KAMAR Update - January 2025

We released an update to KAMAR that included a few key changes.

Automated Staff Reporting

We've set up a dedicated area for automated notifications for staff! This area sends daily and/or weekly emails to staff to alert them of various things.

Several existing automatic notifications from around KAMAR have been moved into this area. If you had any of these configured before the update, your settings will be automatically transferred to the new area in the update.

The existing automatic notifications that we have moved into this area are:

• Attendance - Continuous and Consecutive Absence alerts.
• Overseas Students - alerts for visa, passport and agent expiry dates, and host family police vets.
• Staff Alerts - expired police vet, first aid certificate and practicing certificate.

Use this new area to set up notifications about:

• Attendance
• New students
• Leaving students
• Student birthdays
• Recognitions
• Pastoral
• Class Efforts
• Visa, Passport and Insurance expiries for FF students
• Expiring police vets on host families
• Expiring agreement on host families
• Staff practicing certificate expiry
• Staff police vet expiry
• Staff first aid certificate expiry
• Staff review date

Staff Roles (Tutor, Dean, Management) Now Tied to Timetable Year

The tutor, dean and management roles that can be assigned to staff are now per timetable year! This means that you can work on setting up the staff who will be in these roles next year, without messing with this year.

You can roll these from year to year, just like you can with some student things (ie, tutor class, assigned tutor, dean and management).

Improvements to NZSSSC

We've improved Students > NZSSSC to make it easier to review data in preparation for making your sports census. The process has been simplified, and you can use the "Sport Groups" screen to:

• See the groups that feed into the sports census
• See groups that have issues (eg, staff with no role assigned, no category assigned, etc)

In Students > Groups, you can use the Details screen to flag a group as "NZSSSC" without making it sport, so you can include things like chess, dance and e-sports.

Changes to Attendance

There are two key changes in this area:

Attendance Codes
The Ministry of Education has updated the set of codes used for attendance. This update gives you the new set. We won't be changing old attendance data, so you can still go back and see historic attendance data, but new attendance will only use the new codes.

All the things that use attendance codes have been updated to use the new codes (eg, student lists, advanced student search, attendance statistics, attendance entry, etc).

Daily Attendance Reporting to MOE
This update gives you the facility to report your daily attendance to the Ministry of Education.

One More Thing...
Attendance code X (Exam Leave) officially counts as a justified absence. Many schools have argued for years that this is unfair, as it lowers attendance rates. The Ministry of Education ignores attendance code X in their attendance calculations, so we have given you the option to do the same! In Setup > Attendance > Codes, you can decide whether attendance code X is included in the half day attendance rates shown on screen in KAMAR (defaults to 'no, doesn't count'). Toggling this setting has no flow-on effects, and won't have any impact on any attendance reporting, it's purely used in the on-screen attendance rates we show, so the attendance rates the Ministry reports to you and the attendance rates KAMAR tells you will match.

Other Changes

• 2024 National Stats included.
• Compliance changes for 2025 roll returns.
• Minor tweaks and bug fixes.

For full details of the changes included in this update, please refer to the Release Notes.