Spotting a Child in Trouble
Attendance, behaviour, marks and unpaid fees are four registers every school already keeps and no school can read together. This is what happens when they are read together: one risk board, one standing rule that maintains its own membership, one form tutor told on the morning it matters — and one child’s whole record in date order.
The child nobody notices is visible in four places at once
Ask any head of year how a child ends up in real trouble and the answer is never one dramatic event. It is a Monday absence a fortnight, a core average sliding from sixty to forty-six, four late marks nobody joined up, a clinic visit where the nurse noted she had not eaten, and a family that quietly stopped paying in May. Each of those lives in a different register, each is individually unremarkable, and in four separate systems nobody ever sees them in the same place. This walkthrough starts with those registers apart, exactly as a school holds them, and then puts them together: a score, a rule that maintains its own list every morning, an intervention that fires on the day a child crosses the line, and a record that reads like a story rather than five exports.
On this page
Three registers that would normally never meet
Start where every school already is. These are three real screens from three different parts of the platform, and each is genuinely useful on its own — but each is also the reason the child in this story stays invisible: no one of them contains enough to raise an eyebrow.
Attendance, watched rather than filed
Who is missing today, which registers were never taken, and which pupils have crossed the school’s own attendance thresholds. It is the single best early-warning signal a school has, and on its own it says “87%” — a number that is worrying only if you already know what else is happening.
Behaviour, in points and incidents
Awards, incidents, detentions and the net position per pupil. Four late marks in a fortnight is a mild negative here and nothing more — the system has no way, on this page, to know that the same fortnight contains a fall in her marks.
And the register nobody thinks of as pastoral
Unpaid fees, by pupil and by class. Bursary schools treat this as a money screen, and it is — but a family that has stopped paying in May is very often a family where something has changed, and that is a pastoral fact sitting in a finance system.
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One board, computed from all of it
The risk board is the platform reading those registers together and scoring each pupil against the school’s own definition of concern. This is the screen that only exists because the modules share a record — not because a clever report was written, but because there is one pupil row for attendance, behaviour, marks and fees to be about.
Every pupil, scored, worst first
Attendance, behaviour and academic standing rolled into one score, with the components still visible beside it so a head of year can see what drove it. Sorted worst first, because that is the order this page is actually read in on a Monday morning.
And the school decides what “at risk” means
Two numbers, set by the school. This matters more than it looks: a boarding school with 98% baseline attendance and a large day school in a city do not share a definition of concern, and a platform that hard-codes one of them is wrong for the other.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “One board, computed from all of it” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
A list that maintains itself
A board tells you who is at risk today. What a school actually needs is a list that keeps itself — because the intervention list agreed in a September meeting is accurate for about three weeks, and then it is a document that quietly becomes wrong while everyone still believes it.
The school’s standing rules
Each row is a sentence a school already says out loud — “the ones whose attendance has slipped”, “the ones we agreed to watch after Easter” — expressed as a rule and re-evaluated every morning. Some are watchlists with actions attached; some are just cohorts.
Writing one
Conditions joined with AND and OR, over the fields the platform actually holds: attendance percentage, behaviour points, discipline incidents, core-subject average, risk band, year group, pupil premium, EAL, SEN status. The rule in this walkthrough is two clauses — and it is two clauses from two different modules, which is the entire point.
The rule, and what happens automatically
One watchlist opened: the two conditions it is built from, and the five things the school has decided happen without anybody remembering to do them. This is the description of the cohort — who is currently inside it is the next screen, because that is the half people act on.
And the children actually on it
The pupils the rule currently holds, each beside the signals the rule was written over — attendance, behaviour points, incidents, core average, and the risk band the register puts them in. The dates are the useful part: a pupil who joined this morning and one who has been on the list since February are two different conversations. So is the one nobody’s rule found — a pupil added by hand stays through every evaluation, and only a person can take her off again.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “A list that maintains itself” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
The person who will actually have the conversation
None of this is worth anything if it stays in the office. The form tutor is the one who sees this child every morning, and the action attached to the watchlist means they were told on the day she crossed the line — not in a half-term review after the damage was done.
