Planned Not yet started — this page describes the intended design and build plan.
Overview
A daily attendance record per class: present, absent, or late, taken once a day by the class teacher, and
visible to each student's own linked guardians as part of their child's record. It's a simple daily
roster, not a period-by-period tracker — Notipa has no timetable concept, and this feature doesn't
introduce one.
Once this exists, it feeds directly into the attendance summary line planned for
report cards, so a term's attendance total is calculated automatically
rather than re-entered by hand.
How it will work
Daily roster. A teacher opens their class each school day and marks each student present, absent, or late in one pass — a fast checklist, not a form per student.
Closed-day awareness. The roster only needs to be taken on days the school is actually open, using the school calendar once it exists to skip holidays automatically.
Guardian visibility. A guardian can see their own child's attendance history — a simple calendar or list view — but never the rest of the class's records.
Editable within a window. A teacher can correct a same-day or recent entry (e.g. a student arrived late and was marked absent by mistake), with older entries requiring an admin to amend, to keep the record trustworthy.
Development plan
1Data model
New AttendanceRecord model: FK to Student, FK to class, date, status (present/absent/late), recorded-by (teacher), last-edited timestamp.
Unique constraint on (student, date) so a day can't accidentally get two conflicting entries.
2Teacher UI — daily roster
A one-screen daily roster for the teacher's class, defaulting every student to present, with quick taps/clicks to mark absent or late.
A visible "not yet taken today" indicator so a teacher isn't relying on memory to know if they've done it.
Edit window logic: same-day edits are unrestricted; edits beyond a configurable window require admin permission.
3Guardian & admin views
Per-student attendance history view for guardians, scoped strictly to their own linked student(s).
Admin-level class or school attendance overview for the cases where an admin needs the bigger picture (e.g. flagging a pattern of absences).
4Report card integration & testing
Auto-calculated attendance summary line pulled into the report card feature once both exist.
Permission tests confirming a guardian never sees another student's attendance, even indirectly through a class-level view.
Migration is additive — no attendance data exists until a school's teachers start taking it, so nothing changes for schools not using the feature.
Technical considerations
No period-by-period or subject-level attendance — one status per student per day, matching how most primary/secondary schools outside a timetable-heavy system actually take attendance.
Edit-window logic protects the historical record from casual after-the-fact changes while still allowing same-day corrections.
Designed to feed report cards without requiring a guardian or teacher to manually total anything.