Records and Points Administration
ADAM offers a reasonably sophisticated means to deal with the disciplinary and award records that is compatible with many schools’ requirements. The following sections will explain the different features of the system.
Events vs Points
Broadly, there are two different kinds of records that can be stored by ADAM. These are broken down into an “event” and a “point”. Distinguishing between the two is best started with some examples:
Events:
- Detention: detentions when detentions are loaded, they indicate that at some future time and date, the pupil will attend a detention.
- An award made at prize giving: awards are decided on in advance, but are awarded at some specific time and date when the awards ceremony happens.
- Colours awards: as with the example above, the colours awards are decided in advance and are made at a specific time and date - normally an end of term assembly.
Points:
- Demerits: teachers can record one or more demerits against a pupil’s name.
- Homework infringements: a teacher can log the dates that a pupil’s homework was not completed. A cumulative total is used for other disciplinary purposes.
- Service hours: Teachers can log one or more service hours towards a pupil for various activities that they have taken part in.
The key distinguishing elements are:
- Events are mostly associated with some date in the future to when they were recorded. Importantly, they can record who attended the event (i.e. served their detention or received their certificate) and who might still need to do so.
- Points either count the number of occurrences (such as homework infringements) or sum a number of points to arrive at a total.
Managing Records and Points Category Groups
Three default groups are provided: “Good”, “Neutral” and “Bad”. These groups are used only to sort the Records and Points categories and have no other meaning. Some combined primary and secondary schools choose to have groups such as “Junior Primary”, “Senior Primary” and “High School” to help separate out the categories. This also allows different consequences (see later!) for demerits in the prep school vs in the high school.
On the Administration tab, look for the Pastoral Administration heading and click on the option to Edit the Records and Points Category Groups.
On this screen, you can edit existing groups, add new ones and change the order of the groups.
Managing Records and Points Categories
This is certainly where most of the work is done when setting up Records and Points for your school.
From the Administration tab, look under the Pastoral Administration heading and click on the Edit the Records and Points categories option.
Adding a new Records and Points Category
The screen, shown above, has a number of options, explained below:
- Records and Points Category Name: This may be something like “Demerit” or “Detention”.
- Records and Points Category Group: While the group has no effect on the function of the Records and Points Category that you are adding, it does influence the order and grouping of the categories.
- Attendance Register: Choose whether the category requires an attendance register. Setting this option to “Yes” sets the category as an “Event” as contemplated above.
- Points Type: This setting has no effect if you’ve chosen the attendance register option above. However, if you are using points, ADAM can either force each event to be counted or to allow a varying number of points to be entered per record. In other words, the first option, forces each entry to count 1 point whereas the other allows for records to count a variable number of points. If this option is selected, teachers will be able to capture a number of points between 1 and 100.
- Expiry Settings: ADAM will show a running total of points and of events recorded. Setting an expiry date will allow older events not to be counted. The records are never, however, deleted - even if they have expired. Options for the expiry settings are:
- No expiry: points and events will never expire. The running total will show the total number of points earned.
- Expire after a number of hours/days: The records will only be counted if they fall within this time period. The actual time period is set in the field below (it is currently hidden in the screenshot above, next to Expire After).
- Expire after a number of calendar weeks/months/years: The records will not be counted if they fall before the first day of the week, month or year. For example, if points are set to expire after one calendar month, then if a pupil has a running total of 10 points on October 31st, their total will drop to 0 on November 1st.
- Expire at the end of a reporting period: This allows points to expire at the end of a reporting period. Schools who use multiple concurrent reporting periods should use this setting carefully since there will be unpredictable behaviour when multiple reporting periods are opening and closing at different times.
- Expire before the start of this week/month/year: This setting is identical to the calendar periods above, but have a fixed time period of 1 week, month or year.
- Expire on a specific date: Here, you can specify a date before which all points will expire.
