Every school takes a register. Most take it in a book, and the book is accurate on the day and useless a month later, when a parent asks how many days their child missed in February and somebody has to count ticks. This post is about what changes when the register moves to Clarvyn, and it includes one rule a head must understand before the first day.
For the teacher
The register lives in the Clarvyn teacher app. A teacher opens My classes, chooses a class, and sees every enrolled child with two buttons beside each name: a tick for present and a cross for absent. Until a child is marked, the row says Not marked. That is the whole job, and it takes about as long as calling the names.
The phone does not need to be online. A mark is saved on the handset first, and the app sends it to the school when it has a connection. The Sync tab says where things stand: marks waiting to sync, or all marks synced. If a mark could not even be saved on the phone, the teacher is told at once, so nobody walks away believing a child was recorded when they were not.
A teacher marks only the classes they take. The app shows a teacher their own classes, and the server refuses a mark for a class that is not the teacher's, one child at a time, so one wrong row never loses the rest of the day's marks.
The register is never erased. A correction is a new mark on top of the old one, and the newest wins. If a mark arrives late from a phone that was offline and it disagrees with a newer mark already recorded, the school is asked to decide rather than either one silently winning. The head or the proprietor sees those conflicts and accepts or rejects them.
The rule: unmarked means absent, once the day is over
This is the part to read twice.
Each school has a cut-off time. Until that hour, a child nobody has marked is shown as not yet marked, which is honest: the day is still going. After the cut-off, and for every day already past, a child with no mark is concluded absent. Overnight, Clarvyn writes that down as an absence for each child who ended the day unmarked, recorded as made by nobody, because nobody made it: the day ended. The default cut-off is two o'clock in the afternoon, and a school can set its own.
The consequence is simple and uncomfortable. If a teacher does not take the register, every child in that class is recorded absent for the day. Not blank. Absent. A parent looking at the app the next morning sees a red day for a child who was in school. That is not a bug. It is the rule that makes the register mean something, because a register that treats "nobody looked" as "everybody was here" is a register that never records a missing child.
So the instruction to staff is not "use the app". It is "take the register every day, before the cut-off". A teacher's mark always wins over the rule, and a later mark always wins over an earlier one, so a register taken late is still a register taken. On a day the school is closed, the rule writes nothing: nobody was expected, so nobody was absent.
Where a school scans children in at the gate, a morning drop-off scan is the first mark of the day and counts as present, so a child the gate saw is never concluded absent because a teacher was slow.
For the office
The office stops counting ticks. The school console shows a Class register for any day, and it can mark a child present, absent, late or excused, where the teacher app offers only present and absent. The dashboard shows attendance for the day across every class, and it says plainly when no register has been taken rather than showing a zero. Attendance on an issued report card comes from the same record.
The office also inherits the rule above. A class with every child absent on a Tuesday is a class whose register was not taken, and the office is the place that notices.
For the parent
A parent sees the child's attendance in the parent app: a grid of the last four school weeks, each day coloured present, late or absent, and the percentage of recorded days present on the child's card. A day nobody marked stays blank in the grid until the day ends. After that it is an absence, for the reason above.
That is what a parent gains from a digital register: not a prettier book, but a record they can read the same evening, and a school that has agreed to be held to it.