30% rise in student attendance

What were we working with?

London is home to over 400,000 students, 40% of whom are international. To support student success and wellbeing, as well as the requirement to report to authorities on behalf of students on a visa, higher education institutes have a big responsibility in assuring attendance of their students.

London South Bank University (LSBU) recognised the importance of having an easy way to track attendance and engagement and were looking for a system to support the student journey throughout their stay at university. This system needed to allow faculty to monitor student engagement with the course, flag up any drop off in attendance from a pastoral care point of view and provide data on the attendance of international students for relevant authorities.

How did we go about it?

4OC was engaged by LSBU to deliver a technical solution that would collect and store data from a wide range of student activity. This system needed to be able to feed into LSBU’s existing Salesforce reporting solution where users could visualise activity for easier, informed decision making. 

We led the technical design, development, integration, and internal upskilling for the ‘Attendance and Engagement’ solution. In the end, following a very active engagement with many stakeholders, we co-developed with LSBU a solution that uses several data points to calculate an engagement score per student, which is monitored by the university. The team designed the data structures and relationships between the data and implemented a workflow that extracts and transforms the data. This allowed for the new solution to interoperate with the various existing systems that were already in use at the university.

Bringing the systems together into a single point of access, supported by numerous workflows, enables the production of an integrated attendance score which is monitored by staff. The solution also provides prompted intervention in the event of a student’s score falling below a defined number.

How’s it going?

We have continued to work with LSBU and following the roll out, we carried out some minor refinements to ensure the tool did exactly what the university needed. So far, the new solution has delivered some amazing benefits:

• Student attendance has gone from 70% to almost 100%!
• Early flagging of attendance issues
• Prompted interventions via email when a student’s score falls below a defined threshold
• Enhanced oversight through visualised data sets in the existing CRM, supporting better decision-making
• Assured student wellbeing with timely interventions and support

Interested in improving your attendance levels?

If you’re interested in how a similar attendance and engagement tracking system would help increase attendance levels and support the wellbeing of your students, reach out to us at hello@the4oc.com. We’d be happy to talk through what this solution might look like for you.