Introduction
With post-covid attendance figures firmly in the spotlight, the importance of a strong cloud MIS has never been higher. An MIS assists schools with their daily lives and tasks, with the most important of these being registration. A system like Bromcom allows its users to view and update student attendance in real time, ensuring student safety and well-being is at the forefront. Now, let’s look at 5 ways that Bromcom streamlines Attendance for schools.
Multi-location Registers
Given that Attendance is strongly rooted in the core of Bromcom, we have worked hard to ensure registers are quick, reliable, and easily accessible. Depending on a user’s specific access, registers can be taken from several locations across the MIS: teacher dashboard, groups page, today’s missing registers and user timetable. This ensures that registers or amendments to attendance can be carried out quickly with little to no navigation required.
MIS-wide integration
The beauty of an all-in-one solution like Bromcom, is that all the data is synchronised under one roof and constantly updating in real time. This means that your behaviour polices, communication and safeguarding configurations will kick in to action based on student attendance (if they are required to do so). For example, the moment a student is marked absent, an email can be automatically sent home to their parents and the student can be assigned a detention. Alternatively, if the absence is authorised or for medical reasons, their attendance can be automatically updated to prevent negative outcomes being carried out.
Manage Attendance page
Even for a school with very low student numbers, attendance is a constantly flowing aspect of daily operations, with students arriving late, leaving early or being unwell. Therefore, schools need a flexible system that can keep up with these changes throughout the day and makes it easy to update attendance. In Bromcom, you have the Manage Attendance page, which allows Attendance officers to overwrite attendance for any on roll students in just a few clicks. Manage Attendance can be used to overwrite individual marks, bulk update attendance for entire cohorts of students who are on a trip, enter past attendance previously not recorded, or update attendance ahead of time for longer term absences. Given the importance and functionality of this page, it is not accessible to teaching staff and must only be made available to office staff and SLT. Manage Attendance user guide.
Attendance Dashboard
We understand the importance of analytics and drill-down capabilities and are proud to offer a range of live data dashboards, including Budgeting, KS2, KS4, Behaviour and Safeguarding dashboards. Arguably the most important of them all is the Attendance dashboard, which was essential during covid. This dashboard allows users with access to view, analyse and export key attendance data for the entire school, as well being able to compare against past data and benchmarks. Comprising of multiple widgets and key statistics, data from the dashboard can be exported into excel or it can be analysed deeper to shine the light on vulnerable students or particular areas of concern. Once again, access to this dashboard is not available to teachers by default but can easily be shared with them should you wish to.
Teacher App
While we are proud to offer an MIS that is rich in features and strong in reliability, there are also situations where you may not have access to a computer but need to record attendance. Thanks to our Bromcom Teacher App, this potential gap has been identified and accounted for. Our teacher app can be used on any compatible IOS or Android device, meaning that a Wi-Fi connection OR cellular data can be used, allowing attendance to be taken on the go. This is especially helpful when it comes to fire drills, school trips or incidents outside of the building, allowing teachers to keep track of which students are present and even send alerts/direct messages to colleagues in other areas of the premises. Fun fact: In 2023, Louise Needham (Bromcom customer success team manager) took on the 3 peaks challenge for charity, while demonstrating the true ‘access anywhere’ capabilities our mobile apps. Read more here.
Conclusion
As previously mentioned, Attendance is where it all began for Bromcom, originally manufacturing physical registration systems, which were used across the country long before cloud MIS were on the horizon. The 5 aforementioned attendance features, plus our history of innovation and commitment to user satisfaction, mean we are extremely well positioned to help schools streamline attendance management. To find out more or speak to the team, please feel free to reach out and we will answer any questions you may have.
