NSW - Attendance Administration Guide
Introduction
Compass provides a detailed and accurate approach to reporting of Student Attendance by allowing schools to be very specific in their rolls’ context. Compass not only works on a Period by Period basis, but also allows time based activities. This means that activities such as Examinations or Meetings can be undertaken outside of a schools regular period structure, whilst still accurately monitoring attendance.
There are two major concepts which Compass Attendance Module is built upon, the Attendance Cake and Student Attendance Status’. Each of these concepts, when combined and adopted provides schools with the ability to accurately record and analyse student attendance with ease.
The Compass Attendance model can be likened to a cake. Each layer of the ‘Attendance Cake’ is considered to provide an overall attendance for a period of time. The image below provides a visual representation of the model on which Compass works.
The ‘bottom’ layer is the students Standard Classes which are imported from your school's timetabling package such as Edval or Timetabler or constructed via Schedule Builder. Standard Classes also include other scheduled classes from inside Compass such as Custom Classes, Literacy and Numeracy classes.
The next layer of the cake is the Events layer which is those activities which the school has scheduled for students to attend. An ‘Event’ has its own roll and may overlap a period, or number of periods.
Adhoc School Activities are the next layer of the Attendance Cake; these are activities that do not have rolls associated with them (students are just considered 'present' in that activity).
The top of the cake is the Note/Approvals layer; these are approvals for student absence for which the student’s parent or guardian has provided approval for.
Compass calculates the student’s attendance based on these different layers, where a layer higher in the cake has an effect on the students attendance lower down the cake.
By a student being marked ‘Present’ in an Event, such as School Excursion, they are automatically pre-selected in their Standard Classes role as ‘Not Present: School Explained’
To further clarify, consider the following example:
The teacher who is responsible for the excursion marks the student ‘Present’ for the excursion.
This action will have a flow-on effect and automatically prefill the student’s rolls for periods 1 through 4 to ‘Not Present: School Explained’
Attendance Status
Compass’ attendance system is based around three statuses: Present, Not Present and Late. Each of these statuses has a specific usage which is described below.
Present
Present is the default status that each student has selected in each roll. A student is only considered present if they are actually in that specific class. If a student is in a custom class, for example, even if the teacher of the student's normal class knows they will be in their custom class, they should be marked ‘Not Present’ in their normal class as Compass will automatically record that the student is in their custom class.
Not Present
A student is classified as Not Present whenever they do not attend a class. If the teacher is aware of the student attending an excursion or custom class, they should still mark the student as Not Present.
Consider the case of a Student who in period 3 has their regular English class, but they also have a custom class. If the student is marked Present in their custom class and Not Present in English, the net result is that the Student is Present in their custom class and Not Present: School Explained in English.
The Not Present status can be further broken down into three sub-statuses
- Not Present: Unexplained
- Not Present: School Explained
- A ‘Not Present: School Explained’ status is used when the student has a scheduling overlap, such as the example used above with a custom class overlapping an English class. It can also be used where the student has undertaken an activity in the Events or Manual School Activities list discussed earlier
- Not Present: Parent Explained
- The status of Not Present: Parent Explained is when the student’s parent has provided notification of a reason why the student did not attend the specific class. This could be for a variety of reasons such as medical, dental or a family holiday.
Late
When a teacher marks a roll, if a student has not arrived in class yet they will be marked as Not Present. However, if after the roll is marked a student arrives in the class the teacher can amend the roll to reflect this by using the Late status.
Staff Roles
The Compass system requires teachers to accurately mark their rolls based upon the three statuses available: Present, Not Present and Late. It is imperative that the Compass definitions of these three options are clearly understood and implemented school-wide.
At an activity level, a teacher is responsible for that activity's roll, whether that activity is a standard timetabled class, custom class or an Excursion.
The major difference between Compass and traditional roll marking systems is that the supervising teacher of an event is responsible for marking the events roll, rather than the traditional method in which the schools Attendance Officer would be responsible for this task.
The reason for this change is that the responsible teacher can see which students are in fact present, an Attendance Officer would not be accurately be able to ascertain students’ attendance.
Permissions
There are an array of functions and features covered in this article that will require certain permissions. If you do not see one of the listed aspects it is likely you do not have the required permission level to access it. Please refer to the Permissions article from our Knowledge Base to ascertain which permission is required.
