Taking the register

The register is the one thing the system asks you to do every day, and it rests on a single distinction. The gate can tell the school that a child is on the property. Only you can tell it that the child is in the room. Those are two different facts, and the register is where the second one gets stated — by a person, deliberately, in a form the school can produce months later and still say who said what.

Everything about the screen follows from that. It will not put words in your mouth, and it will not make you tap thirty times to avoid doing so.

Getting to it

Register sits in your menu, one tap from wherever you are. That is new: the register used to be a panel in the middle of your dashboard, below a hero and a report digest and above the pickup approvals and two full class lists, with every class you teach unfolded on the same page. It is the first thing you do each morning and it is now a screen of its own.

Your dashboard still tells you what you are walking into, in one line per class: the class, whether its register has been taken, and — when it has not — how many learners the gate could not account for. A line that reads Register not taken with a handful of learners against it is telling you the morning is nearly settled before you open anything. A register already filed says so instead, with the time it was filed and how many of the class were in attendance. Either way the line opens the register.

If you teach one class, Register takes you straight into it; there is no list to choose from, because there is no question to answer. If you teach more than one, you get a short page headed Your registers — Choose a class to take its register. — carrying the same two facts per class as the dashboard, so you can start with the one that needs you. My classes at the top of any of these screens returns you to the dashboard.

The front of the register

A register opens the way a register book opens: School, Class, Teacher, Date. Four facts before a single name, so that what you are looking at — and later, what the school has filed — is never ambiguous.

The date is worth a sentence, because it is the school’s own calendar date and not your phone’s. Until recently the app worked the day out on the device, in universal time, which is an hour or two behind South Africa; a teacher opening the register shortly after midnight was handed the previous day’s, with every name and every figure in it correct for the wrong day. The screen no longer works a date out at all. It asks the school, the school answers from its own timezone, and everything that follows — what is read, and what is eventually filed — quotes that one answer.

The figures, and what To mark means

Across the top sits a strip that stays in view as you scroll: Learners, then Present, Late, Absent and Excused. Medical appears only once you have used it — the five marks add up to the size of the class, so it is the one figure whose absence still leaves the row reconciling.

While anything is still outstanding, the strip leads with To mark, in amber: the number of learners on this register nobody has spoken about yet. It leads for a reason. The other figures deliberately do not add up to the class until the register is complete, and a teacher signing a register checks that it adds up. Without To mark that shortfall is a puzzle; with it, it is an instruction, and it disappears the moment it reaches zero.

Every figure counts only what you have stated. Nothing is counted on your behalf.

The gate’s morning arrives as one line

The learners the gate checked in this morning, and about whom nothing else is in dispute, are collapsed into a single line that counts them. Underneath it the line says what it wants from you — Confirm they are in your classroom — and beside it a chip reads Not confirmed.

That line is a proposal, not a mark. Pressing Confirm all in the classroom turns it green, the chip becomes Confirmed, and the sentence underneath becomes You confirmed these learners are in your classroom. Until you press it, the register cannot be submitted at all.

Three things make that confirmation real rather than decorative. You can see what you are confirming: Show names opens the line and lists every learner under it, each with its own mark, so you can read the names first and disagree with any of them individually — Hide names folds it away again. You cannot skip it: the register refuses to be filed while the line is still a proposal, and it says so. And it is recorded as yours: confirming writes a mark for each of those learners, recording you as the person who stated it, the moment you stated it, and the fact that it came from a group you reviewed rather than from naming each child.

That last part is the point of the whole design. A register where you work down the column naming each learner, and a register where you rule one line through the twenty-one the gate checked in and sign underneath, are both yours and both binding — and they are not the same act. A record that cannot tell them apart cannot answer the only question anyone asks of a register months later, which is whether a person actually accounted for this child. The school’s record now holds the answer: for every mark, which of the two acts produced it, who stated it, and when.

A learner the gate saw is kept out of that line whenever the morning is contested — if a parent has sent a note about the same day, or that day already carries a claim, a flagged disagreement or a ruling of its own. The gate saw the child at 07:31 and the mother says the child is home sick; folding that into the one control designed to be confirmed at a glance is how the contradiction would get missed. Those learners are listed separately, for you.

If the gate checked nobody in — load-shedding, a reader down, a morning the badges never got scanned — the line says The gate checked nobody in this morning, and the class is simply a list of names for you to mark.

Everyone else, one tap at a time

Below the line sits a section headed Needs you with a count of the learners in it: everyone the gate could not settle. When there is nobody, it says Nobody else needs you.

