Running the day: attendance, timetable and calendar

Attendance is marked per student per day against four states. Excused exists as its own state rather than being folded into absent, because a planned absence and an unexplained one mean different things to everybody who reads the record later.

• Present, absent, late and excused.
• A half-day arriving from an import is stored as excused — it is not a fifth state a teacher can pick. See The attendance record.
• Marks are attributed to whoever took the register.
• A day nobody marked stays empty rather than defaulting to present — an unmarked register is not a room full of children.

A parent can request that an absence be excused, with a reason and a supporting file. It arrives in the staff queue rather than changing the register on its own.

The timetable is what tells everything else which class is where and with whom. It is worth treating as a shared record rather than a document each department keeps, because attendance, cover and family-facing views all read it.

Events published to the school calendar reach students and families through their own portals. Staff-only entries stay with staff, and that filtering happens on the server rather than being a checkbox the interface trusts.

Once a term of registers exists, attendance becomes the earliest reliable indicator that something has changed for a child. A pattern of Monday absences says something a percentage does not.

A school with no attendance recorded gets no attendance signal at all — and the software reports that honestly rather than showing a reassuring figure derived from nothing.