Attendance Management
Approvals are an integral part of the Attendance module within Compass. The requirement for an approval occurs when a student is not automatically accounted for through regular class scheduling, scheduled events or a custom class.
Approvals can be broken down into two main categories; Attendance Notes and School Activities. Each of these align with the attendance codes published by your local department of education.
| TEACHER ROLL MARKINGS | COMPASS ATTENDANCE STATUSES (Teaching markings combined with parent approvals & co-curriculum info) | REPORTED ATTENDANCE STATUS |
| Present | Present | Present |
| Not Present | Not Present:Unapproved | Absent Unapproved |
| Not Present | Not Present:Parent Approval (i.e. Medical, Dental, Family Holiday etc) | Various Non-Curriculum Absence Codes |
| Not Present | Not Present:School Approval (i.e Music, excursion, sickbay, TAFE etc) | Various Curriculum Absnece Codes |
| Late | Late:Unapproved | Late Unapproved |
| Late | Late:Parent Approval (i.e. Medical, Dental, Refusal etc) | Late Approved |
| Late | Late:School Approval (i.e. Music, excursion, detention, duty, sickbay etc) | Late Approved |
Determining which kind of approval to use
Approvals within Compass are divided into two categories; School Activities and Note/Approvals.
- School Activities are entered when a student is not attending their scheduled class because of a school related activity. Examples of these include an Assembly, VET/TAFE Course or Meeting with a Coordinator or Counsellor.
- Attendance Notes are entered when a student is not attending their scheduled class for a reason determined by their parent or guardian. Examples of these include Medical or Dental reasons or a Family Holiday.
Attendance Notes
Attendance Notes are created when a parent provides written or verbal consent to the school for their student to be absent from class. Most commonly this occurs when the parent sends a note to the school office. A staff member will then be required to record this in Compass.
Please refer to the 'Attendance Notes' article from our Knowledge Base for further details.
School Activities
School Activities cover instances where a student, or students, will miss class because of a school related activity. Compass has a number of School Activity categories. Each of these categories aligns with attendance codes from your local department of education. Examples of approval categories include Meetings,Detention or Suspension.
School Activities use the Intelligient Roll functionality so students will be automatically marked Present in the session unless recorded elsewhere at the time in Compass.
For information on creating or editing School Activities, please refer to the'School Activities' article from our Knowledge Base.
Arrivals and Departures
Students arriving at school late or leaving early should be 'Arrived' or 'Departed' within Compass. This process ensures that rolls contain data with regard to a student's whereabouts, attendance data is correct and in an Emergency, students can be accurately accounted for.
This process can be done through the Compass Kiosk, KioskLite or by staff at the school office. For further information, please refer to the 'Arrivals & Departures' article from our Knowledge Base.
The Attendance Page
The Attendance page within Compass is the primary screen used by attendance officers to enter attendance data into Compass and run the various attendance reports. It also includes a number of tabs which allow attendance officers to access overarching attending information from across the whole system.
To access this page, click on Attendance from under the Organisation menu (grid icon).
COVID-19 Close Contacts Report
If you need to ascertain who is considered a close-contact of a student or staff member who has tested positive to COVID-19, you can use the COVID19 Close Contacts Report on the Attendance page.
When clicked it will open a screen in which you can select the applicable user, set the date range and then click 'Export' to generate the report.
Settings
To adjust some features of the Attendance data, click 'Settings'. Please refer to the'Attendance Settings' article for further details.
Note/Approvals and School Activities
From the Note/Approvals and School Activities tab within Compass, staff can see a list of all Attendance Notes and School Activities entered in Compass. These lists are sortable by the column headers.
Users can also enter approvals from these tabs.
For more information regarding Attendance Notes and School Activities please refer to the sections earlier in this article.
Unexplained
Unmarked Rolls
Suggested Changes
This grid lists all of the roll change suggestions which have been generated in the system based on students that have registers with an Arrival/Departure. This screen is only applicable for schools with the rolls set to Suggested.
From this screen attendance administrators can accept these suggestions.
Arrival/Departure
The Arrival/Departure tab displays a list of all of the Arrivals and Departures entered within Compass. You can use the filter options at the top to locate a specific entry or entry type as needed.
Inconsistencies
This tab shows an instances of inconsistent data for a student. This can occur when they are marked Present in two locations at once.
Administration staff can use this tab to review any inconsistencies.
Clicking the book icon will show the details of the inconsistency.
