Houses and the corridor board

Every point a child earns counts for their house as well as for them. You do not award to a house separately for that to happen – it follows from who the child is.

How a total is worked out

There is no running count kept anywhere. A house total is the sum of the awards that make it up, worked out when somebody asks for it.

That sounds like an implementation detail and it has one consequence worth knowing: a correction moves the total immediately, because the total was never a number somebody stored and has to remember to update. Reverse an award at half past three and the board is right at half past three.

The house a point counts for is the house on the day

When an award is made, the child’s house and year group are recorded on the award itself. If the child moves house in January, the points they earned in November still count where they earned them – last term’s totals do not quietly change shape because somebody swapped a form group.

This is the same instinct as everywhere else in Ten Points: the record says what happened, not what would be true if it had happened today.

The corridor board

The display is a screen meant to be read at four metres by somebody walking past, so it shows very little: house standing, and recent recognition by first name.

Two practical notes.

It paints its own dark ground. The board is navy whatever the caretaker’s screen is set to, so it does not go pale in a bright corridor because somebody’s laptop is in light mode.

Put it on a device that stays signed in. It is a screen in a public corridor, so use a device and an account you are comfortable leaving there, and do not use a personal login that also reaches pastoral records.

Awarding to a house or a year group directly

You can award in bulk to a class, a house or a year group. It stays a draft until you publish it, so an assembly award can be built in advance and sent at the right moment. Bulk awarding is a separate permission from ordinary awarding – if you cannot see it, that is why.

Choosing house colours

An administrator sets these under Admin → Settings → Houses. Pick from the palette rather than matching a jumper by eye: the same colour is used on the board, in every chart, and behind small labels, and a shade chosen to match a tie will usually fail to be readable in at least one of those places.