Online Reporting to Parents-Attendance Web parts

Yesterday I introduced our work developing Web parts for SharePoint 2007. After our first Web part, The ‘My Timetable’ Web part we moved on to looking at student attendance at school. This is a crucial area with government statistics showing a 15% drop in attendance (from 100%-85%) reduces a student’s GCSE outcome by 1 grade on average. To start with we wanted to show student attendance in morning and afternoon registration. Having learned a lot from their early Web part development Chris and Darren our developers managed to create a ‘My Tutor Time Attendance’ Web part within weeks. We have developed this work with Richard Willis from Salamander Soft to include headline statistics and the final product is here.

As well tutor time attendance in June 2008 we had a request from our Sixth Form to produce a Web part for lessons. The main driver for this was the fact that our year 13 students are not always required to attend tutor time and so keeping tracks on them was proving difficult. Although most students were attending all the time some were slipping through the cracks and so an easy way of monitoring lesson attendance was essential. The result is shown below- ‘My lessons’ attendance.

My Lessons Attendance

The impact of these Web parts has been significant in the school. Tutors and Heads of Year as well as teachers are able to track students in the school and measure how often the attend lessons. Now that we have rolled this work out to students and parents we are able to encourage them to take responsibility for ensuring they are successful at school.