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The attendance record: states, rates and who can read it
Taking the register is covered in Running the day. This is the record underneath it — the four states and what they mean, who is allowed to write one, how the rate is worked out, and why a school with no registers gets no percentage at all.
For Teachers, the school office and families · reviewed 2 September 2026
The 1 points where someone must decide
Everything else can be worked on in any order. These cannot move without a person.
- RecordingUnmarked → Marked
Four states, and what each one claims
/teacher/attendance
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Register · states
Four, not five
Present
In the room
Late
Arrived after the register
Excused
Planned, and agreed in advance
Absent
Not there, no explanation on file
A half-day sent from an import is stored as excused. It is not a fifth state a teacher can pick.
A mark is one of four states. The distinction that matters is between absent and excused: a planned absence agreed in advance and an unexplained one mean different things to everybody who reads the record later, so they are never folded together.
Imports may send a half-day, which is accepted and stored as excused. There is no half-day a teacher can choose in the register, and nothing in the interface will show one back — worth knowing if you are reconciling against a previous system that had one.
- Present, late, excused and absent.
- Each mark records who took it and when, alongside the class and the day.
- A note can be attached to a mark for the thing the state cannot say by itself.
Only staff write a mark
/teacher/attendance
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Saving a register
Read by many, written by few
PYP4A · 22 Aug
Saved by A. Iyer at 08:44
MYP8A · 22 Aug
Nobody has marked this
Classes marked
9 of 11
Marks today
214
An unmarked register stays empty. It never defaults to present, because a room nobody looked at is not a room full of children.
Attendance can be read by students and families and written only by school staff. A save arriving from any other role is refused rather than ignored, so the restriction does not depend on which screen sent it.
The register can be filtered by class, date, status and student while marking, and the panel carries the rotation cycle for schools that do not run a plain weekly timetable.
Gate · Recording
Unmarked → Marked
Only school staff can save attendance, and the mark carries whoever took it. A day nobody marked is left genuinely empty rather than filled with a default, because a defaulted register is a claim the school never actually made.
Students and families read their own
/parent/attendance · /student/attendance
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Attendance · family view
One child, resolved on the server
22 Aug
Arrived 09:15
21 Aug
Medical appointment agreed in advance
20 Aug
No contact from home
Which students a caller may see is worked out from the session, not passed in with the request.
A student sees their own attendance and a family sees their own child's. The set of students a caller may read is resolved from their session when the request arrives, so a family portal cannot be persuaded to return another child's register by asking differently.
Families see the same states staff recorded, including the note where one was left. There is no separate family-facing version of the record to keep in step.
How the rate is worked out
/teacher/attendance · /teacher/student-risk
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Attendance rate
A ratio of marks that exist
Aanya Sharma
38 marks · 2 absent
Diego Alvarez
38 marks · 9 absent
Ishaan Verma
No marks recorded
Days recorded
38
School rate
94.1%
Present, late and excused all count toward the rate. Only absent counts against it.
The rate is the share of a student's marks that are present, late or excused — an agreed absence does not count against a child, and a late arrival is counted as attendance rather than as a partial one.
It is a ratio of the marks that exist, not of the days in the term. A student with no marks has no rate, and the software says so rather than showing a zero or a hundred: both would be a claim about a child nobody registered.
- Counted toward: present, late, excused.
- Counted against: absent.
- No marks means no rate — never zero.
Take the record out
/teacher/attendance
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Attendance export
For the people who ask for a file
PYP4A · 1–31 Aug
22 students · 38 days
Whole school · term to date
Includes the generated timestamp
The export carries when it was generated, so a file found in a folder a year later can still be dated.
The record can be exported for a class or a date range, which is what inspections, authorities and boards tend to actually ask for. The file records when it was generated, so a copy sitting in somebody's downloads folder can still be placed in time.
The export is built from the same marks the screen shows. There is no second calculation to drift from the first.
Who can approve what
Designations are assigned in IB roles and are separate from the account role somebody signs in with.
| Designation | Sees | Approves |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher | The classes they teach | Recording and correcting marks |
| Office and leadership | The whole school | The same as a teacher, plus exports |
| Student | Their own attendance | Nothing |
| Family | Their own child's attendance | Requesting an excusal — see Running the day |
If something looks empty
A student's rate reads as no rate rather than a number
No marks have been recorded for them. The rate is a ratio of real marks, so with none there is nothing to divide — and a zero would be a claim the register never made.
A rate looks higher than expected
Excused days count toward attendance, as do late arrivals. Only absent counts against the rate, so a child with many agreed absences still reads high — which is the intended reading of an agreed absence.
An imported half-day shows as excused
That is where half-days are stored. There are four states in the register and half-day is not one of them, so an import carrying one is normalised on arrival.
A save is refused
Only school staff can write attendance. The check runs on the request rather than the screen, so it applies to anything sent from a student or family session.
A family says they see a different record
They see the same marks, scoped to their own child. If the day looks wrong to them it is worth checking the mark itself rather than assuming the two views differ.
Still stuck?
Bring the unit you are working on. Thirty minutes with someone who has taught the programme.