Values, houses and classes

Three lists under Admin → Settings, and they are yours entirely – the overnight sync has no opinion about any of them, except for classes, which it will bring in if your MIS is connected.

Values

Admin → Settings → Values.

Every point in Ten Points is awarded against one of your values, so this list is the vocabulary your whole school will use for recognition. Each value has a name and an Awarded for line: a sentence saying what earns it.

Three pieces of advice, in order of how much difference they make:

Use the words you already use. If the corridor wall says Kindness, Curiosity, Courage, then those are your values. A new vocabulary invented for the software is a vocabulary nobody uses by half-term.

Five or six, not twenty. Awarding is two taps, and a long list turns the second tap into a decision nobody wants to make in a corridor with thirty children waiting. If you cannot get below eight, the extra ones are probably descriptions of the same thing.

Write the Awarded for line for a supply teacher. It is read by somebody who has been at your school for two hours and wants to recognise a child correctly.

Values can be edited later. Awards already made keep the value they were made against.

Houses

Admin → Settings → Houses.

Name and colour. The colour is used on the corridor board, in charts, and behind small labels, so pick from the palette rather than matching a jumper by eye – a shade chosen to match a tie will usually be unreadable in at least one of those places.

Every point a child earns counts for their house automatically. The house recorded on an award is the house they were in that day, so moving a child in January does not reshape November’s totals.

Classes

Admin → Settings → Classes.

If your MIS is connected, classes arrive overnight and you will rarely touch this screen. If it is not, or for something your MIS does not know about – a club, an intervention group, a nurture group – you add them here.

Each class has:

• A name, which is what is on the door and on the register
• What kind of class it is
• A year group, or none, for a group that spans years
• A subject, or none
• Who is in it

A child moving class

You do not edit a class membership. The old period is closed and a new one opened, whether that happens here or through the sync.

This is worth understanding because it explains something that otherwise looks like a bug: a child’s record can show two form classes, one ending in December and one starting in January. That is correct. A report about the autumn term needs to know where they actually were in the autumn term, and a record that was edited in place could not answer that.

It is also why an archive does not close anything – see The overnight sync.