Special types of mark and your MIS

For general day-to-day operation when using tier two or three, attendance marks should only be recorded directly in GO 4 Schools rather than into the MIS. There are a few exceptions to this rule:

• Planned school closures, e.g. bank holidays - If your school calendar on GO 4 Schools has a day marked as closed, then no attendance marks will be expected. However, there are occasions where the school is open for part of the day, or for particular year groups (such as staggered starts). In these circumstances, the school will need to be marked open on the calendar, and the students who are not expected to attend should receive a # mark. Due to technical restrictions, GO 4 Schools cannot write the # marks to SIMS, so you should record the marks in both SIMS and GO 4 Schools.
• Exceptional circumstances - When a school needs to record a closure due to exceptional circumstances, (Y mark), the exceptional circumstances routine in SIMS must be used, and GO 4 Schools will automatically import the Y marks from SIMS. If the Y marks are correctly entered into SIMS, there is no need to manually enter them in GO 4 Schools, as they will be picked up during the write back process.
• Breaks in student enrolment - In some cases, a student may leave the school for a period and then return. You should record this as usual in your MIS. When you make these changes, your MIS will write Z marks for the student for the period when they are not expected to be at school, and these will be automatically imported into GO 4 Schools during the next write back process.