It’s important to ensure that the Attendance Officer at your school has the correct role assigned to them in Satchel One. You can have more than one member of staff set as an Attendance Officer; they will all receive the same notifications.

Being an Attendance Officer in Satchel One means that you will automatically receive truancy notifications. You can adjust the type of notifications to meet your preferences.

Staff can adjust their role by going to Account Settings and changing their main role to ‘Attendance Officer’.

Alternatively, Satchel One Admins can change staff roles by going to Admin > Manage Users > Edit Teacher / Staff Member and updating their main role to 'Attendance Officer'.

Once this change has been saved, the user can go to their Account Settings to manage their new 'Attendance' notifications.

On Attendance Pro, a 'truancy warning' will be triggered if a student is marked with an unauthorised absence mark for the first time in that day. If the student continues to be consistently absent, no more warnings will be triggered.

If the student returns to school and is marked as 'Present', then subsequently is given another unauthorised absence mark after this, this will trigger another truancy warning as it is a separate incident of truancy.

If any member of staff records an unauthorised absence mark for a students, they may receive a 'Truancy warning' alert.

If someone is allocated the Attendance Officer role in Satchel One, they will notified about this automatically.

If nobody has this role allocated to them. this alert can prompt the teacher to report this directly to an Attendance Officer for further action.

🎉 NEW: AM Registration truancy warnings now grouped together

We know that previously it could be overwhelming to receive truancy warnings en masse for AM reg; for this reason we have now grouped together these alerts.

Instead of receiving an email / browser notification for every class that has a truant student for AM reg, you will now receive a single email / notification 10 minutes into the session informing you of the total number of truant students identified across the whole school.

Any truancy marks logged after the initial 10 minutes will result in normal truancy notifications and these will continue throughout the course of the day.

Truancy notifications can be delivered to Attendance Officers via the bell icon in Satchel One and also via email.

Notification types can be managed by going to Account Settings > Manage notifications and opting into / out of the choices available.

When clicking on the bell icon and choosing 'See all notifications', you can then use the filter to refine by only 'Truancy Notifications' if needed.

To monitor and take action based on live attendance data, click the ‘Attendance’ button on your navigation panel.

You’ll arrive on the ‘Daily absences’ tab, which will give you an overview of all absences that have been recorded so far today.

You are shown the full days’ attendance record, allowing you to identify when students may have left or arrived at the school and any associated comments beside each mark.

As an Attendance Officer, you can easily update attendance marks straight from the 'Daily absences' tab. Click on any attendance mark which will allow you to adjust the mark, add any comments and / or populate the chosen attendance mark for the rest of the day.

Should you need to, you can go to the 'View contacts’ button under a student name to immediately surface contact details for the students' guardians directly from your MIS.

You can adjust the filters in this area at any time to view authorised absences, approved educational absences and any instances where no marks are recorded. Additionally, you can filter by year groups, classes, registration groups and inclusion groups.

From the 'Daily Absences' page, you can click the 'Emergency Registers' button on the top right of the screen.

This will generate a printable PDF register for the entire school so far today, showing previously recorded marks with a space for you to manually fill out a register on the go.

This can be useful in the event of a fire drill or evacuation, for example.

Click on the 'Register tracker' tab.

The register tracker shows all periods scheduled for the school day and allows staff to easily see all completed, pending, incomplete and upcoming registers for tracking and monitoring purposes. If needed, you can click the directional arrows to move left and right in order to see other periods of the day.

You’ll notice that the current period will be highlighted in blue so that you can focus on registers in real time.

Whichever period is currently active will be populated with orange 'Pending' boxes, symbolising every register that is due to be taken.

Click on any box to jump straight into the class register for the relevant period.

Once the registers have been completed by staff, these pending boxes will be replaced with a single green ‘Complete’ box; this will appear at the bottom of the list showing a running total of how many class registers have been completed so far.

The aim is that by the end of every session, you will be left with a single green box showing that every possible register for that session has been completed.

If a lesson started longer than 5 minutes ago and a register has still not been taken, it will turn from an orange ‘Pending’, to a red ‘Incomplete’ box.

You’ll be able to look at any future periods and see how many upcoming registers are due to be taken. Use the filters to narrow down your registers to specific year groups or subjects you’d like to focus on.

🎉 NEW - Automatic alerts sent to staff for incomplete registers

If staff have not completed a register after 10 minutes of the session / lesson starting, they will receive a 'Priority Alert' on Satchel One prompting them to complete the register.

If you'd like to deactivate alerts for sessions / lessons / both, please reach out to our Support Team using the blue chat bubble.

If you want to email a member of staff about an outstanding register, you can click on their name.

💡 Administrators: As an Admin user, you can adjust the timings of your registration periods by going to Admin > Personalise > Key Dates.

If you click on the ‘Students’ tab, you can view in-depth attendance data for individuals or groups of students.

Use your filters to refine by attendance groups, registration groups, classes and inclusion data. Alternatively, simply search for a specific student.

