Human Resource Management
Run the establishment — hiring, leave, contracts, training, performance and conduct — on the same record as the classroom, with every employee able to serve themselves.
What this module is
A school's staff records are usually spread across a filing cabinet, a payroll spreadsheet and the head teacher's memory. That arrangement holds until the day an inspector asks how many staff hold a current safeguarding certificate, or a teacher asks how much annual leave they have left, or a contract quietly expires and nobody notices until the person is teaching without one.
HR Management replaces that with one establishment record. The staff directory the school already maintains for timetabling and access control is the same directory HR works from — there is no second list of employees to keep in step. Around it sit the things a school actually has to do: recruit, contract, allocate leave, train, review, and occasionally discipline. Each of those is a record with dates and an owner rather than a conversation someone remembers differently.
The module has two halves, and the second is the one that changes how it feels to work at the school. The HR office gets a workspace; every employee gets a self-service view of their own employment — leave balance, contract, documents, profile — so the routine questions never reach the HR office at all. What follows walks the HR office through its ten screens, then shows the same records from the employee's side.
What you get
One establishment, not two lists
HR works from the same staff records that drive timetabling, gradebooks and access control. A new hire is one record, and it is already the record the rest of the platform uses.
Leave that answers its own question
Every request carries its days, its type and the balance it comes out of. Entitlement, taken, pending and remaining are stored per employee per leave type, so "how much do I have left" is a number rather than an email.
Approvals go through the school's own queue
A submitted leave request enters the platform's shared request queue — the same one results approvals run through — which is escalated on a schedule rather than left to sit in an inbox.
Conflicts surfaced before approval, not after
A request is checked against non-working days, the school calendar, the requester's other bookings and the staffing risk it creates, and the flags travel with it to the approver.
Compliance you can evidence
Documents carry a type, a verification state and an expiry, and the compliance dashboard totals them — how many staff hold a current background check, how many certificates lapse within thirty days.
A defensible conduct record
A disciplinary case carries its severity, investigation notes, evidence, hearings, actions and appeals in sequence. That is the trail an employment dispute asks for, and it cannot be reconstructed after the fact.
Every employee self-serves
Booking leave, reading your own contract, requesting a letter of employment and correcting your own phone number are things staff do themselves — which is where most of the HR office's week goes today.
How Human Resource Management actually works
Everything below is the real application, running live on this page with sample school data — not screenshots. Each screen is the same one your team would use.
On this page
- HR office / school admin
- Start on the overview
- Work the people record
- Decide leave with the facts attached
- Hold the balances that make the decision defensible
- Hire into the same system
- Run review cycles that finish
- Keep certifications current
- Hold the contracts and the compliance evidence
- Record conduct properly
- Review what staff have asked for
- Every employee
HR office / school admin
The HR office runs the establishment. These ten screens are the year as it actually happens: know where you stand, keep the people record straight, handle leave, hire, review, train, contract, and deal with the things nobody enjoys.
Start on the overview
The landing screen is built around what is waiting for a decision. Headcount and open positions are context; the action queue is the work.
Work the people record
The directory is the establishment itself — every employee with their job title, department, role, employment dates and status. It is the same record the rest of the platform reads, which is what stops HR drifting out of step with the timetable.
Decide leave with the facts attached
This is the busiest screen in the module. A request arrives with its days, its reason and — the part that matters — the conflicts it creates, so the approver is not the person who has to remember that two of the three Physics teachers are already away that week.
Hold the balances that make the decision defensible
Every argument about leave is really an argument about a balance. Allocated, used, pending and remaining are stored per employee per leave type, which is what turns a disagreement into a lookup.
Hire into the same system
Recruitment runs from a vacancy through a candidate pipeline to an offer — and the point of doing it here rather than in a jobs board is that a hire becomes a staff record without being re-typed.
Run review cycles that finish
Appraisal fails when it is a document nobody chases. A cycle here is an object with a window, a population and a completion rate, which is what makes an unfinished review visible.
