After a first page that should consist of the most important ‘headline‘ measures for a school, the next page in any SIMS + Power BI report is probably attendance. Partly, this is because of it’s importance to schools and partly because it is one of the few areas that almost all schools use their SIMS system for and is therefore almost always well populated with good quality, analysable data. As part of the School Analytics SIMS dashboards I’ve been working on this attendance dashboard:
This page makes extensive use of conditional formatting. As you can see from the screenshot, this school isn’t doing very well. The red colours are triggered when the percentage attendance figure falls below 95%, with yellow for percentage attendance rates between 95% and 96%, green for rates above 96%. Finally, blue is reserved for groups with 100% attendance.
The slicers on the left hand side of the screen provide an easy way for users to investigate the impact of various groups on the overall percentage attendance.
For example, you can use the slicers to selectively include or exclude year groups from the analysis as many schools choose to exclude nursery children from the overall attendance percentages.
Likewise, in this particular school, it might be interesting to exclude year group 2 pupils from the analysis, as there is clearly a problem with this group!
Persistent absentees are created using a Power BI calculated column, (although SIMS does include its own persistent absentee calculation). By calculating if a pupil is a persistent absentee is Power BI we can accommodate schools that want to use a different threshold (SIMS uses 90% attendance as the threshold, below which a pupil is counted as a persistent absentee).
Finally, I’ve added a total minutes late by year group graph, to identify year groups where lateness is a problem. For primary schools with more than one registration group in each year group we can also ‘drill down’ into the year groups to individual classes.
Comments