Kurt Meyer: Thank you, everyone, for joining today. I'm here with Ronan, and it's Ronan's birthday today, so happy birthday, Ronan. Thanks for jumping on.
Ronan Quirke: Thanks, Kurt.
Kurt Meyer: In the middle of getting some birthday cake?
Ronan Quirke: Not this early, no. Not this early in New Zealand. But, uh, what better birthday gift than some questions from the audience? So don't be shy, everybody. I won't force you to ask questions, but it's great to be here and I'm looking forward to getting some questions as Kurt goes through the presentation.
Kurt Meyer: Yes, we can get started. Thank you again, everyone, for joining. I really appreciate you taking the time to learn a bit more about Orah and today's topic. I'm Kurt, and I run the product team at Orah. Ronan also runs the product team with me, and we've been working on the attendance product for a couple of years now, collaborating with several schools.
Today, we want to discuss attendance rates and how Orah can help you improve this key metric. I'll share my screen so we can get started. As Ronan mentioned, feel free to pop any questions into the Q&A; we'd love to respond to them.
Okay, so just a little bit about Orah to start off with. We've been around since 2015, working with over 300 of the top independent schools worldwide. Orah is really about helping schools meet and exceed their duty of care. What we mean by duty of care is being able to account for students both physically and mentally, helping schools provide a secure and supportive environment.
For those of you who don't know, Orah started as a system to help boarding schools look after their students, so this idea of duty of care was the number one thing boarding schools had to manage. It's also essential for every school, actually—making sure that students are accounted for physically and mentally.
We've been expanding our scope across all schools, not just boarding schools, but that's where the duty of care origin comes from. We define three pillars of duty of care: attendance (knowing where your students are), wellbeing (knowing how they are), and communication (how you communicate with those students). We believe that if you can do these three things really well and answer these questions to a high standard, you're providing industry-leading duty of care. Today, we want to focus on the attendance piece.
Just a quick mention as well: Orah integrates seamlessly with your SIS (Student Information System). We're not here to replace your SIS; we sit on top of it and integrate deeply. We have partnerships with most of the main systems out there.
So, the topic for today is how to improve your attendance rate with Orah in 30 days.
First of all, what is the attendance rate? Generally, the attendance rate is a measure of student presence in school that reflects engagement and helps identify students who may need additional support to succeed academically. Attendance rate can be calculated either by days or classes, which would be the number of days or classes attended divided by the number of days or classes expected. Typically, 90 percent is considered the minimum acceptable attendance rate before students are viewed as being at risk. There are many different definitions and calculations depending on which region or country you're in, but this is the broad definition we align with.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, and feel free to share if you have a different definition or calculate things differently. We'd love to hear that, so just pop that in as a question. We can compare notes across the different schools that are online here.
Kurt Meyer: Absolutely. So, why should you track your attendance rate, and why does it matter? There are a few reasons we think this makes sense. First, attendance is an indicator of student mental health. A study showed that students with mental health issues, such as anxiety, had about twice the number of absences compared to students without mental health issues.
Attendance is also correlated with educational success. Students who attend school regularly are 1.7 times more likely to achieve proficiency in core subjects like math and reading compared to students with irregular attendance. Moreover, if a student is not at school, then families aren't receiving the value for their investment. Based on some averages in Australia, if you have a 90 percent attendance rate—meaning 10 percent of the time students aren't coming to school—that can translate to around 1.3 million dollars of unused school fees per year. It's a tangible amount, and you want to ensure that parents are receiving the benefit of sending their child to independent schools, which they can't if the student is not actually attending.
The idea of attendance rate, mental health, and academic achievement are all interrelated. It's hard to say which is causality versus correlation, but there is a "doom loop" that can happen. If a student starts missing class, whether due to mental health reasons or otherwise, that can lead to falling behind in class, which impacts their academic achievement. This, in turn, heightens their anxiety and stress, feeding into more mental health issues, which then causes them to avoid class further, impacting their attendance rate. All of these factors are correlated, and it's important to ensure that students don't fall into this doom loop. Identifying it early and taking proactive action is crucial.
Mental health can be monitored with our wellness module, but it can sometimes be hidden. Academic achievement is usually a lagging indicator—something that becomes apparent after the fact when you see whether a student has achieved a good grade or not. Attendance, on the other hand, is clear-cut. You can measure attendance regularly and accurately, giving you leading indicators as to whether or not this situation is occurring. That's why we think attendance rate is an important metric; it fits into the broader picture of engagement and student wellbeing.