When you have ascertained the issue, update the applicable details in the related roll (or rolls) to resolve the inconsistency. Alternatively if you want to retain the student's attendance data as is, you can choose to dismiss the inconsistency by clicking 'Dismiss Inconsistency' in the bottom right corner of the details screen for the entry. This will remove the entry from the Inconsistencies tab.
If they have been accidentally marked Present, the rolls would need to be re-marked to show the student as NP to resolve the inconsistency.
If the rolls were correct and the student had returned earlier than anticipated from the holiday and attended school on that date, you may want to retain this information so you would click 'Dismiss Inconsistency' to remove the entry from the Inconsistencies tab.
You can select multiple inconsistencies and then select the 'Dismiss Inconsistency' button to bulk dismiss if required.
Analysing Attendance: By Group
Within the Attendance page of Compass there are a large number of reports that are designed to assist attendance officers in managing attendance at a school.
There are a number of reports that can be filtered by Home Group, Year Level or House. Details of these reports are below:
Not Present: Unexplained | Lists students and the activities that they have been marked ‘Not Present’ for where there is no other School Activity or Attendance Note to cover/approve this absence. |
Late: Unexplained | Lists students and the activities that they have been marked ‘Late’ for where there is no other School Activity or Attendance Note to cover/approve this absence. |
| Letters | These allow you to print bulk Not Present/Late letters or Flag letters. Please refer to the School Letters article in our Knowledge Base for details. |
| Export | Includes various raw attendance export options. |
| Other Reports | A range of reports to provide data on specific content. |
Daily Summary/Emergency | Shows a list of students and their attendance status for every period on a given day. |
Most of these reports can be exported in a number of formats including CSV and PDF.
Clicking 'Attendance Export' will give you access to exports applicable to your school type.
Group and Year Level Profile Pages
Within Compass each Form Group and Year Level has a profile page which allows for detailed analysis of the attendance for these groups of students.
To access these pages click on the required Form Group or Year Level from the Attendance page or search for the group in the main Compass search box.
The view defaults to 'Whole/Partial' view but you can change to view by 'Session' if preferred.
This grid can be filtered using the tools at the top of the page. This can be particularly useful when looking at data for larger groups of students, to identify individuals whose attendance is below a certain threshold.
The data can also be exported to CSV using the ‘Export’ button in the top right-hand corner of this screen.
Whole/Partial View
The grid shows an overview of each student within the group.
| Run | Number of Teaching Days that fall inside the date range, where there is attendance data |
| Present | Number of days where the student was not absent for any time (calculation is Total Whole Days + Total Partial Days) |
| Whole Day - NP Absent | Number of days the student was absent and the absence was explained. |
| Whole Day - NP Other | Number of days the student was not present in class but this was not counted as an absence. |
| Whole Day - NP Un'd | Number of days the student was absent and there is no indication of their whereabouts. |
| Whole Day - Toal Wh'l | Number of Whole Days where the student was absent. |
| Partial Day - NP Absent | Number of days the student was absent for part of the day and the absence was explained. |
| Partial Day - NP Other | Number of partial days the student was not present in class but this was not counted as an absence. |
| Partial Day - NP Un'd | Number of days the student was absent for part of the day and there is no indication of their whereabouts. |
| Partial Day - Total Pt'l | Number of days where the student was absent for part of the day |
This grid shows an overview of each student within the group. The first 9 columns list the number of lessons or activities in each of the particular categories.
Run | Number of instances/activities that the student was scheduled to attend within the date range. |
Present | Number of instances where the student was marked ‘Present’. |
Late Approved | Number of instances where the student has been marked ‘Late’ within the given date range and the ‘Late’ has been explained by other activity or approval. |
Late Unexplained | Number of instances where the student has been marked ‘Late’ and this Late has not been explained by another activity or approval. |
In Class: Total | Total number of instances where the student has been marked as in class – (Total of Present and All Lates). |
Not Present: School Explained | Number of instances where the student has been marked ‘Not Present’ at the activity and this Not Present has been explained by a school related activity (School Activity, Music/Support Class, Event/Excursion). |
Not Present: Parent Explained | Number of instances where the student has been marked ‘Not Present’ at the activity and this Not Present has been explained with a Note/Approval. |
Not Present: Unexplained | Number of instances where the student has been marked ‘Not Present’ at an activity and this Not Present has not been explained by another activity or Note/Approval. |
Out of Class: Total | Total number of instance where the student has been marked as out of class – (Total of all ‘Not Present’ instances) |
Within this data you can double-click on any square within the grid to drill-down into the data and see which instances the student was marked with a particular status.
