Education template

A course, a student and the enrolment that joins them are three different things, and the moment they live in three tabs of the same spreadsheet, attendance stops being answerable. This template models the join explicitly: an enrolment carries attendance, grade and completion for one student on one course, which is what makes "who is below seventy percent this term" a question with an answer instead of a manual count per tab.

Courses holds one row per course per term: name, instructor, term, capacity, session count, start date. The sample row reads Introduction to Statistics, Dr Aliyev, Spring, thirty seats, twelve sessions, starting 3 Feb. Students is one row per person: cohort, email, the date they enrolled, a status, and a Courses taken column that's a formula, not a count somebody keeps. Then there's Enrolments, the table the whole thing turns on. One row is one student on one course, and it carries the attendance percentage, the grade, a completed flag, and the date they last attended.

Attendance belongs to neither a course nor a student. It's a property of this student on this course, and that's the structural reason the spreadsheet version breaks, no sloppiness required. Give courses one tab and students another and the fact you most want to report on has nowhere to live, so it gets smeared across a row of columns named after weeks. Make the enrolment its own row and “who is below seventy percent attendance this term” collapses from a manual count per tab into a filter.

A percentage doesn't tell you who to email. Attendance by cohort does: it charts rates per cohort and per course across the term, then lists every student under the threshold right beneath, so the report ends in names rather than a number. Completion and capacity sets each course's fill against its seats alongside the fraction of enrolments that actually finish it: the view where an oversubscribed course and one quietly losing people no longer share a summary line.

Ask “which students are below seventy percent attendance this term” and you get a list, read straight off the enrolment rows. “Which courses have the lowest completion rate” runs the same rows the other direction. “How full is each course against its capacity” sets an enrolment count against a number already sitting on the course row. The sharpest one uses the last attended date: “who has not attended anything in the past three weeks” finds the student before they become a dropout.

One figure per enrolment summarises a term; it can't reproduce a register. When you need per-class detail, say so: ask for a Sessions table and Ferra restructures the tables around it, carrying the existing rows across instead of handing you a term's worth of registers to re-key. The same route covers assessments and fees, or a second instructor per course: the structure changes together with the rows inside it.

Training providers, language schools, bootcamps, a university department running its own cohorts: anyone tracking enrolments outside a full student information system. And if your institution already runs one? Keep this anyway, for the reporting an SIS makes hard to reach: attendance by cohort and completion by course, no data request filed.

Order matters: courses first, then students, then enrolments, and each import can be told which columns name the rows it links to. A CSV or XLSX export from your current system drops straight in. Better still, a Google Sheet a coordinator already maintains can stay connected, so the tables keep pace with it instead of drifting away from it within a fortnight.