Suspending a Pupil
The register that replaced a button: where a suspension comes from, the dates and the reason it is raised with, the four different ways it can end, what the family and the pupil see — and the one switch a person still throws by hand.
A decision somebody will ask about later
Suspension is rare, serious, and almost always revisited — by a guardian who disagrees, by an inspector reading a safeguarding file, occasionally by a solicitor. It used to be a button on a pupil’s profile that set their status and recorded nothing else: no start, no end, no reason, no author. A school asked in December how many days a child was out in July had genuinely no way to answer. This is what that button became — a dated register that says who decided, why, for how long, whether the family was told, and how it ended. It is a short flow. It is here because the record, not the workflow, is the thing that has to be right.
On this page
Suspension is an outcome, not a starting point
Almost no suspension begins with somebody deciding to suspend. It begins with an incident, and then with a disciplinary process that arrives at a sanction — so the register is downstream of two things a school already keeps.
The incident that started it
What happened, when, who was involved and who reported it. An incident is a record in its own right whether or not it ever leads to a sanction — which matters, because the pattern of small incidents is usually more informative than the one that finally tipped it over.
And the process that decided the sanction
Disciplinary actions with their outcomes and appeals. Suspension is one possible sanction among several, and it is worth showing the others: a system that offers only the most severe option encourages its use.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “Suspension is an outcome, not a starting point” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
The register, and the four ways one ends
This page is the whole feature. It is a register rather than a status, and everything interesting about it is in the column that says how each one finished — because those four endings are four genuinely different facts, and the old status field could express none of them.
Who is out, until when, and how the others ended
Active, expired, lifted, cancelled. An expired suspension ran to its end date and was closed by the scheduler the morning after — nobody had to remember. A lifted one was ended early by a named person. A cancelled one was raised in error and revoked, and is still on the record, because a school that can delete a mistake cannot prove it did not delete anything else.
Raising one
A pupil, a category, a start date, an end date — or deliberately none — a reason, and notes. The two text fields are separate on purpose, and it is not a formatting decision: the reason is what the school will say to the family, and the notes are what the school says to itself.
And the record it produces
Three days out, returning Monday the 3rd, raised by a named deputy on the evening of the incident, with the guardian notified sixteen minutes later. This is the screen that answers the question a school gets asked six months afterwards, and every field on it exists because somebody once could not answer it.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “The register, and the four ways one ends” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And the one switch a person still throws by hand
A suspension changes the pupil’s enrolment status automatically and puts it back automatically when it ends. What it does NOT change automatically is whether the child can sign in — and that separation is deliberate, because those are two different decisions and a school should have to make the second one on purpose.
Portal access is its own column, and its own decision
Being on the register and being able to sign in are different facts, and the register shows both. A pupil suspended for three days usually keeps their portal — they still have work to do — and a pupil suspended over a safeguarding matter usually does not. The system holds no opinion about which; it makes the school decide.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “And the one switch a person still throws by hand” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
What the household sees
The last question, and the one schools most often get wrong in the other direction: how much of this does the family see? The answer here is the incident and its outcome, in the same portal they read everything else in — not a letter that may not arrive, and not a phone call nobody wrote down.
The guardian’s view of the incident and its outcome
What happened, what the school decided, and the dates. It is the same record the office is reading, which is what makes a difficult conversation start from an agreed set of facts rather than from two different accounts of them.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “What the household sees” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And what the pupil sees
Where the school leaves portal access on — which for a short disciplinary suspension it usually should — the pupil sees their own record too. A child who can read what was decided about them, and get on with the work they are missing, is a child more likely to come back well.
Their own record, in their own words
The same incidents and outcomes, from the pupil’s side, beside the positive record that is usually longer. Showing both is deliberate: a behaviour page that only holds the bad days is a page nobody opens twice.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “And what the pupil sees” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
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.