The second set of columns shows the student’s percentages of attendance.
Class % | Is the percentage of time that the student was in the scheduled class (Present + All Lates) / Number of Scheduled Classes |
Ac’td % | The percentage of time the student was accounted for by the schools (Present + All Lates + All Approvals) / Number of scheduled Classes |
VCE % | Specific calculation for VCE co-ordinators (Present + Lates + School Activities + DET specified allowed Note/Approvals) / Number of Scheduled Classes |
Schl % | A useful indicator for schools to calculate the students actual attendance (Present + All Lates + School Activities) / Number of Scheduled Classes |
The percentage columns have a visual alert system based on colouring which highlights low attendance.
You can use the options at the top to generate photo sheets, emails or form/year student lists.
Analysing Attendance: By Student
Details regarding an individual student’s attendance can be found on the student’s profile within Compass. To view a student’s profile search for the student in the main Compass search bar.
If a school is using the Compass Chronicle module, an alert will be created on the student’s dashboard when a student has a large numbers of unexplained absences. This immediately alerts staff that there is an issue with the student’s attendance and prompts further investigation.
Common actions including adding both School and Note/Approvals can be added using the ‘Actions’ button from the dashboard of a student’s profile.
A student’s attendance records can be viewed from the ‘Attendance’ tab on the student’s profile.
Summary Tab
The Summary tab within Attendance has three separate sections, Daily Activities & Attendance, Annual Half-Day Summary and Attendance Summary.
The Daily Activities & Attendance section lists all of the activities a student is scheduled to attend for a particular date and the student’s attendance status for the lesson. Clicking on the roll icon in the right hand column of the grid will display the roll for the class.
The Annual Summary shows the student's attendance status by day across a series of months.
If you hover over these squares you will see the attendance breakdown of the student's attendance.
To the right of the summary, you will see a count of specific figures.
These include:
- Number of whole days which are counted as absences for statistical purposes
- Number of partial days which are counted as absences for statistical purposes
- Number of whole days which are not counted as absences for statistical purposes
- Number of partial days which are not counted as absences for statistical purposes
The Attendance Summary grid displays the same grid seen on the Form Group and Year Level profile pages. This grid shows a detailed analysis of the student’s attendance, broken down per class. The data can be filtered using the tools at top of the grid.
The same drill-down functionality is also available on this grid.
Notes/Approvals Tab
The Notes/Approvals tab on the student profile lists all of the School Activities and Note/Approvals that have been entered into Compass for the student. From this screen the approvals can be edited and deleted as required.
For more details regarding approvals within Compass please refer to the 'Note/Approvals' and 'School Activities' section of this article.
Unexplained Tab
The Unexplained tab lists all of the instances where the student has been marked ‘Not Present’ or ‘Late’ and there is no approval or other activity in the system approving this absence.
The tools at the top of this grid can be used to bulk approve absences by using the tick boxes in the left hand column of the grid to select the instances that need approving and then clicking either the ‘Explain with Attendance Note’ or ‘Explain with School Activity’ Button. Using these functions will automatically insert the appropriate number of approvals for the selected sessions.
You can also use the ‘Re-mark selected as…’ button within this grid to re-mark the rolls for the instances listed and change the student’s attendance status in bulk.
Arrival/Departure Tab
The Arrival/Departure tab of the Student’s profile lists all of the times the student has checked in late or check out as an Departure. You can remove these check in/outs from this screen as well as adding a new check in.
For more information regarding Arrivals and Departures within Compass please refer to the Arrivals/Departures article from our Knowledge Base.
Enrolments Tab
The Enrolments tab shows all classes the student has been enrolled in for the current academic year. You can choose another year to view from the drop down. For schools using a third-party timetable package, class enrolment data is imported and changes should be made within the timetabling program. For schools using Schedule Builder, you can edit a student's class enrolment data from this tab however proceed with caution when adjusting dates or deleting enrolments as this will impact the student's attendance data.
Full Record Tab
The Full Record tab of the student profile lists every instance that a student has been enrolled to attend and their attendance status for the instance. You can click 'Generate Report' to export a file of this information.
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