August 2026: The attendance workspace, staff clock-in and leave

One page for attendance

Marking a register, looking up a pupil's record and reading the term's trends were three separate places. They are now six tabs on one page: Overview, Register, Students, Staff, Analytics and Settings. Your old links still work and land on the right tab. See Attendance.

Overview is today, and Analytics is the term. That is deliberately two tabs: the question at half past eight is which classes have not been marked yet, and the question at half term is which Fridays a class has been losing.

Opening the page does not need every attendance permission. A class teacher who can take a register gets the register and a pupil's history; an office administrator who handles staff hours gets the staff tab and nothing else. Each tab checks for itself.

Staff clock in from their own phone

Staff clock in and out on the mobile app, and the platform checks they are at the school when they do. See Staff Attendance.

• Their own phone, and only theirs. Each member of staff sets up their own device, and no two accounts at your school can share one. That is what stops a single phone clocking in three people, which is the thing that actually happens where only location is checked, and it is not something a school can switch off. A second phone waits for an administrator to approve it, and you set how many one person may hold for staff carrying a work handset as well as their own.
• Your school's location. Set a pin and a radius under Attendance → Settings, or stand at the school and capture it. A clock-in from outside is refused, and the refusal is logged, so a pin in the wrong place shows up as a pattern rather than as one complaint at a time.
• Checks you cannot switch off. A location reading too vague to prove anything is refused, so is a device reporting a faked one, and the time is stamped by the server rather than taken from the phone. Without those the rest would not mean much. The location radius is the one check a school chooses, which suits a school whose staff move between sites.
• A day is worked out, not typed in. Every punch is kept exactly as it was made, and hours, lateness and whether somebody is on site now are read from them. A correction is another punch, never an edit, so the record of the morning stays the record of the morning.
• Nobody is tracked. The app asks for location only while it is open and you are clocking in, and asks for nothing in the background. That is a decision rather than an oversight, and it is enforced in the app's own build.

An administrator can also clock somebody in on their behalf, which is what covers a flat battery or a phone left at home.

Staff leave

Somebody at a training course all week is not absent, and a system that calls them absent every morning is one your office stops reading. Record leave as a range of days under a kind your school recognises. See Staff Leave.

Four kinds are there from the start and you can rename them, add your own and disable the ones you do not use. The setting that matters on each is whether it counts as a working day: official duty at an examination centre is not an absence, while sick leave is, and marking the difference keeps the right days out of every absence figure.

There is no request-and-approve queue. An administrator records that somebody is away, the same way they record everything else here.

The morning message

Each school gets one message at its own seven o'clock naming everybody who was absent the day before. One message, not one per person: eleven notifications on a bad Monday tell your office nothing the first did not, and nobody is notified that they were themselves marked absent. Absence here means no clock-in on a working day nobody was excused from, so recorded leave silences it and a closure on your calendar silences it for everybody.

Staff who have not clocked in also get one reminder in the morning, at a time you set. It is a clock rather than a location, and the wording says so.

Documents you can print

Three, and each is read on screen before it goes near a printer. See Attendance Documents.

• A class register sheet with a signature column, for the days the power or the network is not cooperating.
• An absence report for the whole school over any period.
• A timesheet per member of staff, as a PDF: one person, days down the page, with arrival, departure, hours worked and the totals at the foot.

Beside the timesheet there is a payroll export, which is a different thing and a spreadsheet rather than a document: every stretch of time worked with its exact instants, for one person or for everybody, for feeding into a payroll system. It is not offered for reading on screen, because nobody reads a payroll feed.

Analytics gained two panels

Attendance by weekday lays out the rate for each day of the week, for the school and then per class, worst attended first. A term rate averages the week flat and this does not, so a Friday a class has been losing since February reads as a Friday. A day with no register at all is drawn differently from a day nobody came, because they are not the same thing.

Staff punctuality reports how often each member of staff arrived before your late threshold, with the window, the threshold and the number of staff measured all stated above the figures.

On the phone

Clocking in and out is the app's job, and so is a member of staff's own record: the day so far, the month behind it, and their own timesheet. The app tells them which checks passed before they press anything, so a refusal at the gate is not the first they hear of a problem.

A member of staff can also read their own timesheet on the phone and save or share it from there. Running the rest of attendance stays on the web: the day board, the device approval queue, leave, the school's location, the register sheet, the absence report and anybody else's timesheet are all there.

Available on every plan

Including the free one. There is nothing to upgrade to and nothing to switch on beyond setting your school's location.