Resources to support student attendance and engagement

The ability to identify low student attendance and engagement is key to enabling student success, as well as closing awarding and retention gaps.  

Pre-pandemic, our Attendance Management and Engagement Project Team had plans to implement a swipe card-based attendance monitoring system across campus. COVID-19 halted these plans, as we moved to deliver teaching and learning in a new way. 

The project team instead turned its attention to creating a suite of tools that bring together data on students’ academic engagement across their programme.  

Academic and professional services colleagues now have access to a range of data sets to review attendance and engagement and to trigger direction to additional support where appropriate. Available for both individuals or groups of students, the key data sets include information on enrolment, module selection, attendance at in-person and online timetabled taught sessions, use of the virtual learning environment and submission of coursework. Find out more about the tools and the Attendance Management and Engagement policy. 

A new Attendance and Engagement information webpage on Essentials sets out guidance and support for students as well as their own responsibilities regarding attendance and engagement.  

The next phase of the project – to enable automated collection of attendance data – will further improve how we can support our students. In the meantime, these new tools together with the Student Progress Dashboard now provide unprecedented access to key in-year data on students’ academic engagement and progress.  These insights allow colleagues to develop and embed a systematic approach to pro-actively reach out to those students whose overall pattern of academic engagement is of concern.  

We will update colleagues when the next phase of the project begins.