Attendance Management Case Study.

Attendance Management for Prior Pursglove College

• Tracking students attendance at Prior Pursglove College. Established in 1970, Prior Pursglove College is a leading sixth form college with over 1,200 students between 16 and 19, and 300 part time adults. The college provides a range of courses including: AS, A2, AVCEs, GNVQs and GCSEs.

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  The college uses Infonic Attendance Manager to capture the attendance of its students for the Connexions Card scheme which is designed to encourage young people to pursue further education. The integration of Attendace Manager into the scheme was under contract to the Department for Education and Skills.

  Replacing an unwieldy system

  All colleges face issues of student attendance. Many factors impact student’s attendance from personal circumstances to pressures of coursework. Colleges have to deal with this effectively – with the aim of getting students back in class. The ability to monitor attendance accurately is crucial.

  Prior Pursglove operated a weekly register system to monitor attendance at classes and tutorials. This was originally just for college use, but more recently to meet the colleges obligations within Government run attendance schemes including the Educational Maintenance Allowance initiative. The college ran a purely manual system maintained by tutors. As the college merged with other colleges this system became unwieldy and inaccurate. It was also difficult to produce reports.

  The college briefly adopted a Schools Information Management System (SIMS), but this did not provide the reporting functionality that the college needed.

  “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” said College Information Systems Manager Malcolm Collins.

  Choosing Attendance Manager

  Infonic Attendance Manager was chosen primarily for its flexibility, its simple user interface and its functionality including very strong reporting facilities. Attendance Manager was also able to integrate easily within the colleges existing IT systems. It is a Windows-type system that looks and feels familiar to the colleges users (unlike the previous DOS-based system). It required no special stationery and displayed results that looked similar to conventional attendance register formats. The college also liked the high level of automation the system provided and the low level of administrative overheads.

  The college looked at a number of solutions, including a leading electronic registration system. These were rejected for lack of functionality and high cost and Infonic Attendance Manager was chosen.

  Benefits of Attendance Manager

  1. Accurate, efficient attendance management
  2. Rapid identification of attendance problems
  3. Timely management reporting
  4. Reduced administrative overheads
  5. Easy integration with existing systems and processes
  6. Supports Web-based services

  “The system provides improved flexibility, did not require us to change working practices, and is reliable,” says College Information System Manager Malcolm Collins.

  The Attendance Manager solution

  Used by colleges across the UK, Attendance Manager is the least expensive, most flexible system available for capturing student and staff attendance.

  The Infonic team has strategic partnerships with the Department of Education & Skills and leading software vendors in the Education market to ensure the solution remains tightly integrated with the MIS, enrolment and timetabling systems.

  Attendance Manager enforces tight security and offers a range of capture methods including paper registers using OCR, direct data entry from tutors’ laptops and Web registration.

  Reports can be configured using a range of criteria and saved for sharing with other users. The system is fully compliant with the Freedom of Information and Data Protection acts.

  The Attendance Manager system provides an accurate picture of college attendance. It allows users to compare attendance figures across campuses, subjects, and lecturers. It makes the registration process easier for lecturers. Students are very aware that their attendance is being monitored.

  “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” says College Information System Manager Malcolm Collins.

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