Tracking attendance effectively in early years is crucial for a variety of reasons, such as compliance with regulations, efficiency of the childcare service and keeping children safe and well.
In this article we look at 5 key reasons you should adopt efficient management software for attendance, before highlighting how Child Paths could help your setting to improve attendance tracking.
Keeping accurate attendance records ensures that you always know which children are present at any given time. For example, in the case of an emergency, such as a fire drill or evacuation, knowing the exact number of children present will be essential to ensure each child is accounted for.
Effective attendance tracking helps to identify quickly if a child is missing. This supports staff in taking prompt action such as contacting parents/guardians in the case of an unauthorised absence.
In the UK and Ireland there are strict regulations regarding child attendance tracking in early education and care settings. Accurate records are required during regulatory inspections in order to demonstrate compliance.
Attendance data is also crucial for securing government funding and subsidies. These can often be decided on the basis of accurate reporting of the number of children enrolled, as well as their attendance patterns.
Patterns of absenteeism may indicate the spread of illness. Through monitoring of children’s attendance, early years settings can react to illness and enact timely health interventions or communication with parents, which can minimise the impact of potential illness outbreaks.
Furthermore, regular attendance tracking ensures that children with specific health needs or conditions are consistently and effectively monitored throughout their time at the setting.
Accurate attendance records provide parents with up-to-date information about their child’s whereabouts. Parents can see when their child has been checked in or out of the setting by other permitted designated adults, in real time.
Tracking attendance can also help caregivers identify patterns in a child’s behaviour or wellbeing that could signal emotional or developmental concerns.
Knowing the exact number of children attending each day helps to plan for the accurate allocation of resources. For example, precise meal planning and the purchase of raw materials can be supported by accurate attendance data. g
Attendance records also help managers make informed decisions about staffing levels, guarding against incorrect child-to-staff ratios thus ensuring optimal care for children.
Child Paths collaborated closely with educators to create comprehensive and user-friendly attendance features – enabling you to complete tasks quickly and easily. This allows you to reclaim valuable time with the children.
Functionality includes a wide range of reports, authorised collector options with signature or password protection, NCS and ECCE alerts, and chick number expiry alerts for both parents and educators.
You can log various types of absence, such as holidays, sickness, appointments, and more, with a “date to and from” feature that eliminates the need to mark a child as absent each day during extended holidays.
Let’s look at some of the attendance tracking functionality:
If you want to track practitioners’ attendance, it will need to be enabled within your branch settings. Once it has been enabled, when you click into the Daysheet/attendance area within the rooms section you will not see the list of children until you mark yourself in using the arrival/departed switch as seen in the image below.
Once you mark yourself as ‘arrived’, you will see the list of children and be able to mark them as present. You will then also have the ‘break’ option for when you take and return from lunch breaks (marked ‘1’ in the image below). If anyone makes a mistake, they can simply delete the log (marked ‘2’ in the image below).
Child attendance logging/tracking:
When you first click into Daysheet/attendance you will see the list of children that will be in this room on that day. They will all be greyed out until they have been marked as present.
There are a couple of ways in which you can mark the children as having arrived or left.
Firstly, you can simply click on the arrival/departed switch seen in the image below as the children enter the room.
Once you have clicked on this, the child will be highlighted, and a time stamp added. You can edit this time if needed by clicking on the time display box.
However, many services prefer to wait until all the children have arrived, get them settled and then, (1) in the option box at the top of the page select arrival, before entering a time in the time selector (2). Then click on the ‘select all’ switch, before unselecting the children who have not yet arrived, if appropriate.
1.
2.
3.
Once you have completed these three steps, simply click ‘Apply’ either at the top or the bottom of the list of children, this will then highlight all children present within the room:
You can also change the time for any child that may have been slightly earlier or later than the time selected:
Authorised ‘collectors’ can be added by parents when filling out their child registration forms, and they can amend these at any time. You can add their name, profile picture, password, and they can even get the person in question to add their digital signature, which can then be checked by staff when that person collects the child, if they are not already familiar with them.
Once added, these individuals will be displayed beside the child’s name in the attendance area for staff to select if they wish to use this functionality:
If a service does not wish to use this function, it can be disabled within the branch settings.
We have also included radio buttons so you can quickly mark children as absent, sick, not due in, or on holiday for just that one day, if needed.
For holidays longer than one day, you would 1: Select the ‘Holiday’ option. Then, 2: Use the ‘Date from’ and ‘Date to’ option to enter the dates. 3: Then you would select the child in question. 4: And click ‘Apply’:
You will not have to do anything for this child during the dates selected as it will already display that they are on holiday:
Children can also be assigned to more than one room if needed. For example, if a child arrived in the breakfast room and then had to move to another room, the teacher in the room that they are moving to will see a ‘Room change’ button, as seen in image 1 below. Once they click on this, it will automatically mark them as having left the room they were in and mark them as present in the new room (image 2).
Image 1:
Image 2:
Attendance reports and alerts:
All attendance logs captured for educators and children will be available in our comprehensive reports section.
Reports are available in the menu area and below are a few that you may find most useful for attendance.
Another couple of reports that you may find useful are the Scheme reports.
The National Childcare Scheme (NCS) report is useful for keeping an eye on any children that are close to reaching NCS alert status for under-attending. This report is also very useful for any inspections related to NCS.
First you select what you need to see in your report:
Then you can select any of the advanced switches below. We would recommend using ‘Round up hours’ with this report.
Once you click generate you will see the layout below:
This provides you with the following information:
As seen in the image above, it will turn amber for 6 and 7 weeks of under attendance and red on the 8th week of under attendance for any child not attending for the NCS hours claimed.
Then, both the parent/guardian and the early years manager would also receive an NCS alert, stating the weeks that the child has not been meeting their hours.
I hope that you have found this information useful.
If you would like to find out more about Child Paths attendance function, or any of the wide range of features available within the platform, please email us at info@childpaths.ie. We would be more than happy to run you through a quick online, no obligation demonstration.
