New school to open in Chester

A new special educational needs and disability (SEND) school will open in Chester in September.

Abbey School is a grade-II listed building located in Abbey Square. It will be staffed by people from multiple disciplines, and will provide care and education for pupils with a diagnosis of autism and/or severe learning difficulties. It will offer up to 75 places.

The new school will invest over £1m in research, development, evaluation, and training.

Principal Dr Katy Lee said: “Our highly-trained trans-disciplinary team is our most valuable resource in ensuring that pupils reach their best possible outcomes.

“Supporting our pupils, their families and our community, we are working hard to deliver an agenda that is socially significant and relevant and we’re delighted to be opening out these hugely rewarding career opportunities.”

Our Integration module enables schools and other organisations in the educational sector to link the Time and Attendance Clocking and Access Control equipment with the School Information Management System (SIMS).

The software plugin allows students’ and staff’s attendance records to be imported into our centralised system, along with the details of their assigned proximity smart cards. Staff and students can then gain, or be denied, access to areas controlled by the access controllers, based upon their access permissions.

Details of past and current students can now be exported from SIMS into our system. An automatic facility imports students’ forename, surname, gender and start date.  Students are identified by their UPN and grouped by their year and registration group. Staff details are also imported into our system.

Once attendance information is gathered from SIMS, configuration rules dictate how these attendance marks are treated. For example, attendance marks could replace existing clockings on our system, or be added as new entries.  Different rules can be applied to every day of the week.

If a school already have a card-based access control or time and attendance system, our card link facility ensures the records can be carried over and the card integrated.

One of the many advantages of our integrated system is that the list of current clockings can be configured to print automatically as a fire roll call/register when the fire alarm sounds.

This is quick and effective, and much more reliable than other manual methods such as headcounts or reading from a class register.

Please get in touch for more information.