Their class, with the pupils who need them marked
A form tutor’s own roll, with attendance, results and behaviour standing for each pupil. They see their class and no other — a teaching workspace is scoped to the classes the role grants, which is what makes it safe to put this much on one screen.
One pupil, from the tutor’s own module
The behaviour record of a single child, opened from the tutor’s own workspace: what was awarded, what was deducted, by whom, and why. Same view the school’s Behaviour module shows the office — bound to an endpoint that refuses a pupil this teacher does not teach.
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The whole roll, before any one child
A tutor planning for a class does not start with one pupil. Student Records gives them the arm five ways — all three pillars at once, then each pillar on its own, then the term as a single feed — and every figure on every one of those pages is produced by the module that owns it rather than recomputed here.
Every pupil, three pillars, worst first
Marks, conduct and the register on one row per child, sorted by how much of the tutor’s attention each needs. The order is the page: a tutor reads the top five on a Monday and plans around them, and the reasons beside each band say which of the three signals put the child there.
Marks, term by term, as a shape
One column per term of the session, so a fall across a year is something you see rather than something you work out. The empty term in the middle of a child’s year stays empty on purpose — the gap is the fact a tutor is reading for, and closing it up would hide it.
Conduct, with the categories and not just the total
Deepest deficit first — and beside each net total, the categories the child was actually marked on. A net of minus nine is four different conversations depending on whether it is lateness, missing homework, disruption or one serious incident.
The register, with the pattern beside the rate
Lowest rate first, and then the part a rate cannot tell you: the longest unbroken run away, and the weekday each child misses most. A Monday problem and a fortnight of illness are the same percentage and two entirely different phone calls.
And the class’s term as one feed
Marks, behaviour points, register marks and incidents across the whole roll, newest first, interleaved rather than grouped by module. Four registers stacked is what the school already has; one thread is what makes a term readable.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “The whole roll, before any one child” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And then the child, in full
Now the one pupil — and this is where the walkthrough stops being about noticing. Five tabs, each reading the module that owns the data, so the tutor and the office are looking at the same numbers. It is also the only place in the module a tutor may write: a plan, raised from the record it was decided on.
The three pillars, the plan, and who to ring
Chidi’s record as his tutor opens it: where each pillar stands, where he has sat since he joined, what is already being tried, and the two numbers to call. A summary with the way into each pillar beside it rather than a fourth opinion about the child.
His marks, subject by subject
The term in view, every subject with its total, its grade, its position and the class average beside it — then every term before it. Nothing on the page is added up here: the subject total is the gradebook’s own arithmetic and the position is the shared ranking, which is why the record and the broadsheet cannot disagree.
His conduct, rendered by the Behaviour module itself
The same profile view the conduct office sees, on the same shapes, from an endpoint that refuses a pupil this teacher does not advise. The only difference between the two readers is which endpoint filled the props — which is the whole claim this walkthrough has been making, in one screen.
His register, month by month and weekday by weekday
The figures, then the two breakdowns that turn a percentage into a pattern, then every mark with its remark. The filters move the log and not the figures, on purpose: a reader who filtered to absences should not then be told the child’s attendance is zero.
And his whole career here, in date order
One column: marks published, points awarded, register marks taken, incidents logged — every module that has touched this child, in the order it happened. Read top to bottom it tells a story that no single register would ever have shown anybody, and it is the tutor’s copy of it rather than the office’s.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “And then the child, in full” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And here is the screen no stack of systems can produce
This is the end of the argument. Everything above has been about noticing; this is about understanding, and it is the one screen that is impossible without a shared record. Not a dashboard — a sequence.
One child’s whole record, in the order it happened
Admission, class moves, results, attendance milestones, behaviour points, a clinic visit, an unpaid invoice, a pastoral note, and the morning she joined the watchlist — one column, in date order, drawn from every module that touched her. Read top to bottom it tells a story that no single register on its own would ever have shown anybody.
And whether any of it is working
The last question, and the one schools are rarely able to answer: is the intervention doing anything? Enrolment, attendance and punctuality across the whole school, so a pastoral programme can be judged on the cohort rather than on the two cases everybody remembers.
Ready to run your school on this?
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