Student Free Day

Student Free Day

Overview

Compass allows your school to create Student Free Days within your Calendar (please refer to the 'Configure the schedule for a new academic year article for setting Teaching and Non-Teaching days).

In order to account for the school-wide absence for that specific day you must complete two steps:
  1. Cancel the classes for the day; this will remove rolls.   
  2. Create a School Activity that includes all students; this will apply the correct attendance data for students.
You can complete these steps in whichever order you prefer.
Notes
Please note that if you are using a third-party timetable software package, we recommend cancelling the classes within your timetable software and having these changes import into Compass.  

Once you have imported data re cancelling the classes from your timetable software, you can proceed to Step 2 of this process.

 

Permissions

To be able to cancel classes via the Daily Organisation page or to import changes from your external timetable software, you will need to be part of the DailyOrg Permission Role Group.  

For information on this, please refer to the Permissions article from our Knowledge Base.

Cancelling Classes through Daily Organisation

To cancel the classes for the day go to the Daily Organisation page, which can be accessed in the Organisation menu (grid icon). Click the 'Class Manager' tab to view the classes running for the day.

Warning
This page will always default to showing you today's information. To cancel classes for any day click the calendar icon next to today's date and then select the date of the pupil free day.     

Once you've selected the correct date at the top right you should see the classes for that date in the table below. To cancel the classes you will want to select them all using the tick box at the top left of the table.
     

In order to cancel all classes at once you may need to increase the amount of items listed. In the example above you can see the table is only display 20 classes out of 169. To ensure that we will cancel everything, the Items number should be changed to 200 so that all 169 classes are listed on the page.
     

Be sure to click the top tick box at the left to select every row on the screen, and then click the 'Cancel Selected' button which has a big red X. This will cancel all classes that had been highlighted. You will receive a message confirming that you wish to make these changes. Click 'OK' to confirm.
     

Now that you've cancelled all the classes for the day you need to indicate the attendance status for the students so your Department of Education knows why there was no school on this date. This will be done by creating a School Activity in the following step.

Notes
Tip: You are able to restore any cancelled classes by changing the Status setting to Cancelled and clicking 'Filter' to see the results. After this, select all classes using the checkboxes and click 'Reinstate Selected'.
     


Creating a School Activity

For detailed information regarding the creation and removal of School Activities please see the Knowledge Base article titled "School Activities".

The setup of your School Activity should look similar to the following image, with the appropriate pupil free day attendance option selected in the Type field, based on your school's governmental requirements:
     

Click Save.  Click to the Attendees tab and add all Students.
     

Click 'Close'.  The activity will appear on students' schedules, as well as in the School Activities tab.
     

Prep Free Days

Many schools have a program where the new prep/foundation/kindergarten students do not attend on certain days of the week. To facilitiate this you can follow the steps listed above but instead of cancelling the classes for all students, only select the applicable foundation classes in Step 1.  When creating the School Activity for Step 2, just add the applicable year level on the Attendees tab instead of all students. 

You do not need to create a School Activity for each day the students will not attend, you can create one School Activity with repeating sessions.  For information on this process please refer to the School Activities article​ from our Knowledge Base.

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