Registers and attendance

Who was at each lesson. Teachers mark it as they teach; the office uses it to confirm delivery, work out pay, chase what is missing and spot a pupil who has stopped coming.

Where the register is

Open the school, centre or teacher whose lessons you want — or the event — go to their Schedule, pick the activity, and choose the Register tab. The grid is the register for the whole year: pupils down the side, sessions across the top.

Alongside it sit Sessions (the lessons themselves), Pupils and Statistics.

Two marks, and they are not the same thing

The single most common misunderstanding, and the cause of most "the register isn't saved" reports:

Task result	What happened to the lesson — delivered, cancelled, absent. One per session, per teacher
Register key	Whether that pupil was there. One per pupil, per session

Setting a task result does not mark anybody present, and marking pupils does not say the lesson happened. Both are needed, and a lesson is only finished when both are done.

Each is set up in Settings with the flags that make it mean something — Task Results carry Mark as delivered, and Register Keys carry Present and Absent reason provided. Those flags, not the wording, are what the totals, the chasing and the pay claims actually read.

Marking it yourself

You do not have to wait for the teacher — the office can mark any register:

• One pupil, one session: click their cell, then pick a register key from the list. Clear the mark empties it again.
• A whole session: click the session's heading to mark everybody who has a lesson in it at once.

A cell shows the key's letter in the key's own colour, M where the lesson was made up elsewhere, and · where it is not yet marked. A make-up appears as its own column for that pupil, flagged with * in the heading.

An empty cell is not an unmarked cell

A cell with nothing in it at all — not even a dot — means that pupil has no lesson in that session, so there is nothing to mark. That is the thing to chase, and the next section is about why it happens.

Why a pupil is not on the register

The register is built from the diary, so a pupil appears only where they have a diary entry. Work down these in order — the tickets we get are nearly always one of them.

1. They have not accepted yet. An applicant is not on the register until the offer is accepted — and where the parent is paying, accepting means making the first payment. Until then there is nothing to mark, which is deliberate.

2. They were not progressed into this year. Run the query Tuition progression - indirect not progressed: it lists everybody who did not come across and why. Two causes come up again and again:

• the pupil has outgrown the school's year range and no new school has been recorded — see Progression;
• the activity was given an end date at the end of last year, so its pupils were never carried forward. Watch for two activities with the same name, one closed and one new: the pupils are all sitting in the closed one.

3. They were stopped, then restored. Restoring last year's lessons puts last year back — it does not re-create the move into this year. And a finish date left on this year's record takes them off the register from that date. Check both. Reinstating does not re-charge anybody either, so if the lessons are being taught again, post a debit adjustment for them.

4. They have finished. A finish date removes them from that date on. If the record is not in the list at all, filter the pupil's tuition to include cancelled applications so the hidden one shows.

5. They have no diary entries at all. An active pupil with nothing in the diary is a fault, not a setting — raise it with us. The nightly tidy-up spots this (it counts pupils missing diary entries), but it does not create the missing lessons, so it will not come right on its own.

Statistics

The Statistics tab turns the grid into two figures:

• Delivery — delivered, not delivered, and remaining. A session counts as delivered only when its task result is one marked as delivered; remaining means it has no task result at all.
• Attendance — how many pupils were present, counted only across delivered sessions. Lessons nobody has given an outcome to are left out, so the percentage does not punish you for paperwork that has not been done.

Make-up sessions are excluded from both.

What the teacher has to do, and what chases them

Two settings in System Configuration decide whether a lesson is considered unfinished:

Insist On Register Keys	A lesson is not done until every pupil on it has a mark
Insist On Task Results	A lesson is not done until it has an outcome

With both off, nothing is chased at all.

A lesson is counted as outstanding when it is this academic year, has started, is not itself a make-up, sits on a confirmed activity, has either no task result or one that is marked delivered and needs no make-up — and a pupil on it has no register key, was not made up elsewhere, and had not finished before that date.

That one definition drives three things:

• the prompt on the teacher's Portal, and the query Teacher - Outstanding Portal Tasks, which is how the office sees the same list;
• a weekly email, sent on a Saturday: one email per teacher listing all their unmarked lessons. It covers the last seven days only, so each lesson is chased once, the week after it happened. Anything older shows on the Portal prompt but is not emailed again. It goes to their work email, or their personal one if there is no work email;
• pay claims. Where Insist On Register Keys is on, a teacher cannot submit a claim while any lesson in it still has an unmarked register. They are told which lessons.

"The teacher marked it and it has gone"

Nothing in Xperios removes a saved mark, and a failed save shows an error rather than silently losing it. In practice it is one of two things: the teacher set the task result and thought that was the register (or the other way round), or they selected the register keys on the Portal without pressing the button that applies them.

Where a lesson has two teachers, both see the register and either can fill it in — but each teacher has their own task result, so both must set theirs if you are tracking who delivered what.

What a school can and cannot do

A school cannot change a register. There is no setting that lets a school portal user add or remove pupils, or alter a mark.

The one thing they can be given is Schools Confirm Diary in System Configuration, which lets a school confirm the teacher's work on school-billed lessons by setting a task result. That confirms delivery — nothing more.

If a school needs a pupil taken off a lesson, that is office work: open the school's Schedule (or its Weekly Summary), pick the lesson, and finish the pupil from the register.

Chasing absences

Xperios can write to a payer whose pupil keeps missing lessons. It needs two things switched on:

1. Process Absence Notifications in System Configuration; and
2. a figure in Pupil Absent Sessions Emails Trigger on the service type — how many lessons in a row may be missed. At zero, that service type is left out entirely.

What counts is narrower than people expect: only a mark whose register key is neither present nor one that asks for a reason. An absence somebody has explained does not count, and any other mark breaks the run and starts the count again. It looks at marked lessons from the last month, up to seven sessions back.

Once a pupil reaches the trigger, their payer gets the first warning; if it carries on, the second and then the third. Each lesson can only produce one email, and a pupil who has finished is not chased.

It runs weekly, on a Saturday, and is skipped on test and demo databases.

Finding attendance across the service

Two queries do most of the work:

• Tuition - Pupil Attendance - Not Present List — everybody marked absent. Its Finish Date column, next to the pupil's name, is blank for pupils still in tuition, so you can filter out the ones who have already left.
• Teacher - Outstanding Portal Tasks — the registers teachers have not marked, the same list their Portal prompt counts.

See also

• Progression — why a pupil never reached this year's register
• Transfers — a pupil on the wrong register
• Register Keys — the marks themselves, and what Present means
• Make-up lessons — why a cell shows M, and the outcome a make-up needs