Each of those learners is one row: the name, a short line saying why this one needs you, and a single chip carrying the mark. A learner nobody has spoken about carries an amber Not marked — because that is the register’s outstanding work, and it should look like it rather than sitting quietly on a default.

Tap the chip and a sheet rises from the bottom of the screen, headed with the learner’s name, restating why the learner needs you, and offering the five marks as one list with the current one ticked. Tap one and the sheet closes. Two taps to state or change a mark, and nothing on screen while you are not changing one.

This replaced a row that carried all five marks as buttons. Thirty learners meant a hundred and fifty controls on one page, four of every five of them wrong for any given child, and a list five times longer than the class it described. The sheet sits at the bottom edge because this is the most-tapped control the product has and it is tapped on a phone, held in one hand, at twenty to eight in the morning.

Marking a learner by scanning their badge

On an Android phone running Chrome, you can also mark a learner by holding their badge against the back of the phone. Scan badges sits above the list; tap it once and the phone starts listening, with a line underneath telling you to hold a badge against the back of it. Tap the same control again — it now reads Stop scanning — and the phone stops listening immediately.

Each badge that resolves shows one green line naming the learner and the mark it made. That mark is the same mark a tap makes, recorded the same way, counted in the same figures. Nothing about the register treats a scanned learner differently from one you named, and nothing about the screen treats scanning as the proper way to do it.

Tapping is not a fallback from this. The technology that reads a badge in a browser exists only in Chrome on Android — not on an iPhone, not on a laptop, not in most other Android browsers. So on a phone that cannot do it, the control is simply not there: no greyed-out button, no message explaining what you are missing. Tapping a learner’s row is the way this register is taken, and scanning is a shortcut available to some of the people taking it.

Holding a badge down, and scanning the same child twice

A badge reader keeps reading for as long as the card is against the phone — several times a second. That is normal and it costs you nothing: the first read marks the learner, and every read after it finds a learner already marked Present and says so, without changing anything. You can rest a card on the phone, pick it up, put it back, and the register holds one statement.

If you have already said something about that child

A badge is easy to wave and hard to un-wave, so it is not allowed to overrule you.

If you have already marked a learner Absent, or Late, or Excused, or Medical, scanning their badge does not change it. Instead you are asked Change this mark?, in a question that names the learner and repeats the mark you gave them, and says that scanning would make it Present instead. Two answers: keep what you said, or record the scan. Nothing changes until you choose. While that question is on screen the reader is ignored entirely, so it cannot be dismissed by the next card that brushes the phone.

Late is included in that deliberately, even though a late child is present. You marked Late because you know when the child walked in; a card should not quietly flatten that back to Present.

When a badge does not mark anybody

Three things can go wrong, and each gets its own sentence in amber, because each one needs a different person to do something.

The badge belongs to a learner who is not on this register. A child from another class is standing at your desk. The register will not name them — it is not your roster and you cannot mark them in any case — it tells you to send them to their own class and mark your own learners by name.

No learner has been given this badge. The card is not one the school has issued to anybody. Mark the learner by name and ask the office to look at the card.

The badge has been reported lost, or it has been replaced. A card the school has written off never marks anyone, even its owner — a lost card may be in another child’s hands, which is the whole reason it was written off. Because this is one of your own learners, you are told whose card it is, so you can mark them by name, and told which of the two problems it is: the office needs to know about a lost card, while a replaced one just means you are holding last term’s.

None of those tells you to try again, because trying again would give you the same answer. The only message that asks you to retry is the one that means it: if the phone could not reach the school’s system at all, that is a connection problem and a second attempt may well work.

Nothing is filled in for you

This is the part that changed most, and it is worth understanding rather than just noticing.

The register used to arrive already answered. Every child the gate had seen sat on Present, every child it had not sat on Absent, a parent’s note moved a child to Excused, and the whole thing could be submitted untouched. On a good morning that was convenient. On every morning it meant the school might be filing twenty-one statements nobody had read, recorded in a way that was indistinguishable from twenty-one a teacher had considered.

So the pre-fill is gone. The gate’s morning is a proposal you confirm, and every other learner starts with no mark at all. The figures count what you have said and nothing else, which is why they do not reconcile until you are done. It is the same amount of work on an ordinary day — one confirmation and a handful of names — and the record it produces is one the school can stand behind.

The five marks

Each learner takes one of the same five marks.

Present — here, in the room.

Absent — not here, and you have no explanation for it.

Late — here, but not on time. For the day’s headcount this counts as being at school; the difference matters for the pattern, not for the child’s safety.

Excused — not here, and you have a reason to believe it is legitimate.

