SIX REGISTERS A DAY,
FIFTEEN SECONDS EACH.
A single mark at 8am tells you a child entered the building. Per-period capture tells you whether they were taught — and it only works if taking the register costs a teacher almost nothing.
DESIGNED AROUND
THE EXCEPTION.
On a normal day, twenty-eight students are present and two are not. So the register opens on the current period with everyone already marked present, and the teacher taps only the exceptions.
- No date picker, no class picker — the teacher's next class is what opens.
- Late is one tap, not a separate workflow.
- The record closes itself — there is no submit step a teacher can forget on a Friday.
- Backfill is possible but visible, so retrospective edits are attributable.
RAW MARKS ARE NOT
THE PRODUCT.
Per-period records are raw material. What an administrator needs is the derived view — and both the safeguarding question and the academic question answered from one dataset.
Daily status
Computed from the day's sessions rather than entered separately, so it can never contradict the periods it came from.
Term percentage
Derived from the days, per student and per subject — because a student at 94% overall can be at 61% in one course.
Class report
A whole group over a date range, for the head of year who needs to walk into a meeting with something defensible.
Subject-level patterns
Avoidance of a specific lesson shows up as a pattern instead of remaining an anecdote in a teacher's head.
Parent visibility
Families see their own child's record without emailing the office, which removes most of the questions before they are asked.
Automatic notification
Absence can trigger a message to the guardian on the day, not in a letter at the end of the month.
"The number that changed our conversations was not the school average. It was being able to say to a parent: Amir has missed nine of forty-two maths periods this term. That is a conversation. 'Attendance is a bit low' is not."
One dependency worth knowing about. Per-period attendance is only as accurate as the timetable underneath it. If the schedule in the system does not match the schedule on the wall, sessions attach to the wrong slots and nobody trusts the data within a fortnight. Build the timetable first — we will not switch attendance on before it is verified.
RELATED, AND WORTH READING.
Timetable
The spine attendance hangs off. Named periods, in-place amendments, PDF export.
See schedulingThe case for per-period
What a daily headcount hides, and the objection every school raises first.
Read the article