Future Absences Should Be Included in the Audit Trail

Registers on iSAMS are generated in the early hours, e.g. 3am. Within the Registration Manager module is a future absence system. Using this, we can instruct registers to be pre-populated with absence codes and notes.

So, when the register is generated, the absence codes are pulled from Future Absences and placed into the register. In particular, the details of when the register was “taken” and by whom reflects when the future absence was placed on the system and by whom.

When staff come into school to take their registers, the codes are already there on the system.

There is also an audit trail within the registration system. Every time a change is made, this is logged to the TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationPupilsAudit table. There is a built-in report within the Registration Manager module (“History of Changes”, under the Registration Reports heading) which pulls through this data.

If you have a set that is not registered, and you register those pupils, not only is the register updated with the latest registration information, but the TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationPupilsAudit table is also populated. You can then use the History of Changes report to view the complete list of changes made to a register.

However, future absences are only entered on the register and not to TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationPupilsAudit. In other words, if staff go in and overwrite the codes that were pre-populated, there is no record within iSAMS to indicate that this has happened, and the History of Changes report does not return anything.

This is a significant omission in the audit trail for registers and it would be great if it were added.