ARTICLE: Student State Management (Rotas)

ARTICLE: Student Status Management (Rotas)

Student Status Management (Rotas)
Or how to make student accounts active and inactive in Reach!

Overview

Schools are adapting to different types of boarding based on parent requirements and market trends so that full-time boarding is no longer the only option offered. This change is approach has led to students either only being in boarding for selected days of the week, ad-hoc overnight stays or in fact not staying overnight at all but staying on after the academic school day has finished.

Reach can accommodate these different types of boarder but required a level of configuration and then manipulation of factors such as groups to provide an account of what students were in boarding care and which were not at any given time.

Brief

Students of all status need to be accommodated within the Reach platform irrespective of whether they are boarding, partly boarding or not boarding at all. A solution is needed that allows all student types to be available within Reach but for the times that they are active to be controlled by the system either automatically, by a student action or under direction of a member of staff.

Example

A school has a mixed boarding offering where students that do not board overnight but stay beyond the end of the school day for activities, sports fixture or prep. These as sometimes called ‘Day Boarders’ or ‘Flexi-Boarders’ and will be attached to a boarding house whilst they are in school and will need to be treated in the same way as a full-time boarder and appear in the operational parts of the platform such as roll call and SiSo. When they go home from school they then need to ‘disappear’ from these operational functions so that the staff can get an accurate picture of who is in boarding maintaining accurate roll call lists and kiosk view without staff not being able to check a student history or raise a pastoral note for instance.

Solution

Create a process where a student can be either in an active or inactive state, this state will then dictate where and when they can both appear and interact with the components within Reach.

This status can be controlled by:
  1. A configured rota based on Residential status where it changes based upon a student association with the timetabled rota. i.e – Student X is a ‘Day Boarder’ that is expected into school at 08:00 and to leave by 19:30 therefore they are a member of the rota item that runs each day from 08:00 until 19:30 and will automatically activated and deactivated at these times.
  2. SiSo to a location where the location is configured to change the Student status, i.e. SiSo’ing to location ‘Home’ will deactivate that student.
  3. Manual change to a student status by a member of staff.

Configuration


Setup

Student Status Management is an optional module and so will need activating by Reach Support Staff.

Considerations

SSM brings the ability to accommodate not just full-time boarders into Reach and consideration should be given before set up as to how the school wants Reach to handle any non-boarders and how they should be represented.

The recommendation is still to only create the student accounts in Reach that the school needs to, data minimisation is a key cornerstone of data protection and so a policy of minimisation should always be applied, students can be added into Reach at any time if needed.

Residential Status

Residential Status is a new addition to a student account and controls whether the student is subject to SSM or not.

Note on Roles: The residential status that is set for the student is not connected to the role of the student but consideration must be made to the role configuration. In order for the student to be subject to SSM their role MUST have BE_BOARDER selected otherwise they won’t be subject to SSM.

The residential status of a student is set in the student account:

Main Menu > People Management > View Contacts

Then select the student you want to be subject to SSM and click on the ‘Metadata’ tab:




Here you can set the Residential Status – Any selected option in the dropdown will enable the student to be subject to SSM.

Consideration on Residential Status: The type of residential status selected for the student will come into play when selecting students to be part of a timetabled event where you will be able to bulk assign students based upon their residential status.

The Residential Status’ available are:
  1. Day Student
  2. Flexi-Boarder Weekly
  3. Flexi-Boarder Ad Hoc
  4. Fulltime
Select the one appropriate to the student and then click save. This will then make the student available for their status to be set via SSM.

Consideration on Residential Status: SSM can be enabled on ALL students that have a residential type selected and not just non full-time boarders.

The following Timetabled events (Rotas) can be created:
  1. Class
  2. Residential
  3. Fixture
Class would be for any academic or co-curricular events, Residential is for boarding and Fixture would be for sporting events.


Setting the Status of a Student

Overview

The status of a student determines where within Reach that student is visible dependant upon whether the student is ‘Active’ or ‘Inactive’.

The status of a student can be changed by three ways:
  1. A member of staff can change the status using ‘State Management’
  2. The student signs out to a location that is set to deactivate them.
  3. A timetabled event (Rota) of which a student is assigned to either starts (Activates) or finishes (Deactivates).
When a student is active they will function as a normal boarder within Reach, when a student is inactive they will not appear within the Roll Call and the Sign-in / Sign-out elements of the platform. An inactive student however will still be accessible within the Reach platform so that for example a Pastoral report can be raised, the student sidebar accessed, they will appear in reports etc.


State Management


There is a new Main Menu item called ‘State Management’ and it is found:

Main Menu > People Management > State Management


State Management is used for manual control by a member of staff that needs to either ‘Activate’ or ‘Deactivate’ a student status.

Click on ‘State Management’ and you will be taken to the ‘State Management’ screen where it shows the current ‘Currently Activated’ Students in the right hand panel and a search bar at the top in order to find students that are deactivated.