Medical — not here, for a health reason.

Excused and Medical do not settle a day by themselves, and this is the one part of the register worth reading twice. When you mark a child Excused you are usually passing on something you were told second-hand — at the gate, in the corridor, by another child. That is worth recording, and it is not the same thing as the school having agreed. So your Excused is recorded as Teacher excused — confirm: your word, on the record, waiting for the office to agree with it.

A parent’s note is different, because it comes from the one person who actually knows. It excuses the day on its own, before you touch the register, and shows as Auto-excused — confirm.

Both are waiting on the same thing — an administrator — and until that happens neither reads as a settled excuse. One word, two authors, two weights, and the register shows which is which.

Surname order, or first-name order

The list is filed by surname, under a control labelled Order offering Surname and First name.

Surname is the default because that is how a register has always been filed and how a class list is read aloud; a principal or a district official handed a list ordered by first name cannot find a child in it. But a teacher standing in front of her own class is reading faces, not a document, and often knows the children by their first names — so the other order is one tap away, and it re-files the whole list without disturbing anything you have already marked.

Why Submit is not available yet

The action bar is pinned to the bottom of the screen, so you never scroll to the end of a forty-name class to find it. Review and submit stays unavailable until two things are true: the gate’s line has been confirmed, and every remaining learner carries a mark.

Above the button, in amber, it says what is missing — and it counts the two separately. How many learners of the gate’s group are still unconfirmed is one job: open a line, read it, press once. How many learners are still to mark is a different job entirely. A single merged number would leave you hunting for which of the two it meant. A button that is greyed out and says nothing at all is worse than either.

Review, then submit

Review and submit does not submit. It opens a confirmation headed Submit this register?, restating the same four facts and the same figures as the screen behind it — not a summary written a second time, which could disagree with the thing it is confirming — and telling you plainly: Once you submit, this register is final. Only an administrator can change it afterwards. Submit register files it. Backing out changes nothing.

Two refusals are possible at that moment, and both name what to do rather than asking you to try again. If a learner was added to your class while you had the register open, the school will not file a register with a child missing from it: The class list changed while you were taking this register. Reload it and mark the learners that were added. And if a learner you confirmed as part of the gate’s group turns out to have no gate check-in after all, the claim no longer fits the record beside it: A learner in the confirmed group no longer has a gate check-in. Reload the register and mark that learner yourself.

The filed register

Confirming files it. A green Register submitted appears in place, with the time, and beneath it the sentence that matters: This register is final. Only an administrator can change it now. Every mark is then read-only to you.

That finality is deliberate, and it is worth saying why. A register that can be quietly rewritten later is not a record of what anyone stated — it is a note of what somebody last thought. A school that has to produce a register for a district official, an inquiry or a subsidy claim needs the first thing, not the second. The confirmation step exists to make the finality fair: you are told before you commit, not after. If you submit a second time, the school says so rather than accepting it: This register was already submitted. It is final, and only an administrator can change it now.

If you never take a register and the school day ends, it does not silently pass. The register opens read-only and says Register not taken — The school day ended before this register was taken. Only an administrator can record it now. That is deliberately amber rather than the calm green of a filed register, because a day nobody recorded is a miss and must not be dressed up as a success.

Submitting sends nothing to any parent. It writes the day’s record for each child, and nothing more.

How this register was taken

Beneath the finality sentence, the filed register carries a short heading — How this register was taken — and a line for each of the three ways a mark on it came to be there, with how many of them there are: Marked by name, Confirmed with the gate group, and Badge scanned in class. A way that produced no marks that morning is not listed at all.

It is there because the only question anyone genuinely asks of a register months later is whether a person actually accounted for each child, and the three answers are not the same answer. Naming a child one at a time, ruling one line through the twenty-one the gate saw and signing under it, and holding a child’s card against a phone are all your register and all binding — and a record that cannot tell them apart cannot answer the question at all.

A register filed before the school started recording this reads Not recorded. That is a statement about the record and not about you: those registers were filed by a screen that never asked the question. Nothing was withheld and nothing was lost.

If your connection drops while you are submitting

This is the ordinary case on a school field at half past seven, and it used to go badly.

When you submit, the register is sent with a one-time reference that identifies this particular submission. If the school receives it and the reply never makes it back to your phone — a dead spot, a dropped signal, a page you closed too early — pressing submit again sends the same reference. The school recognises the submission it already holds and answers with the original confirmation. Your register is filed, once, and you are told so.

