Can CiviCRM be used to record student attandance?

Question

A school thinks CiviCRM can be used for keeping their pupil's details including their attendance for each semester. Later that attendance would be used for a report. I am not able to figure out how the attendance part can be achieved!

Did you ever implemented a similar feature, if so, please share how you have acheived it. Or if have an idea, please feel free to share. Thanks

Answer 1

We have done this. The approach was as follows

• use Activities with custom fields including 'week commencing', Term, etc
• one field for each day (or half day) of the week with the options for attendance (eg justified absence, unjustified absence, present, etc)
• each week an Admin selects 'all current students' and create an Attendance activity for the next week
• each Teacher is 'related' to the class which is 'related' to the student and we use 'permissioned relationships' to restrict each teacher to only seeing 'their' students
• attendance is recorded via a custom report which allows the 'attendance' to be edited in bulk for 'their' students (that customisation is available in our Extended Reports extension I believe)
• each Teacher can therefore access only their students and run down the list marking as Present/Absent etc
• we then use Drupal Views to build reports and do eg Monthly calculations to give the percentage attendance