Pupils at risk
Who this is for: directors · Where: At risk in the sidebar. The sidebar badge shows how many pupils are in the high tier.
What this page is for
An early warning. It surfaces pupils whose recent record suggests they need attention, so a problem is noticed in November rather than in June.
It is rebuilt once a week
The board is recalculated every Monday at midnight, and the date it was computed for is shown at the top of the page. What you are looking at is a stored result, not a live sum — which is what makes two other things possible: everybody opening the page on the same day sees the same numbers, and the board can tell you what changed since last week.
If you need it sooner — you have just corrected a batch of records, or the school is newly set up and has never been calculated — use Recalculate now. It can be used again after a few minutes.
The signal genuinely does not change from one day to the next. A daily rebuild would produce noise, and "worse than last week" would stop meaning anything if the gap between two numbers kept changing.
How the score works
A pupil is measured on five areas: marks, attendance, homework, behaviour and engagement. Each area is looked at in two completely different ways, and either one on its own is enough to raise a concern.
1. How far from their classmates
The pupil's figures are compared against their own class — or their year group, or the whole school, whichever is the first with at least eight pupils to compare against. The page tells you which was used.
This is what catches the pupil everyone has quietly stopped noticing.
A class of twenty with one pupil on thirty absences has its average wrecked by that pupil — who then looks unremarkable against a figure they created themselves. The comparison therefore uses the midpoint of the class, which one extreme case cannot move.
2. How far from where they used to be
The pupil's last 30 days are compared against their own previous six months.
This is the half the old board did not have, and it is the more important one. A pupil who has fallen from 9.3 to 5.8 in a month still has a perfectly respectable average — so an average-based board says nothing at all about them, while a teacher would recognise instantly that something has happened.
A pupil can be flagged on this alone, with no comparison against anybody else. That is intentional.
Recent events count for more
An absence yesterday matters more than one in September. Everything is weighted so that a record loses about half its weight every three weeks. A pupil who stopped coming in October does not stay flagged all year on the strength of it, and a pupil who stopped coming last month is not buried under a good autumn.
Thin evidence is treated as thin evidence
A pupil with two marks is not ranked alongside a pupil with forty on the same figure. The fewer records there are behind a score, the more it is pulled back towards what is ordinary for their class. The panel tells you how many records a score rests on.
What lowers a score
Some things count in a pupil's favour, and they reduce the score rather than adding to it:
| What | Effect |
|---|---|
| Recognitions awarded in the last 60 days | somebody is actively noticing this pupil positively |
| A parent meeting held or booked in the last 30 days | the conversation has already started |
| An active individual support plan | the pupil is already being supported |
| Absences a parent has explained | evidence of an engaged family, not of risk |
Together these can reduce a score by at most 40%. A well-supported pupil who is falling still appears on the board.
The tiers
| Score | Tier |
|---|---|
| 70 or more | High |
| 45–69 | Medium |
| 25–44 | Low |
| under 25 | OK — not listed |
| no records at all | Not visible — see below |
A tier goes up immediately, but takes two weeks to come down. A pupil sitting around the boundary would otherwise appear and disappear from the list week after week, and a list that behaves like that is one people stop believing.
The score is arithmetic on attendance, marks, homework, behaviour and engagement. It knows nothing about illness, family circumstances, or a pupil who is fine and simply had a bad fortnight. Treat a high tier as a reason to ask a question, never as a conclusion.
Excused absences are not counted. Only unexcused ones score.
Using the board
- Biggest movers this week sits near the top: the pupils whose score rose most since the previous Monday. This is usually where something new shows up, because a pupil who was fine last week and is not fine now is exactly the case nobody has noticed yet.
- The donut shows the whole school across the tiers.
- The by-class bar chart shows where the concentrations are — often the single most useful view, since a whole struggling class is a different problem from three struggling pupils.
- The table can be searched, filtered by class, and sorted by score or by how much a pupil moved. The Change column shows the week-on-week difference; a pupil with no previous week is marked new.
- Clicking a pupil opens a panel with the two or three sentences that produced them — "average fell from 9.3 to 5.8", "11 unexcused absences, against a class median of 1" — then which areas the risk sits in, anything that is already helping, what they were compared against, and how many records the score rests on.
- Export Excel produces the list you are currently looking at, carrying those same sentences, for a meeting.
Clicking a tier card or a class bar filters the table to it.
The "Not visible" tab
Pupils with nothing recorded at all for six weeks appear on their own tab rather than being scored.
They are not low-risk. They are invisible, and that is its own finding: a pupil nobody has written anything about for six weeks is a pupil nobody can see. In practice this is usually a gap in what staff entered rather than a fact about the child — which is exactly why it is worth knowing.
During holidays almost nobody has recent records, so most of the school lands here. That is correct behaviour, not a fault.
The parental-consent gate
If your school has enabled parental consent, pupils without consent on record are never scored at all — they do not appear in the table, the donut, the class chart or the movers panel, and no result is stored for them.
Scoring and ranking pupils by risk is automated profiling. Where a school declares consent as its lawful basis, a pupil without it must not be profiled — so the gate sits inside the calculation rather than hiding the result afterwards. Recording their marks and attendance continues as normal; that is a legal obligation the parent cannot opt out of. What stops is the analysis on top.
This means your totals here may be lower than your roster.
Rules and limits
- Directors only.
- Rebuilt every Monday at midnight; Recalculate now is available in between, but not more than once every few minutes.
- Active pupils in active classes, from active journals.
- Unexcused absences only.
- A comparison group needs at least eight pupils; below that, a pupil is judged only against their own history.
- Behaviour notes from a single teacher can carry at most 60% of that area, so one person cannot put a pupil on the board alone.
- The weekly list names at most 15 pupils, or 5% of the roster, whichever is larger.
- Results are kept for 24 months, then deleted.
- Non-consented pupils are never scored where consent is required.
- Safeguarding reports are deliberately not an input — see below.
What this board deliberately does not use
Nothing from Mâna Ridicată. A pupil named in a safeguarding case does not score higher here. That module has a deliberate conflict-of-interest firewall, and leaking the existence of a case into a general dashboard would defeat it — and that pupil is already inside a stronger process with its own deadlines.
Troubleshooting
"A pupil I am worried about is not listed." Their score is under 25, or they are on the Not visible tab. The signals are marks, attendance, homework, behaviour and engagement — a pupil struggling in ways none of those capture will not appear. The board is not a substitute for a teacher noticing.
"The page says the first weekly analysis has not run yet." The school has never been calculated. Press Recalculate now; from then on it rebuilds every Monday.
"A pupil's marks are good but they are flagged." Look at the sentences in the panel. It is most likely that they have fallen from their own previous level, which is measured separately from whether their marks are good in absolute terms.
"A pupil dropped off the list even though nothing improved." Scores are recency-weighted. If the concerning records are now months old and nothing new has been recorded, the score falls by design.
"Their score barely moved after I corrected their records." The board is weekly. Press Recalculate now to rebuild it immediately.
"Almost everybody is under 'Not visible'." There are no recent records — normally because it is a holiday. See above.
"The counts are lower than my roster." Either most pupils are fine, or the consent gate is filtering. See above.
"The badge and the page disagree." The badge is fetched when the sidebar loads. Reload to resync.