Once you’ve found your users, you’ll notice that their overall attendance percentage is shown which may be accompanied by a coloured dot; this colour represents their attendance rate group which will have been created by an Admin user at your school.

Click on an individual to see some high level attendance statistics along with a breakdown of their records from up to the last 30 weeks.

You can toggle between a weekly or a daily view using the drop down menu to see the marks that students received for every individual session.

🎉 NEW - Update marks from the Students > Daily view:

Attendance Officers can make changes to attendance marks via the 'Students' tab in 'Daily' view. Just like on the 'Daily Absences' page, simply click on a mark and make any changes needed. This is the perfect solution for marking an individual student as ill following a phone call from a parent.

Remember that you will need to have the 'Attendance Officer' role to be able to do this.

Should you ever need to, you can view and mark attendance for a specific student via their Insights area.

Visit the student profile and you'll arrive on the Insights tab, then scroll down to where you will see a ‘Today’s Attendance’ card. Click on a session or lesson slot and choose which mark you’d like to give them!

If a student does not have a timetabled lesson for this period, you will be unable to update the corresponding attendance mark.

If you know that a student will need this mark to be applied to all of the following sessions and lessons too, you can tick the ‘Populate for rest of day’ box. When you’re finished, apply and confirm your changes.

Please click here to learn more about the Attendance Report.

If I record attendance in Satchel One, how quickly does it write back to my MIS?
Almost instantly - our SLA promises that it will take no longer than 30 mins.

Can I still take attendance on our MIS?

It's important to make sure that you only mark Attendance in Satchel One in order to avoid data conflicts. If you'd like to understand more about why this is so important, please click here to read our 'Understanding Attendance Pro' article.

The only time that it's appropriate to mark a register in your MIS is when marking for a future date i.e. planned appointments, holidays or trips. These marks will then be visible in Satchel One when the relevant date arrives.

Can I mark attendance for a previous date in Satchel One?
Yes. Use the date picker within your Attendance register and select which historical date you'd like to mark attendance for; after doing this ensure that you have selected the correct session / lesson in the filter.

Can we have more than one Attendance Officer?

Yes, you can allocate the role of Attendance Officer to more than one member of staff.

If I were to take a register in our MIS, how often does the attendance data import into Satchel One?
Attendance data is imported from your MIS into Satchel One at 7am, 9am, 1pm, 2pm, 5pm.

Which codes are considered an 'Unauthorised Absence' in Attendance Pro and will therefore trigger a truancy alert?

O - Unauthorised absence
N - No reason yet provided for absence
U - Late (after registers closed)
G - Family holiday (not agreed)
@ - Do not use

Can I change a mark I've already saved in Satchel One?
Yes; click on the saved mark and you will be asked to confirm that you intend to overwrite the previous mark. Make your change and then click 'Save register' again to save your changes.

If I change / update a mark in Satchel One / my MIS, will it overwrite the mark on the other platform?

Yes, the latest saved change to an attendance mark will be reflected across both platforms on the next sync.

Who can take a register in Satchel One?
Any member of staff can mark attendance in Satchel One, even if they are not linked to that class.

How can I mark attendance for a class I'm not linked to?

Type the class name into the 'Search for students and classes' bar at the top right of your Satchel One screen and click on the correct group.

Go to the 'Student List' tab of the class, click the blue 'Actions' button and then click 'Attendance'.

I can see that our students have marks for AM reg but nothing else for the rest of the day. Where are their marks?
If attendance is being recorded in your MIS, the AM session will have been marked before 9am and therefore will have been imported. The next MIS import will take place at 1pm and then all of the days marks will become visible.

Please remember that it's important for all registers to be taken in Satchel One to avoid data complications like this.

What do I need to know about 'Guest' students?

If your school has 'Guest' students, they will appear on all registers. You will be unable to take attendance for these students on AM/PM registers (they will be greyed out) however their attendance marks can be logged for any timetabled lessons.

What can students and parents see?

Students and parents can't currently see attendance details for specific periods, therefore they will only see overall attendance and punctuality rates when they look on the app. Click here to see how this appears for your stakeholders.

Can we customise the attendance codes to suit our school?

Because Attendance Pro syncs with your school's MIS, your codes will be imported automatically into Satchel One. Any changes made to your MIS codes will be reflected in Satchel One during the next data import.

I know that AM registration truancy alerts are grouped together into a single email if they're marked within the first 10 minutes of the session; what happens if they are marked after those 10 minutes?

Any unauthorised absence marks recorded after the first 10 minutes will result in normal truancy alerts being delivered to the Attendance Officer. These truancy alerts will continue as standard throughout the rest of the day; the grouped notification only affects AM reg to avoid overwhelming your inbox!

Do I need to use the Register Tracker to chase up every member of staff who has an outstanding register?

Staff will automatically receive an alert if they have not completed their register within 10 minutes of the start of the lesson / session. This should prompt most staff to complete their register and reduce the need for your intervention.

If you want to further follow up with staff about an outstanding register, click their name on the Register Tracker to email them.