Manually Deactivating Students

In order to deactivate a student, the staff member just finds the relevant student in the ‘Currently Activated’ list and then clicks on ‘Deactivate’. Once deactivated they can be automatically activated by a timetable action or rota or can be manually activated by searching for the student in ‘State Management’ and then activating them as the screen below shows:




Manually Activating a Student

Search for the student you want to activate then click on ‘Activate’ when they appear in the ‘Currently Deactivated’ panel. They then will also appear in the ‘Currently Activated’ panel on the right.


Sign-out to Deactivate

A location can be set to automatically deactivate a student when they sign out to a location, for example where a ‘Day Student’ is leaving to go home for the evening they can sign out to location ‘Home’ that will automatically deactivate them.

This automatic deactivation is set up in the system configuration for locations:

Main Menu > System Configuration > View System Configuration > Locations



Click on ‘View’ and then click from the list of locations provided, the location you want to automatically deactivate a student when they sign out to it.

Under the details tab you will see the ‘Deactivate on SISO’ dropdown, select ‘Yes’ and click on ‘Save’. Any student that now signs out to the location will be deactivated automatically where they are subject to state management, i.e. have a residential status set in their account.


Timetables (Rotas)

Rotas as set timetables that can be either Class (Academic or co-curricular) , Residential (boarding) or Fixtures (Sports or Activities) based and are created using the calendaring system and then students that are to be part of the timetable elements are assigned into them. Once assigned into a timetabled rota, their state will automatically be managed by the rota unless manually changed by a member of staff using ‘State Management’ or the student signing out to a location that is set to deactivate.

Note: Only Residential Rotas will currently subject students to control over their state, Class and Fixtures are for organisational purposes only and are part of future development.

Setup

The first step is to create the Rota Profile that you want to then add timetabled elements to, in this example we want to manage the status of ‘Day Boarders’ that come into school each morning at the start of school but stay after the end of the normal academic day for dinner, prep or after school activities before going home in the evening.

Rota Profiles are set up and configured using Rota Management:

Main Menu > Reach: Rota Management > Reach: Rota Management

Clicking on ‘REACH: Rota Management’ will open up the Rota Management screen, click on ‘Create Rota Profile’ to create a new rota profile or click on any existing ones in the list to edit.


Give the new rota profile a label and select what type it will be from the dropdown list.

Click on ‘Save Rota Profile and the new rota profile should appear in the list under Rota Management (if it doesn’t just close the tab and go back into Rota Management from the Main Menu).




We want to now create the timetable for the Rota Profile and add students into it, to start click on the Rota Profile you want to use, this will bring up the Rota Profile screen, click on ‘Add Rota’:



Give the new timetable item as label, a location if required and then set the day of the week and the time you want the students to become activated (Start Time) and the time you want them to be deactivated (End Time). You can then set a colour for the timetabled item and also give it an icon if required for identification.

Note: Rollover Rota If you want the timetabled item to cross more than one day, in this example the student should be activated at 4pm on the Friday and stay activated until Sunday evening so we have set the end time to 23:59 on Friday and selected the ‘Rollover Rota’ box, this tells Reach not to deactivate the student at 23:59 but to keep them in the current state into the next rota. You will need to ensure that there is a rota that follows at 00:00 the following day, in this case Saturday for this to work.




Once the rota items have been saved they will appear in the calendar, in this case we have ‘Weekend Flexi’s – Two Nights’ running from 4pm on Friday, when they will automatically be activated, through until 8:30pm on Sunday where they will automatically be deactivated unless they have already signed out to a location that deactivates them, or a member of staff deactivates them.

You can create and organise these timetabled rotas for different groups of students or based on the type such as residential or fixtures.

Assigning Students

The final operation is to assign students to a rota so that their status is then automatically set according the start and finish times. To assign students to a rota go to the Rota Profile:

Main Menu > REACH: Rota Management > REACH: Rota Management

Select the Rota Profile you want to add students to and then click on the rota in the calendar view that you want to add students to, this will then bring up the Rota Details, click on the ‘Contacts’ tab and this will bring up the screen below:


Under ‘Assign a Student’ you can either select the students on an individual basis or if you click on the bulk select icon Kiosk View (circled in red), this will bring up the contact selector screen:


You can now bulk select students based on their house, year, group, location or Gender but also by their Residential Status, so in this case we want to add all ‘Day Students’ to the rota, we would then select the ‘Day Student’ residential status and add them in.

Effects of Student State Management


SSM effects the operational parts of Reach where staff need to know whether a student is actively in boarding or school or has deactivated and left site.

Kiosk View

If a student is active they will show up on the kiosk screen, if they are inactive they will not. This gives staff an accurate account of which students are in boarding or still in school and should therefore be able to sign in and out of locations as normal.

Roll Call

As per kiosk view, when a student is active they will show in a roll call, when they are inactive they will not.
Note: Visibility of active and inactive students in both the kiosk view and roll call is dependent upon filters and house / year memberships.

Communications

Reach can be configured to send automatic notifications out for certain aspects of rotas, this is configured by inserting the email address of the members of staff you want to receive these notifications:

Main Menu > System Configuration > View System Configuration > Communications


The email address will then get notification that the rota has deactivated any students that were active in a particular rota that has finished:


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