Had similar issues. Refreshing the page several times worked for others in our Wg.
Checked with Region Shoot O.
From my feedback sent to him, he will check to see if there are loading errors / excessive times to upload, & look for a fix if possible:
"Each individual attachment is limited to 10mb, and there is an unlimited amount of allowed attachments. Also prior to upload of F7257, the service number box must be complete, this will then allow upload and save.
Thank you it submitted first time this morning after 10000 refreshes last night haha 
QQ…
When looking at “best attendance”, the simplest way to judge it is clearly on number of parade nights attended, according to the attendance report on Bader.
But, we also have authorised absences. Although it’s clear to me that you could never turn up but ensure your absences were always authorised, so I can’t really give it the same weighting.
If a cadet is on a camp, for example, is that an authorised absence, or does the tracker count them as having attended?
While I wouldn’t count every day of a camp or weekend activity, because the opportunities aren’t open to everyone equally, I also don’t want someone to miss out on a few parade night points if they were on a camp…
How do you use this tool if judging things like “best attendance”?
There should be a ‘Duty Absence’ option for that
But it’s not automatic. It requires whoever is doing the register to put it down correctly.
Ah so the system doesn’t feed it in automatically. Gotcha.
Maybe just have to treat it as pure attendance on unit then and accept that other life / cadet events could deprive them of a few points here-and-there…
We always used to do pure attendance at unit + attendance on camps/parade night stuff + weekend activities, whilst taking into account the reasons for any authorised absences.
It means that those most engaged with the cadet experience overall would win the award.
The pitfall is those for poorer backgrounds can’t always take part in weekend activities/activities requiring transport due to costs, so you’ll need to consider your demographics.
It’s annoying it’s not automatic, but as Adj I’ve previously just tried to stay on top of logging people as DA instead of AA.
When we’ve done the attendance award, it’s been specifically for parade nights. So we’ve just taken whoever has the highest total parade nights plus DAs.
Then, you can always do a separate award for most off Sqn days attended.
Isn’t the CWC there to make sure no cadets are missing out for financial reasons?
I’ve just had a look on our units records, and the way the ‘rate of attendance’ column is worked out is that same as this. It’s PC+PI+DA vs Register Total. Which is also good as if someone joined halfway through the year they are not penalised in the percentage bit.
This is what I originally looked at and it’s good, save for the fact that someone who was present during the period could get 100% because they’re a new-joiner and haven’t missed a night, but someone else has been there all year and was ill.
Unless I use the percentage but then check to make sure someone was actually enrolled for the full year?
I think this bit is just up to you.
If someone only had 10 in the register total, ie only been in 5 weeks, then yes, 100% is a lot easier to get. So you’ve got to draw a line somewhere.
Anecdotaly, if I look at ours, of the top 5 by percentage, only 1 started this year with half the number of register total. The other 4 all have the full number of parade nights.
But the new stated is not first, so it wouldn’t matter for the award.
The CWC is there to help, but they can only help if the help is known to be wanted and needed/accepted.
Indeed, but staff should be able to identify low attenders and ask appropriate questions then signpost parents to the CWC if finances are the only barrier to accessing the full cadet experience.
Over the decades, I’ve been around that one a good few times. We can do all of that, but taking you to my previous post, more often than not, I have found that the offer of support is not taken up. A matter of pride not wanting to openly admit that they couldn’t afford the activity. There would very often be some sort of long planned family gathering etc, if you catch my drift?
Unfortunately, you’re right. The same is true of all sorts of support: those who need it are too overwhelmed to ask, or too prod/ stubborn to accept.
Perhaps that’s something the team could look into when they actually make the move away from SMS - for an autopopulation to “DA” for anyone on an approved activity like a week long camp etc.
I’ve played about with pulling the data into Excel and trying some basic tracking and analysis over time.
it is fiddly to do with the way SMS exports data (csv files and they don’t include the cadet’s name!) but even a sub sample such as a single flight allows me to correlate to what’s on the programme and also what is happening outside cadets.
So for example we have a ‘soft’ programme during the public exam periods and the peak times for mocks so cadets with academic commitments don’t fall behind due to no fault of their own.
I could do this without the data, but having the attendance data gives me a rationale to explain when someone higher up asks why we don’t have classroom training on a given week.
I think you may be pulling it from the wrong place. The exports I use include name, number, register type, PC, PI, DA etc, register total and a percentage.
They do but they don’t give the data over time, only totals.
It might have changed since I last did the analysis but I want to be able to track attendance for each cadet over each parade night, not simply see whose % attendance is good or bad.
Who does that?