The Ministry of Education has issued the following directive to all SMS providers:
"Currently, some SMSs enable the automatic re-coding the “? – Unknown” code to “T – Truant” after a configurable number of days. While both “? – unknown” and “T – Truant” are unjustified absence codes, this automation can make it difficult to identify if an absence has been followed-up, and a reason for the absence sought from a parent or caregiver. For those reasons we have updated the eAR spec to remove this functionality. Note that the removal of this requirement does not apply to the function of early notification systems that are set to change a ‘?’ to a ‘T’ if a text has been sent (and logged) and there is no response."
As a result of this directive, the Hero daily task to convert '?' to 'T' has been turned off and the options for setting the configurable number of days have been removed from all NZ MoE sites.