Today's absence is known today: attendance from the lesson to the parent's phone
With a paper register an absence is known a week later. In Nippur the teacher takes the register from their phone and the parent sees it the same minute.
By The Nippur team Published Reading time: 3 minutes
In most schools an absence passes through three stations: the teacher ticks the lesson register, the register reaches the office at the end of the day or the week, and the secretary calls the absent students’ parents when she has time. A parent who thinks their child is at school learns days later that they were not.
From the lesson to the phone in a minute
In Nippur the teacher opens the section’s list on their phone, marks attendance, and sees before saving how many parents will be notified. When they save, today’s absence becomes a fact the parent sees on their home screen in the same minute.
And if attendance is taken per lesson, which lesson represents the day for the family? Our current decision: the first one. A student absent in the first lesson and present in the third arrived late, and that is the register most schools already keep on paper. It is one of the decisions we put to every school before going live, because a school that genuinely tracks six lessons may want something else.
A day with a colour and a word
On the parent’s phone the month appears day by day. Every day has a colour, and always a word with it: present, excused, unexcused, late, holiday. Colour alone is not enough, not for someone who cannot distinguish colours and not for someone reading the screen in the sun.
Weekend days never appear as absences. The weekend is defined once for the whole system, so the attendance record cannot disagree with the calendar about it.
An absence request has a path
A parent who knows their child will be absent tomorrow reports it from the app: they pick the day and the reason, attach what is needed, and then follow the request step by step: submitted, under review, decided. No request is sent into a void.
The decision belongs to the class teacher or the office. If the request is refused, the parent reads the reason verbatim, because the database itself refuses to store a rejection without a written reason. That is not a rule in an interface that can be worked around; it is a constraint on the table that nobody can bypass.
An early pickup is never nameless
A request to collect the child before the end of the day is not accepted without the name of the person collecting, and it is not approved if that person’s authorisation has expired, even if it was approved before. Months sometimes pass between filing a request and deciding it, and the system re-checks the authorisation at the moment of the decision, not the moment of the request.
Editing the record leaves a trace
Did the teacher mark an absent student present by mistake? They can correct it within a window the school sets (the default example is twenty-four hours), but the correction needs a reason, and who corrected it, when, and the value before and after are all recorded. The new value does not erase the old one; it is added to it.
What we ask the school
- Which lesson represents the day for the family.
- The attendance edit window, and how many days back a missed register may still be taken.
- Who decides absence requests: the class teacher, the office, or both.
The system accepts any answer. What it does not accept is these questions staying without a written one.