At Kilkenny Youthreach, education looks different by design.
The centre serves young people aged 15 to 20 who have left mainstream school early or are at risk of doing so. For these learners, Kilkenny Youthreach offers not just an alternative path but a second chance.
The students often arrive with a history of irregular attendance, low motivation, and limited trust in education. Helping them re-engage means building structure, visibility, and positive habits from the ground up. That’s where attendance becomes more than a number – it becomes a tool for growth.
“We work with students who don’t always see the value of showing up,” explains Youthreach Coordinator Michelle Murphy.
Before implementing Attender, staff at Kilkenny faced a number of challenges.
Weekly attendance percentages had to be calculated manually, taking up valuable teaching time. Students had no way of checking their own attendance in real-time, making it harder for them to connect their efforts with results. And producing weekly reports for administration and internal guidance staff required a considerable amount of administrative work.
“They need to feel that their effort counts – and they need tools that make it easier to take responsibility.”
Michelle Murphy, Youthreach Coordinator at Kilkenny Youthreach
Michelle and her team were looking for a solution that would simplify the process and engage learners.
Attender stood out for its ease of use and its integration into Microsoft Teams, which Kilkenny already used as their virtual learning environment (VLE). With Attender, staff could register attendance directly inside the platform they were already working in. For students, attendance data was visual, accessible, and immediate.
The built-in gamification features gave students additional incentives – not as a gimmick, but as a concrete way to track progress and recognise effort. The built-in gamification features gave students additional incentives – not as a gimmick, but as a concrete way to track progress and recognise effort.
“The students feel more ownership now. They can check their percentage, track their progress, and actually see the effect of staying engaged ,” Michelle says.
One of Kilkenny’s key needs was the ability to monitor students who were disengaging before it became a pattern. Their teachers relied on weekly overviews to flag and follow up with individual learners.
Attender responded by delivering a customised weekly Excel report tailored to Kilkenny’s processes. Instead of manually compiling and formatting data each week, staff could now generate and share accurate reports in minutes, saving hours of time and enabling quicker action.
“We’re required to send weekly attendance records, and the Attender app allowed us to easily download and pass on accurate information,”Michelle explains. “It reduced the amount of time our teaching staff needed to spend on this task.”
The value went beyond efficiency. With cleaner data and faster workflows, the team could intervene earlier and spend more time supporting the students who needed them most.
The most significant change, according to Michelle, has been the time savings for teachers. With administrative pressure reduced, staff can focus more on their core responsibilities: building relationships, delivering learning, and supporting students’ personal development.
At the same time, the shift to visual, accessible attendance data has made students more aware of their habits – and more inclined to change them.
“Attender is a fantastic tool for any education setting struggling with how to promote the importance of attendance with their students,”,Michelle says.
“It’s easy to use both for staff and students and has add-on gamification features to positively engage learners in improving their attendance.”
As a Youthreach centre, Kilkenny serves a particularly at-risk group of young people. But Michelle believes the benefits of Attender extend to many other settings – particularly for programmes focused on attendance, motivation, and re-engagement.
“Youthreach and Community Training Centres can gain a lot from using Attender and encouraging their very vulnerable cohorts to improve their attendance and engagement,” she says.“Attender has enormous potential for attendance-orientated programmes such as LCA in mainstream schools. DEIS schools should also be interested in the student-friendly, attractive interface – and in particular the gamification features. ”
Kilkenny Youthreach didn’t just find a tool to track attendance.
With Attender, they found a way to connect data with action — and to help students feel that showing up matters.
