When the gate stops you

Most scans go through. A few do not, and the gate is deliberately loud about those — a refusal takes over the screen rather than sitting quietly in a corner, because a refusal you did not notice is worse than no system at all.

The one rule

Red means stop. Amber means pay attention. Green means it is done.

That is the whole colour language, and it never changes anywhere in MySentinel. A red screen is the only kind that means a learner must not go through.

The refusals

The school is in lockdown.

The school is in lockdown. No learner may leave.

Nothing is recorded and no learner leaves. An administrator can authorise a single exception with a reason, and both the reason and the names are kept. If you are told to let someone out during a lockdown, that authorisation has to come from an admin — it is not yours to give.

The learner’s record is inactive.

This learner’s record is inactive. An admin must reactivate it before you can check them in or out.

This usually means a learner who has left the school, or one whose record was never finished during setup. It is an office problem, not a gate problem. Send them to the office rather than trying again.

The school refused it after the fact.

The school refused this. Check with the office.

This one is different from the others, and it is the only refusal that arrives after the child has already walked through. The scan was recorded on your phone, was sent to the school, and the school would not accept it — most often because it arrived during a lockdown that started while your phone was offline.

The learner is long gone by the time you see it. The fix is a conversation with the office, not another scan.

It has already been sent.

This has already been sent to the school and can’t be changed here.

You will see this if you try to correct a receipt after it has reached the school. Corrections happen on the phone, in the moment; once the record is with the office, only the office can change it.

What a refusal does not mean

A refusal never means “scan again”. None of these are caused by a bad tap, and repeating the scan will not clear any of them — it will only record the same child twice if the problem later resolves.

If you are unsure whose badge you are holding, use Check tag. It reads a badge and tells you whose it is without recording anything at all, which makes it safe to use as often as you like.

Check tag is the only badge-reading tool in the app. It used to be listed separately as a diagnostics screen, and anyone who saved a link to that older name is taken straight to Check tag instead — same tool, one name.