Free Attendance Management for Boarding Schools

Day-school attendance answers one question per day: was the student in school? Boarding attendance answers it three to four times a day across academic and residential life — lessons, meals, prep, curfew. The system also has to handle exeat, weekend leave, fixtures, and trips so 'absent from house' does not mean 'missing.' OpenEduCat models each roll separately and reconciles them against the leave register.

Configure as many as your house policy requires. Most UK and international boarding schools run three to four mandatory rolls — typically a morning house check, a midday or lunch roll, an evening prep sign-in, and a curfew or in-house check before lights-out. Each roll has its own window, owner, and escalation path.

Yes. Exeat requests, weekend leave, day visits, away matches, and medical appointments are managed inside the same system. Approved leave automatically suppresses 'absent' flags for the duration, and the expected return time becomes the trigger for the next roll. If a student does not check back in on time, the duty houseparent is alerted before the next scheduled roll.

OpenEduCat is designed to evidence the supervision and accounting-for-boarders standards in the UK Department for Education's National Minimum Standards for Boarding Schools, the ISI Commentary on the Regulatory Requirements for boarding, and CIS expectations for residential life. Every roll is timestamped and signed, edits are versioned with reason codes, and the inspection-ready export bundles roll history, exeat records, and missing-child incident logs by date range.

Parents receive same-day push or email notifications for academic absences as soon as the registration window closes, and for missed registered boarding rolls once the duty staff escalation has run. Internal safeguarding investigations are not surfaced to parents until the head of boarding decides — the parent feed is for routine attendance, not live incident management.

Weekend schedules can swap the academic rolls for a leisure timetable while keeping meal and curfew rolls active. Boarders signed out on full exeat or half-term leave drop off the on-campus roll automatically and reappear on the day of expected return. Staff can run a one-tap 'who is on site this weekend' report at any time, which is the question most duty teams actually need to answer on a Saturday night.