- Publish to Parent/Pupil Portal: The options here change depending on whether there is an attendance register associated with this category or not. If there is an attendance register, an additional option appears: the category can either be shown to parents as soon as it is recorded or alternatively only once the pupil has been marked as present on the attendance register.
- Published on Supported Reporting Templates: This setting will be used by specific reporting templates to draw further information onto the reports. If this is one of the categories that should be displayed on a report, you can change this setting to “Yes”. Note that only supported templates will search for any categories that are set to display.
- Limit Notes Options: Normally, the notes field is a free text field. However, you can limit the options available and show cause a drop-down list to show by typing in the allowed options here. Each option must appear on its own line.
Click the button at the bottom to save the new Records and Points category.
Adding and Editing Records and Points
There are several ways to add records and points to a student’s profile.
From the Pupils tab, under the Records and Points Admin heading, click on the option Add records or points. Type in the student’s name and click on the Next button.
Choose the category that you wish to record against and, once more, click on the Next button.
You can now record the information necessary. Be sure to include a note explaining the reason for the record. Your name is automatically recorded against this entry. When you click on the Record Records and Points button, you will see the new record appear in the table below.
If you have permission, or if you added a record to a pupil, you will see an option to “edit” or “delete” the record in the Actions column.
Displaying a Pupil’s Records and Points
From a pupil’s profile, you can click on the Records and Points option and you will see a tabbed summary page of the different categories. Click on each category to see that pupil’s records.
Records and Points Consequences
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Records and Points Alerts
Using Records and Points Alerts, ADAM is able to send emails to staff on a regular basis to alert them to records and points that have been added to a pupil’s profile. Alerts are sent at a regular time interval each day to staff members. The exact staff members that are alerted can be configured per alert.
Timing of the Alerts
To configure the time at which ADAM sends Records and Points alerts, navigate to Administration → Site Administration → Edit Site Settings. On the Site Settings page navigate to the Cron Settings tab and scroll down to the Alerts section. Within that is a time selector for Records and Points alerts times.
Click to select a time to send the alert. It is possible to send alerts multiple times each day. Alerts will only be sent for items that were added since the last time the assessments were run.
Creating Alerts
To create a new alert, navigate to Administration → Pastoral Administration → Manage Records and Points Alerts. You will be shown a list of existing alerts, if there are any on your server.
Any existing alerts can be edited or disabled from this screen by clicking on the edit or disable links to the right of each entry.
To add a new alert, click on Click here to add a new alert at the top of the page. The following screen is shown:
The Records and Points reason is the specific category that should generate an alert. If you wanted to be notified when a demerit was awarded to a pupil, you would select “Demerit” from this list.
The Starting Threshold and Ending Threshold are the totals that a pupil must reach before the alert is triggered. If you want to alert a teacher to every incident, set your Starting Threshold to 1 and your Ending Threshold to the highest value possible (ADAM only lists numbers to 1000 - if you think pupils might get more than that, please contact the developers). If you only want staff members to be notified on the 5th occurrence, then choose “5” for both your Starting and Ending Thresholds.
If you want to be alerted to every 5th occurrence, you will have to add in additional alerts for the 10th, 15th and 20th occurrences - and more if you think a pupil will reach those levels.
The starting and ending thresholds are counted according to the Alert period. You can choose to count from the current reporting period (“Period”), the current year, month, week or a pupil’s entire career at your school (“Total”).
The last two options determine who ADAM will send the alerts to.
Choosing a staff member in the Email Staff block will cause that staff member to always be emailed. In the case of a detention, for example, this might be the head of discipline.
The second option, Email teachers of these subjects, will alert any staff member that teaches the offending pupil for one of the selected subjects. While this may include academic staff, the list of teachers would also be those of subjects like “Registration Class” or boarder house parents. In these cases, you would select “Registration Class” or “Boarding House” and the teacher who has that pupil in his or her class would be notified of the pupil’s alert.
Click on Save Changes to save the alert.