Here are a few strategies we believe can help schools identify and disrupt absenteeism. First, socializing your attendance data—getting it in front of the people who can take action upon it and who are there to support students. Second, identifying those early signs of absenteeism before that doom loop starts to take hold. And finally, when absenteeism is identified, engaging quickly and proactively to support the student and get them back on track. Once you've done that, continue monitoring the student and supporting them to ensure that any underlying causes are addressed.
That's why attendance rate is important and why we've built functionality within Orah to help schools achieve these strategies. Now, we'll go into the product and discuss how Orah has created a platform to address some of these issues.
I'm going to jump into our demo account now. This is our attendance insights dashboard, and it plugs directly into your SIS. We currently integrate with Blackbaud and Veracross, and we're working with other integration partners. Once you've enabled the integration, we sync all of your attendance data and visualize it on this dashboard. You can get up and running with this dashboard within a few hours after enabling the integration. We've designed it in collaboration with many schools to figure out which information is most valuable.
You can set up this dashboard, apply filters for different houses, student cohorts, or classes, such as by grade level, school level, or subject. You can create different dashboards and save them for different staff members to have an overview of the students they are responsible for. Going back to the idea of socializing your data, you can customize these dashboards for different viewers so they know how their own students are tracking.
You can also filter the data by different time ranges. At the top, we've got the attendance rate over different time periods and how it's trending over a given time frame. This gives you an overall high-level indication of where your attendance rate is at, which is a good starting point. You can also set a target, so you can see how you're tracking relative to a benchmark. As we go down, we have reports that help surface students who might be experiencing attendance issues. For example, you can see hotspots of poor attendance by class or grade/year level.
On the right, you can see which students have the most unexcused absences. This will show you the top 10 students, and you can see how many classes they've missed, as well as the number of days they've been absent. We define a day as when a student has been unexcused for all classes within that day. You can compare the number of classes versus days to get a sense of the pattern. Straight away, you can identify which students might need attention. For instance, you can see that Colin has had an unapproved absence 60 times. This is a demo account, so these numbers might be higher than what you'd expect in real life. You can drill down into the details, export the data if needed, and use it for conversations with the student and their parents.
We can also show the students who are most tardy or late. Chronic tardiness can be an indication of absenteeism or mental health issues, so we highlight that as well. You can also track excused absences to keep tabs on students who are regularly excused from school by their parents.
At the bottom, you can see all these data points on a per-student level and apply different filters to surface students who meet certain criteria. For example, if you wanted to see students with more than three absent classes and more than one tardy, you can easily filter for that. You can also filter by attendance rate, bringing up a list of students with an attendance rate below 90 percent. This makes it easy to identify students who might need the most attention, and you can bring up their specific records, such as a particular class they are struggling with.
Ronan Quirke: So... I'm just going to jump in here, Kurt. For those of you wondering about how we categorize things like excused or tardy, these are categorizations of your attendance data and the coding within your SIS itself. We group and categorize that data here, so if you're wondering how that works, that's how we do it. This is all based on your own attendance data, and we're just summarizing it in a different way than you might have seen before. But it's still your underlying attendance data that you use when taking roll or class attendance in your existing systems.
Kurt Meyer: Exactly. Just to illustrate that, if I jump over to the dashboard settings here, you can see the data source from which the dashboard is generated. In this account, we're connected to a Blackboard instance, so all the data I showed you is pulled from Blackboard. If you adopted Orah for full attendance tracking, you could switch the data source to Orah instead of the SIS. But typically, when schools get started, they plug it into their SIS, generate the dashboard, and that gives them a solid starting point. You can also see that the last sync ran 18 minutes ago, so you'll be aware of how up-to-date the data is when you're looking at it.
So, just to recap, this dashboard is designed to socialize your attendance information, making it front and center and driving the conversation around attendance and attendance rates throughout your school. It helps you identify the students who might need proactive support around attendance, mental health, or any other factors contributing to attendance behavior.
The next thing I want to cover is proactive engagement—actually taking that initial step to disrupt a pattern early. You can do this by setting up automated alerts on the dashboard. Using the data we sync into this dashboard, you can set up alerts with different criteria. For example, we have an alert triggered because a student, Catherine, had unexcused absences three times in a row within the last month. The alert shows which people were notified and which specific classes were related to the criteria.
When creating your own alerts, there's a lot of customization available to tailor these alerts to different thresholds and policies that make sense for your school. These alerts can also be based on different student groups. I'll walk you through how to set up an alert.
Let's say this particular alert is only for grade 12 students. You can set up tags for seniors, juniors, upper school, middle school, etc. In this case, we'll apply the alert to grade 12 and look at unexcused absences and tardies. You can choose whether to listen for any course or the same course. The "same course" option is interesting because it shows if there might be a pattern associated with a specific course that the student is avoiding. You might decide to have one alert for each category, but for now, we'll choose "any course" and set the frequency to four times within the last month, for example.
