School attendance analysis in Arbor

Chelsea Hopkins - 31 July, 2023

School Operations

Category : Blog

School attendance analysis in Arbor

Today’s guest blog is another from our very own Digital Customer Operations Analyst, Chelsea Hopkins, who was previously an school Attendance Officer. You can read more from Chelsea here, but in this blog, she looks into her top reports she thinks all Attendance Officers will find useful.

Now as we know every single staff member that works in a school, only do so for the perks, the salary, job satisfaction, good work-life balance.

I’m smiling as I write that, but apparently, those people exist?!

Joking aside, I think I can confidently say that we all work in a school because for some crazy reason we want to make a real difference in this world and mould the future generation.

I’ve worked alongside many incredible people, who work their magic and are just incredible but they can’t work their magic on those that are simply not there. That’s why keeping an eye on your student’s attendance is crucial in improving the outcomes for our young people!

Now you will be glad to hear that Arbor is full of wonderful built-in Attendance reporting tools and I’m going to explain some really useful ones that can be used on a daily basis and reports that can be shared with others.

So we’ve all taken part in staff meetings,  where we sit and learn that Year 11’s have decided that what they are wearing to prom, is far more important than focusing on their GCSEs.

….Or that the Year 8s think that harmlessly flipping bottles onto tables is no longer fun and have now started throwing them from balconies….

In a strange way, I looked forward to the meetings. It was a nice change speaking to actual human beings older than 16 after your day of having conversations with Year 9 students that turning up to school 15 minute late, just really isn’t acceptable.

(Spoiler! They obviously listened and decided to make a change, that change being turning up 30 minutes late instead.)

As an attendance officer, you can sometimes feel like a one-man band, so it’s useful to have an opportunity to share your data/concerns with other members of staff such as Head of Years, Senior Leadership Team, Pastoral staff etc…

I found it useful during my time as an attendance officer, to run reports and distribute the data. I have created an article on our help centre that details all the reports I liked to use, you can find the article here – Common Attendance Reports

Below I have listed the top 4 reports that I found most useful and why:

Attendance breakdown for the week

You can use attendance statistics to get this information. In the article above take a look at the Percentage Attendance Report with steps on how to do this. You will need to amend the dates to show a Monday, then re-run the report with dates for Tuesday etc…

I find this particularly useful as you begin to see if there are any days in which attendance drops.

Students that have been absent this week 

You can view this information by the Absentees by date page in Arbor, take a look at the Session absences report in the article above.

As attendance officers our sole purpose is to monitor attendance. Whereas this is not the focus for other members of staff, it is useful for them to be reminded of students that were absent.

Students that have been late to school this week

In the attendance reporting article, take a look at the Minutes Late Report section.

Now ten minutes late here and there, we can overlook and forgive. However if a student is late every school day by 30 minutes, that’s 2.5 hours a week. if this was to continue for a month, that would amount to 10 hours, equivalent to 2 school days. It is useful to monitor this as minutes late, that build up, can amount to a significant amount of missed learning.

List of students that are currently a persistent absentee

To view a list of students that are currently persistent absentees, head to Students > Attendance > Absentees (on the left) > Persistent Absentees

It’s good practice to constantly be familiar with our students that are persistently absent. Even though teachers are incredible at their jobs, ultimately they can’t teach those that are absent. Sharing this data with other members of staff allows you to put in place interventions in a bid to improve attendance.