The biometric terminal uses fingerprint technology, which has been shown to be reliable, whilst not raising any ‘human rights’ issues - in this regard a unique number is derived from the finger image and it is this alone that is stored in the database. It is not possible to ‘reverse engineer’ the number into any form of finger pattern or fingerprint.
Many institutions use a student proximity card as the student’s ID card as this provides added security, whilst helping make registration quick and easy.
Classroom monitoring
Monitoring the time students spend in individual classrooms can be achieved using Classroom Registration Readers.
Each classroom would have two readers, one for ‘in’ and one for ‘out’. When the student enters or leaves a classroom they simply pass their Proximity / ID Card in front of the appropriate reader.
By electronically recording the exact times that a student attended lectures you can :
> eliminate the need for a tutor to take a manual register and
> remove the need to manually update attendance spreadsheets
A student’s on-site times are recorded, together with the time spent in each lecture room. Only the time spent in lecture rooms counts towards attendance for UKBA purposes.
This additional step in monitoring student attendance ensures records prove a students movement throughout the day rather than simply recording their attendance at the start of a day.
Health and safety and duty of care
An electronic student attendance system helps you discharge your duty of care for the Health, Safety and Welfare of your students.
In addition to reports covering absence and sickness the system provides you with an up-to-date fire list of all students on site.
Option to include academic staff
As the software that is provided with a monitoring system allows you to track all attended time you have the option to include all staff and non tier 4 students. This provides the added benefit of an early warning when staff have not arrived, so that cover can be put in place, and secondly, ensures that everyone on-site is included on the fire list.
If classroom monitoring is in place you will be able to meet the latest requirement to show the attendance of qualified staff in lecture rooms.
Administrators can be authorised to view just students and not staff if this is deemed necessary.
Reporting
An attendance recording system should provide a comprehensive set of reports to ensure you are kept fully informed of student attendance behaviour, such as;
> less than required percentage attendance (e.g. 80%, 85%)
> failing to attend for the required hours (e.g. 15 hrs per week)
> absent for a specified number of days (e.g. 10 consecutive; 10 days within a period)
> persistent late arrival
> daily absence
Reports can be run manually or scheduled to be emailed to named persons. For example, if classroom monitoring is not being used a report could be automatically produced every morning at say 9:30 showing all students who had arrived on-site. The tutor could then use this in checking class registration. All reports can be output in Word, PDF or Excel formats.
Agent monitoring
The UKBA now requires agents to be monitored. This means that institutions now have the additional burden of maintaining accurate records of both sponsored students and agents.
A good student attendance monitoring system should record against each student the agent who placed them. This would enable you to monitor, and subsequently report on the performance of agents in respect of items such as non-registration, student absence rates and uncompleted courses.
Conclusion
The UKBA clamp down on bogus institutions and students is a positive step forward in reducing immigration however for genuine educational establishments the new guidelines and subsequent inspections have meant a step increase in administration.
To maintain a quality rating or highly trusted status each institution now requires a system that will effectively record attendance, flag up non-attendance and provide reports at the touch of a button. Manual registers are a thing of the past and many UKBA inspectors will not accept these as a positive record of student attendance.
Electronically recording attendance drastically reduces administration, provides a central database of all student data and helps institutions combat the ever growing demand on them from the UKBA.
Contact us on 0800 288 8632 to arrange a free software demonstration