to compare pupils within your chosen pupil category against the rest of the pupils within the group type chosen, i.e., whole school or year group.