NZ Schools - Reporting and Recording Student Attendance Interventions

Regular attendance helps learners develop a sense of belonging and routine, and fosters better engagement with learning to drive progress and achievement.   We recognise that the monitoring and reporting of declining attendance is the first step in achieving this result.

In conjunction with the Ministry of Education, Hero has developed a feature to identify, record and report student attendance interventions.

IDENTIFYING STUDENTS REQUIRING INTERVENTION

Hero runs a nightly task across all NZ MoE schools that will maintain an early intervention register.  

This task will -

• Identify and add to the intervention register, any student who has accumulated 5 full days unjustified absence (consecutively or separately) during the current term.   The student needs to be absent for the entire day with codes of T, E, G or ?.
• Calculate an intervention due date, which will be 5 school days following the student reaching the 5 day unjustified absence threshold.
• Remove any student from the intervention register if their attendance has been updated resulting in the student no longer meeting the 5 day unjustified absence threshold.

VIEWING AND RECORDING INTERVENTIONS

A school administrator is able to view all students added to the interventions register.  A visual count will be updated when new students are added to prevent them being overlooked.   The count will update on page refresh or whenever the user visits the home page.

An intervention may consist of a phone call, email or meeting with the caregiver.  Schools may choose to record the details of the intervention as a post on a designated caregiver communications page or attendance page.

1. Navigate to the Administration menu. If you have a wide-screen device this will already be visible on the left-hand side of your screen. If not, click on the Administration menu icon at the top left-hand side of your screen.

2. Under the heading Administration select Attendance Interventions

3.  A table of students awaiting intervention will be displayed.  Monitor the Intervention Due Date to ensure a timely intervention is actioned.

4.  From here you can view the attendance for the student, view the caregiver contact details and record the action taken in the notes field.

5.  Once the intervention has taken place select the student(s) who have received interventions by clicking the checkbox followed by ACTION <no> INTERVENTIONS.

6.  The student records will move to ACTIONED where they will be retained indefinitely.   Use the filters provided to view the years/terms required.   Note:  Only years and terms with interventions will be available for selection.

7.  If a student is processed as 'actioned' in error, he/she can be moved back to awaiting by selecting the student and clicking RE-ACTIVATE <no> INTERVENTIONS.

Note:  A student will not be added to the Interventions Register more than once in a single term. 

REPORTING INTERVENTIONS TO THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

As for Weekly and Termly Attendance uploads, the Ministry of Education request a weekly upload of student interventions.   This upload will happen automatically and will send a file to the MoE of all students who have reached the 5 day unjustified absence threshold during the current term or in the last week of the previous term.  The file will include the date of any intervention actioned.  Students who leave during the term will not be removed from the uploaded file on leaving.

Schools have the choice to opt out of submitting this file.

1. Navigate to the Administration menu. If you have a wide-screen device this will already be visible on the left-hand side of your screen. If not, click on the Administration menu icon at the top left-hand side of your screen.

2.  Under Options select Ministry of Education

3.  To opt out, unclick the Weekly Intervention Report slider