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TOKAIRO
AM CAPTURES THE STUDENT ATTENDANCE DATA
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Student attendance capture and reporting
Leading
sixth form college Prior Pursglove is using Tokairo's Attendance
Manager software to capture and upload 16-19 year olds attendance
details under the Connexions Card, an exciting initiative
to encourage young people to remain in post compulsory learning.
Developed
under a contract between Tokairo and the Department for Education
and Skills (DfES), the new functionality of Attendance Manager
provides for automatic uploading of student data to the Connexions
Card server. Students receive award points to reflect actual
attendance and the college avoids administrative overheads
otherwise necessary to resolve inaccurate information.
Key
benefits achieved since the introduction of the system include
much increased flexibility, conformance with existing systems
and processes - without the need to make major changes, and
improved reliability. Other benefits range from improved user
support, facility to satisfy new report formats quickly and
easily, and support for Web-based online extensions to the
scheme.
The system means that the college can more easily and
rapidly identify students that are in difficulty and need
help and respond to individual cases more effectively. It
also enables the college to receive a more complete view of
the overall attendance situation as part of new "at risk"
strategy designed to boost student performance and overcome
failing performance.
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Established in 1970, Prior Pursglove College
is located in the small market town of Guisborough,
which is on the edge of the North York Moors and
close to the industrial town of Middlesbrough.
A leading sixth form college, it has over 1,200
full-time students between 16 and 19 - and some
300 part time adult students whose ages range
up to 75. The college provides a very wide range
of courses, including AS, A2 and AVCEs, as well
as GNVQs and GCSEs which can be taken in any combination
- www.pursglove.ac.uk.
"We have traditionally operated a weekly
register system to monitor student attendance
at classes and tutorials," says College Information
System Manager Malcolm Collins. "This has
been to ensure for our own information that students
actually attend - and more recently to comply
with new Government schemes to reinforce attendance
measures". These include the Educational
Maintenance Allowance initiative and the recently
launched Connexions Card scheme.
The scheme was introduced in January 2002 jointly
with Capita plc in a unique partnership aimed
at encouraging students to remain in a learning
environment, and support motivation to ensure
they make the most of their educational opportunities.
In return for maintaining a good attendance record,
students earn points on their card that can be
redeemed rewards posted on www.connexionscard.com
that include free goods and services as well as
many exciting ‘money can’t buy’
experience rewards. Currently, there are over
1,000 learning centres signed up to the scheme,
with around 250,000 issued cards and over 5,000
organisations offering on-the-spot discounts to
cardholders.
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"All educational institutions have to face the
issue of student motivation and attendance," says
Malcolm. "It is part of the educational wisdom
that students should not have to be driven to classes
but should want to go. One might assume that having
competed to win a place at a college - often at the
cost of great personal effort - every student would
grasp the opportunity with both hands. But life isn't
like that. Personal circumstances, unexpected events,
the pressure of coursework and a whole range of factors
can often combine to result in students absenting themselves".
"Colleges have to deal with that and face the
issue squarely - with the aim of resolving problems
and getting students back on track. The absolute prerequisite
is the ability to monitor attendance and try and nip
any problems in the bud. What we needed was a robust,
reliable and effective system that could produce meaningful
and useful reports for the college management, departmental
heads and individual tutors".
"There were a number of options. We could have
stayed with a traditional manual register - maintained
by individual tutors. However, after we merged with
another college some years ago, this became unwieldy
and was incapable of being accurately audited and used
for college-wide reporting".
For a period, the college employed an alternative system.
"It worked an established the principle of centrally
held attendance records, but it didn't provide the breadth
or depth of functionality that we needed," says
Malcolm. "We also looked at a number of alternative
solutions, including a leading electronic registration
system. These were rejected for two main reasons: lack
of functionality and cost. We eventually went for Tokairo's
Attendance Manager".
Reasons? "Flexibility, functionality, friendly
user interface, ability to fit in with our current IT
systems and good reporting facilities. It is a characteristically
Windows-type system that was familiar to our users,
unlike the previous DOS-based system," says Malcolm.
"It required no special stationery and displayed
results that corresponded to conventional attendance
register formats. Other features include a high level
of automation and low administration overhead".
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Benefits? "Apart from providing accurate
and timely statistics, the system has helped to
make our students more aware of the fact that
their attendance is being effectively monitored,"
says Malcolm. "In fact, our attendance rates
are going up. Tutors make more use of reports
and there is more ammunition for them to bring
to bear to transgressors. Actually, students recognise
and appreciate this. Staff are more involved in
the monitoring process and better equipped to
deal with necessary action. Also, the solution
is providing a more effective platform for college
management to evaluate and recognise staff ability
in addressing attendance challenges".
"The system provides improved flexibility,
did not require us to change working practices,
and is reliable," says Malcolm. "User
support is good; there are no problems when it
comes to designing new report formats and the
system has more than enough functionality to support
forward plans - for example, an extension of the
application to cover on-line Web-based attendance
monitoring".
"The bottom line is that we have a sharper,
bigger picture of the student attendance situation,
can now analyse the information in a wider and
more effective way, and respond more quickly to
help students who may need assistance. We are
more responsive and the system has provided a
platform for a newly developed "at risk"
strategy by which we identify students who are
struggling and recover them to an academically
disciplined regime to ensure they don't throw
away their opportunities. It works".
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