Keep certifications current
Training is where a school's compliance obligations actually live. Programmes carry sessions and CPD hours; enrolments carry completion and a renewal date.
Hold the contracts and the compliance evidence
Two things live here: the employment contracts themselves, and the documents that prove the school is allowed to employ these people. Both are dated, which is the only property that matters.
Record conduct properly
The part of HR nobody wants to use is the part where a missing record costs the most. A case here carries the whole sequence, in order, with dates.
Review what staff have asked for
The other end of the self-service half. When an employee changes their own phone number or address, it arrives here as a request showing the current and proposed value — reviewed, not applied blind.
Every employee
This half is not for HR staff — it is for all 128 employees. Everything under the staff portal is self-service that every employee gets whatever their role, and it is the reason the HR office's week stops being spent answering the same four questions. Samuel, the bursar, has no HR permissions at all; this is simply his own record.
Their own HR home
An employee lands on what is theirs: leave balance, what is pending, what is coming up. No permissions, no admin screens, no request to the office.
Book leave, and see the balance it comes from
The same request the HR office decides in the chapter above, written here. It shows the balance it is drawn against before it is submitted, which removes most of the reason requests get rejected.
Read their own employment record
Job title, department, campus, contract type, start date, supervisor and reporting line — the facts an employee is entitled to see and currently has to ask for.
Request a letter without joining a queue
Employment confirmations, payslips, tax certificates and reference letters are requested here and collected here. The request appears in the HR office's queue with a status the employee can watch.
How it connects to the rest of the platform
The staff directory is the base platform's
HR does not maintain a second list of employees. It works from the same staff records that hold teaching assignments, form-class ownership and access control, so a leaver disappears from the timetable and the establishment at once.
Roles and permissions decide who sees HR at all
The HR workspace is granted by role like every other module. The self-service half is not gated on a role at all — it is what every employee gets — which is why the second chapter shows an employee with no HR permissions.
Leave approvals use the platform's shared request queue
A leave request is a queue item, alongside results approvals and other requests the school routes for decision. The queue escalates on its own schedule rather than depending on someone opening HR.
Staff are billed on the same finance ledgerrequires School Fees & Finance
Where School Fees & Finance is enabled, employees who owe the school — staff-ward tuition, levies — see their invoices in the same portal as their leave and their contract, and those payments post to the school-wide ledger.
Common questions
Do we have to re-enter our staff list?+
No. HR works from the staff records the platform already holds for timetabling, gradebooks and access control. Buying the module adds screens over the establishment you already maintain; it does not create a second copy of it.
Does every member of staff need an HR licence to book leave?+
No. The self-service half — leave, employment record, documents, profile updates — sits in the staff portal and is available to every employee regardless of role. Only the HR workspace itself is granted by role.
Does it do payroll?+
No. Contracts record salary, and staff fee invoices and payments run through School Fees & Finance, but there is no payroll run, no PAYE calculation and no payslip generation. Schools that need payroll keep using their existing system.
Will it stop us approving leave that leaves a class uncovered?+
It will tell you. Every request is checked on submission against non-working days, the school calendar, the requester's other bookings and the staffing level it would leave in their department, and the flags travel with the request to whoever decides. It advises; it does not block.
Can we prove our safeguarding compliance from this?+
Yes, for what has been recorded. Documents carry a type, a verification state and an expiry, and the compliance dashboard totals compliant staff, expiring documents and pending verifications by type. Nothing warns you before an expiry, though — that check is one you still have to run.
What happens when someone leaves?+
Their employment record stays attached to the establishment with its end date, so contracts, documents, leave history and any conduct record remain attributable rather than disappearing with the account. An exit interview can be recorded against the offboarding.
Other operations modules
Run your whole school on one connected platform
Start with the base package, switch on the modules you need, and give every parent, student and staff member a single place to log in.