Understanding Attendance Patterns

The article explains how to manage nursery enrolment in attendance registers using Attendance Patterns and manual enrolment. Attendance Patterns allow for automatic inclusion in registers based on consistent attendance times, while manual enrolment offers more flexibility for varied schedules. The recommendation is to use manual enrolment for better management.

As nursery-age pupils are not required to attend school full time (10 sessions of education a week), you’ll need to reflect on when they are not required to attend in Arbor. Making sure Arbor knows whether a nursery student is due to attend ensures your attendance data remains accurate. 

What are the different ways to manage nursery enrolment in registers?

There are two ways to manage nursery enrolment into registers: Attendance Patterns and manual enrolment.

Attendance patterns can be assigned to students to tell the system when to include them in attendance registers. Using this method, you can include students in all morning roll-call registers, all afternoon roll-call registers, or both morning and afternoon roll-call registers. For example, if you give a student the ‘Mornings only’ attendance pattern they will appear in only the morning registers for their nursery class every day of the week. You can see how to do this here.

You cannot use attendance patterns for students who do not attend during the same times every day of the week. For example, a student attends all day Monday-Wednesday but doesn't attend Thursday or Friday, or a student attends afternoon only on Monday and mornings the rest of the week. In this case, you would need to enrol students into their registers manually, using these instructions.

Which do you recommend?

We recommend manually enrolling students. This is because Attendance Patterns can only be used for students who attend morning only, afternoon only or all day every single day. Manually enrolling is much more flexible, and so can be used for all students.

Can we use a combination of the two options?

We don't recommend using a combination of the options, as this process is hard to manage.