Enrol nursery into registers using regular Attendance Patterns

This article explains how to use attendance patterns in Arbor to automatically enrol nursery students into registers based on regular session schedules. It details preparation steps, setting and managing attendance patterns, automatic enrolment, and when manual enrolment is needed for irregular attendance.

When to use attendance patterns (and when not)

Attendance patterns are a great way to enrol students into their nursery registers if they do regular sessions. For example, every morning, every afternoon, or all day.

If your students attend a mix of sessions throughout the week (for example, they only attend Tuesdays and Thursdays), then attendance patterns will not work for you. Instead, you can manually enrol the students into their registers. 

Please read our guidance here to decide before following the instructions below: What are Attendance Patterns?

Please note: this process is for enrolling your nursery students into registers during the year, such as after migration. If you wish to set up your nursery registers for next year, you'll need to follow these instructions. 

Preparation

Permissions

• School: Academic Structure: Administer or School: Teaching: Administer - Lets you add automatic enrollments
• Student Profile: Attendance: Administer All Students - Lets you set attendance patterns

If you don't have the permissions needed to complete the setup, your admin team can assign these permissions to you using these instructions.

Check your course structure

To use attendance patterns, you must have your Nursery course set up with individual modules for each Mon - Fri AM/PM session. If you head over to School > Programmes > Courses, your Nursery course should look like this (a Nursery top-level course with 10 modules):

Full details on how to create this here: Setting up your nursery registers for the first time

Check student enrolments

Make sure students are enrolled in the correct year groups and registration forms. You can do this from the applicant area if they were added as an applicant, or from their student profile.

If you chose to enrol students based on Attendance Patterns when setting up the school year (option 1 here), this means they will be automatically added to all your AM and PM roll call registers.

Managing Attendance patterns and enrolment into registers

Setting attendance patterns

To change a student's attendance pattern so they only appear on the register at certain times, follow these steps:

1. Go to Students > Enrolment > Year Groups 
2. Click on the relevant year group (e.g. Nursery) to open the year group's Overview page
3. Click Attendance Patterns in the left-hand menu
4. Use the Bulk Set Attendance Patterns button on the right to bulk-set attendance patterns for any students who do not have one.
   
   
    
5. On the slide-over, select the enrolment start date and pattern, then select the students this applies to.
6. Once you are happy, click the green Set attendance pattern button. 

The Initial attendance pattern will run until the date in the Until field has passed. Then the student's attendance pattern will automatically change to the 2nd attendance pattern.

Using automatic enrolments linked to your Attendance Patterns

Automatic enrolments can then be created to add students to the correct course based on their attendance pattern. 

For example, all students on a 'Morning only' attendance pattern will follow the automatic enrolment process to be enrolled into all Mon to Fri AM modules. 

Please note that if you have students who do a mixture of days, for example, just Tuesdays and Thursdays, you will need to use manual enrolments instead. See how to Enrol nursery into registers manually without Attendance Patterns (Irregular-Attendance) for more details.

Adding an auto-enrolment

To add an auto-enrolment, head to the overview page of the group you want to automatically enrol from. In this case, it will likely be your Nursery Registration Form.

For example, from the Students > Enrolments > Pastoral > Registration Forms page, select the registration form to get to the overview page.

To add an auto-enrolment:

1. Click the +Add button in the Automatic Enrolments into Courses section of the groups overview page
   
   
    
2. On the slide-over, select the attendance pattern, then select the courses you wish to be fed into by the group (e.g Morning Only will include all AM modules)
3. Click Add Automatic Enrolments

4. Repeat this step for Afternoon Only and All Day - each time selecting the relevant modules that particular pattern will attend.

   Remember, this will only work for students who attend all AM/PM or all-day modules - for students who attend a mixture of sessions (e.g. just Tuesdays and Fridays), you would need to enrol them manually.

Changing the registers that students will appear in

To change an existing attendance pattern (before the start of the year), you’ll need to delete it and then add a new one. Click the Attendance field, then click the Delete button in the slide over.

After an initial attendance pattern has been set for a student, any subsequent changes can be made by following these instructions: Change a student's attendance pattern so they appear in the right registers