Once you've set the criteria, you can decide who to alert and by what channel. You can specify specific staff members like the Dean of Students or the Attendance Manager, or assign staff members connected to the student through courses. You can also send alerts to staff members based on user roles, such as advisors, homeroom teachers, or coaches.
Alerts can also be sent to contacts, and you can filter those contacts based on relationships pulled from your SIS. If it's just the parents or guardians who should receive the alert, you can filter it accordingly and send it via email or SMS. Getting parents involved is a good strategy to socialize the behavior around attendance and surface important conversations. The threshold before involving parents can be customized based on policy or legal requirements.
Finally, you can send the alert directly to students as a heads-up or to make them aware that their attendance is being monitored. You can customize the wording sent to the student, perhaps using a supportive tone, such as "Hey, how's it going? We noticed you've missed these classes. Please reach out to a support person if you need assistance." A friendly message to students can be quite effective.
This automated alert system is an effective tool for helping schools take proactive steps early on. It's important to be thoughtful in setting the criteria, determining who should receive the alerts, and planning the follow-up process.
Lastly, I want to highlight another feature, which isn't part of our attendance module but is part of our wellness module. It's a feature that schools can use to keep track of behavioral notes around students and collaborate with other staff members. Let's say you've identified a student who needs extra support due to their attendance rate. Within our behavior module, you can create a behavioral note for that student. For example, you can create a note for Alexander, categorize it as an attendance issue, leave a note, add action points, or include any additional information. You can also notify staff members connected to the student automatically, and choose to notify students and contacts if needed.
Behavioral notes can also be saved to a watch list, so you'd have a list of students flagged for additional support. After saving the note, you can start a dialogue with other staff members within the behavioral note itself. You can tag other teachers or staff, discuss check-ins, and track improvements. Whoever is overseeing the student can use this record to ensure that the student is being supported and that there's follow-through after an issue has been identified.
This behavior module is comprehensive and probably deserves its own webinar. Still, we believe that combining the wellness and student support aspects with attendance will yield the best results in understanding how students are doing, improving your attendance rate, and enhancing overall duty of care.
Ronan Quirke: Thanks, Kurt. We've got a couple of questions that we'd like to run through now. The first one: Do we need to use Orah for attendance to use the dashboard? The answer to that is no, you don't. In fact, the Attendance Insights dashboard is a great place to start your attendance journey because you can simply use an integration to connect things together. The most time-consuming part is the integration itself, which involves pulling in the data. You don't have to change anything about how you take attendance in your existing systems, and the Attendance Insights page will just load up.
Another related question: Can class teachers access the attendance reports as well? Yes, any staff member can be given an Orah login and access to the Attendance Insights page. We recommend starting with your core group of heads of faculty, attendance managers, and others to review the data. Quite often, you'll see anomalies like attendance not being taken in certain patches, and that may be something you need to correct before getting a lot of value out of the insights. These are things you might need to address once you get up and running. Once you're happy with how Attendance Insights is populating, you can extend access to other staff members as well.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. To add to that, you can filter the dashboard by different classes as well. A good setup might be having a dashboard that's pre-filtered to each year level or subject, giving staff members a starting point. For instance, deans could have an overview of all the students within their house or year level, while teachers or faculty could filter further down to their own students. As Ronan said, this might be a reflective exercise that they do periodically, but the main proactive step will come from the alerts, where the insight comes to them, and they can start digging in from there.
Ronan Quirke: Perfect, thank you. Last call for a few more questions.
Kurt Meyer: I'll just mention how you can get started. Feel free to reach out to us, and we'll roll out the red carpet to get you set up. Just fill out the demo form or email me directly at kurt@orah.com. I'd be more than happy to help you get started with this dashboard. Currently, it works out of the box with Veracross and Blackbaud. We are also developing integrations with Synergetic and ISAMS, and we're working through those. If you use another system and want us to integrate with it, feel free to reach out, and we'll be happy to explore that with you.
But if you're using either Veracross or Blackbaud, it's as simple as enabling the integration. You get the dashboard, the alerts, and a solid starting point to address the issues we've covered today.
Ronan Quirke: Perfect.
Kurt Meyer: Any other questions? Oh, I just got a comment from the marketing team that the signup page is on the products page.
Ronan Quirke: Yes, that's right. I think it's halfway down.
Kurt Meyer: Try for free. Oh, here we go—try for free. So if you go to the products page, select attendance, and scroll down, there's a "Try for Free" button there. You can create your own account to get started from there.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Thank you, everybody, for your time today and your questions. If you have anything else you want to ask, just feel free to drop us a line, and we'll be more than happy to help.
Kurt Meyer: Thanks, everyone.
