Attendance - Sixth Form

For sixth-form or part-time students, students have their first PM attendance in different periods, but this is not currently possible to record in Ed:gen.

E.g. if the first period after lunch (e.g. Period 4) is designated as PM registration, some students might not have to be back in school until the following Period 5. This varies day-to-day and for different students within the same year group, but currently Registration Dates & Times does not allow for this flexibility - only one session can be marked as PM attendance. This means that students not in a Period 4 class will have no PM attendance mark that day.

The only way to avoid this and record statutory PM attendance is to create a rule that includes a secondary group for these non-attendees, then for someone in the office to manually, retrospectively go back and populate a mark for Period 4 each day. This adds workload, but crucially it also produces inaccurate session attendance statistics (they are being counted as present for a period that they weren't actually there for, so their total session attendance is skewed). However, it's currently the only way to achieve the AM/PM attendance marks and reporting required.

Potential solution: this would work best if there was a way to flexibly designate the statutory PM registration for sixth-formers, based on which period(s) they are in registration groups for. In the above example, if you were able to designate PM registration across Periods 4 and 5, and then the 'PM' mark for an individual was assigned to the first one of those they were supposed to attend, then accurate, maintenance-free AM/PM attendance could be accurately recorded and tracked for sixth-formers.