Before that reference existed, the only thing the school could see was a second submission of a register that was already final, so it said exactly that — and teachers were sent to the office over registers that had filed perfectly. The reference is what lets the system tell a genuine second attempt apart from the same attempt arriving twice, and it holds even if the retry crosses the end of the school day.

If you change something on the register before pressing submit again, that is a new statement. It gets a new reference, and the school will not answer for it with the old one — it will ask you to take the register again and submit it as the new statement that it is. A second, genuinely different register for the same class and day is still refused: you get one statement per class per day, which is what makes the confirmation step fair and what makes the filed record worth anything.

What each mark becomes

This is the part worth understanding, because your mark is not the final word on its own — it is one of three signals, and the school’s record for the day is worked out from all three together. The other two are whether the child’s badge was scanned at the gate, and whether a parent has sent a note.

You marked Present or Late, and the gate saw them. No absence record is created at all. Nothing to explain, nothing for anyone to review — the commonest outcome, and correctly the quietest.

You marked Present or Late, but the gate never saw them. The day is flagged as a disagreement, shown to the office as Conflict — review. Two accounts of whether a child is on the premises do not match, and that is worth somebody’s attention: it might be a badge left at home, or it might be a child who never arrived.

You marked Absent, and no note has come. The day is recorded as Unexcused.

You marked Excused or Medical. The day is recorded as Teacher excused — confirm. Your word is on the record and the office is asked to agree with it. If a parent’s note also exists for that day, the note is the stronger evidence and the day shows as Auto-excused — confirm instead — your mark is still recorded beside it, because the two are separate facts and neither erases the other.

The office agreed. Only then does the day read simply Excused. It is the one state that means somebody with the standing to settle it has.

A parent sent a note and the child never came through the gate. Recorded as Auto-excused — confirm: the note excuses the day provisionally, and the office confirms it. You will also see the note itself waiting for you on your dashboard.

A parent sent a note but the child did come through the gate. Also a Conflict — review. A parent saying a child is at home while the gate says they walked in is precisely the contradiction nobody should discover a week later.

You have not marked anyone yet and the child has not scanned in. The day sits at Awaiting register until you submit.

If a child arrives after you have submitted

Nothing needs undoing, and nothing you submitted changes.

You filed the register at 08:05 with Michael absent. Michael walks through the gate at 08:10 and his badge is scanned. The register above stays exactly as you stated it — he is still marked absent, because at 08:05 he was — and a section appears at the foot of it headed Added after this register was taken, naming him and the time he checked in. It carries its own sentence: The register above is exactly as it was submitted. These arrivals are recorded underneath it.

This is the late-arrivals line a paper register has always had at the foot of the page, and it is the only answer that keeps both facts. Freezing the register without it would leave the school holding two filed statements — he was absent and he was here — with nothing to say which to believe. Editing the register would mean it was never a record of what anyone stated.

So marking a late arrival Absent first thing is safe. The register is a statement about the moment you took it, not a verdict on the day, and the day finishes the sentence underneath.

The school’s own record of the day corrects itself regardless: once the gate has seen him, there is nothing left to explain and the absence record for that day is removed. The register and the record are two different documents, and only one of them is supposed to be frozen.

Subject registers

Some schools take the register per subject rather than per class: the Maths teacher takes it for her Maths group, even though that group mixes learners from three classes. When your school works that way, the office sets up subject groups — a subject, the learners who take it, and the teachers who take its register — and every group you teach appears on your home screen under Subject registers · today, with Register not taken until somebody files it.

Opening a group gives you the register you already know: the same marks, the same surname order, the same one line for the learners the gate saw this morning. One thing is different, and it is stated at the top of the screen: a subject register is for staff. It records who was in your lesson; it does not change what a parent sees about the day, which still comes from the gate and from the class register where one is taken. A child marked absent from Maths is not reported to their family as absent from school.

A group has one register a day, and it can have more than one teacher — any of them may file it. If a colleague has already filed today’s, you are shown who filed it and when, rather than a second copy: two teachers each filing their own version of the same lesson would leave the school with two statements and nothing to say which is true. Subject registers do not produce a filed document, and the office sees them read-only.

What your mark changes elsewhere

Marking a learner Excused or Medical does not stay inside your class. If somebody at the gate checks that child’s badge later the same day, they are shown Expected absent today — sick note on file — so nobody goes looking for a child the school already knows is legitimately away.

The office sees every day that needs a human decision, which is to say every Conflict — review, every Auto-excused — confirm and every Teacher excused — confirm your register produced. Their decision is final and outranks any later automatic correction, so once the office has settled a day it stays settled — and it is the only thing that turns either kind of pending excuse into a plain Excused.