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ADAM newsletter: May 2026

Newsletter ·

Covering changes from 10 April 2026 to 8 May 2026.

It's been a busy month for the ADAM team. We've added a major new safeguarding tool to the Roll Call module, made it much easier for schools to keep parent contact details up to date, and rolled out passkey sign-in as a standard option for staff, parents and pupils.

Headline: Roll-Call Absence Alerts

ADAM can now send an instant notification to nominated staff the moment a pupil is marked absent from a roll call. Notifications arrive both as an email and as a flag on the recipient's staff dashboard, so the people who need to know — a form-class teacher, a head of grade, a deputy — can react before the day gets away from them.

The feature is fully configurable from a new Absence Alert Configuration screen. Schools choose which absence reasons should trigger an alert (the "don't know where they are" reasons, typically), and for each kind of roll call — Timetable, Schedule, Ad-hoc or Free — they decide who is notified. Recipients can be picked by role (the marker, the form-class teacher, and so on) or listed by name. Individual roll-call series can override the default for their type, or switch alerts off entirely if the noise isn't useful.

A short delay sits between the mark and the alert, so a quick correction — a teacher marking a pupil absent and then immediately changing it to present — won't send a false alarm. Only marks made by a person trigger an alert; the absences ADAM applies automatically when a roll call opens stay silent.

To turn it on, give the new Administer roll-call absence alert configuration privilege to the staff who should manage it, flag the relevant absence reasons, and walk through the configuration screen. A full user guide is available in the documentation set.

Five Smaller Improvements

1. A new way to keep family details up to date

Asking parents to keep their contact details current has always been a challenge, and the old emailed "magic link" approach has been let down by patchy email delivery at some schools. We've rebuilt the flow.

Schools can now interrupt a parent's portal login until they've completed an outstanding update — much like the existing Online Agreements interrupt that pauses access until the parent has acknowledged a document. Updates can be requested in three ways: manually by school staff from the Families admin page; automatically on a schedule you set (for example, "every twelve months"); or by the parent themselves from inside the portal.

Once a parent has submitted their changes, an in-portal banner tells them their update is awaiting review, and a fresh banner lets them know once school staff have approved it. Each detail-update profile now has settings for which families it applies to, whether it is the default, and how often it should be re-requested.

2. Passkey sign-in is now a standard option

Passkeys — the phishing-resistant, password-free way to sign in using a fingerprint, face, PIN or security key — are now a standard sign-in method across ADAM. Staff, parents and pupils can all enrol one.

To help people actually take the leap, dashboard prompts have been added to the staff dashboard and to the parent and pupil portals encouraging anyone who hasn't yet enrolled a passkey to set one up. Both the prompts and the passkey management page now link straight to the help documentation, so a parent who has never heard of a passkey has somewhere to go to learn what one is.

3. Off-sport records can now drive roll-call attendance

When a pupil is placed off sport for a medical reason, the staff member recording it can now decide, per record, whether the pupil should be marked absent from roll calls during that period. The off-sport edit form now has an "Absent" option on each entry. The setting on the off-sport type is still there, but it now acts as a sensible default for new records rather than an override — so if you decide one particular pupil's stomach bug means they go home, but another pupil's sprained ankle means they sit out games but stay at school, ADAM follows the decision you actually made.

4. Plan free-attendance roll calls in advance — and share series with colleagues

Free-attendance roll calls — used for clubs, trips, drop-in sessions and the like — can now be prepared ahead of time. The staff Roll Call list shows an Upcoming section listing pending free-attendance roll calls, and lets you stage the pupil list before the session starts. You can seed the list from a class or copy it from a sibling roll call earlier in the same series, and you can keep adding or removing pupils right up until the roll call opens.

Roll Call Series have also gained a collaborators model. The staff member who creates a series is added as the first member, and a new collaborators page lets them invite others. Permissions on a series — including who is allowed to save free-attendance against it — are now driven entirely by who is on the collaborator list.

5. Records & Points log report

A new Records and Points log report has been added under the discipline module for heads of grade, deputies and pastoral leads who need to audit discipline activity at scale.

Pick a category and a date range, and the report shows a sortable, filterable table of the underlying activity — who issued what, against which pupil, when — and offers an Excel export of the same data. Access is controlled by a new discipline log audit privilege, so it is only visible to the staff you choose.

Round-Up of Smaller Improvements and Fixes

Reports and academics

Class and pupil management

Family communications

Roll Call and absentees

Pop-up dialogs across the site

Sign-in and authentication

Smaller fixes and stability improvements

We also fixed several security issues.

All news

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