ADA - attendance software for LAs

ADA is an attendance data presentation tool that helps Local Authorities to improve and maintain attendance in Secondary and Primary Schools. The process of monitoring and managing school attendance is simplified by ADA which presents this data in both graphical and statistical formats. The graphical options identify and show areas of concern very quickly, removing the need for lengthy traditional analysis. ADA allows LAs to demonstrate their achievements to Ofsted Inspectors, Schools, Senior Management and LA Members.

ADA helps you in three ways:

1. Allows you to visualise attendance data quickly and easily

Local Authorities collect large amounts of data regularly from schools and ADA allows you to see your attendance data presented in a way that helps you identify patterns, trends and problem areas that would have been difficult to discover using traditional methods.

ADA helps to spot problems, issues or areas of concern such as:
Which schools are falling below target?
Which pupils have a significant record of broken weeks?
Which pupils are persistent absentees?
Which apparently good schools or attendees are getting worse?
Which schools, groups or pupils show poor attendance on particular days?
What the relationships are between attendance and other factors such as free meals, gender, ethnicity and SEN etc.

With graphical reporting, seeing the contrast between groups or individuals makes it ideal for parents, staff and pupils as they only have to view the magnitude of difference, to see how they are performing against their cohorts or group. Progress on actual school attendance to date can be viewed either year on year, by term or compared for any selected period within a year. Groups of schools can also be defined as geographical regions which may be helpful to larger authorities with sector or area management structures.

2. Allows you to set targets

Having identified individual students or groups of students with particular problems, you can build an action plan and also set targets and achievement dates, if required. Each student can be given their own personal targets and targets can also be set for groups, including groups of schools. Targets can range from simple percentages to broken weeks and half day absences.

With the national focus targeting persistent absence in schools, as part of the overall strategy to raise attendance in schools. Authorised, unauthorised and persistent absence is pinpointed together with block and half day absences to determine the type of absence a pupil has. In addition, the numbers of broken weeks of attendance can be found for the purposes of absence indicators. Patterns of attendance and absences can be seen at a glance and areas of concern identified.

3. Monitors your targets

Regularly check on your targets and immediately see how the students, groups, or schools are progressing, giving you the chance to implement timely remedial action where necessary.

It is important for LAs to know whether their school attendance is improving or deteriorating. ADA will report on this across any two comparison periods of time. This will indicate which pupils are improving and which are not and enables users to monitor the improvements for specific known problem groupings, simply and quickly.

Benefits of ADA:

• Helps direct your actions on attendance decisively towards the most appropriate schools, pupils, families, staff and curriculum areas.
• Provides an unambiguous audit trail of evidence to complete the Authorities SEF, staff development and run a system of rewards
• Allows effective monitoring of attendance against any chosen benchmarks such as national, LA targets or schools of a similar nature.
• Saves time by removing the necessity for lengthy analysis.
• Identifies problem areas quickly and easily.
• Allows realistic target setting.
• Monitors performance on a continual basis providing LAs with a focussed strategy on directing resources efficiently where required.

How does it Work?

An automated extractor now works with all the popular MIS systems including Capita, SERCO, RM and Phoenix. The school’s attendance data is collected in a known format so that it can be imported directly into ADA. ADA is designed to work on an LA Network; anyone can be authorised to view and use the data. Where there is no network access the software can be used off line, enabling staff to work anywhere and at any time, with teachers, parents and pupils at school, or with parents and pupils in their own homes.