Custom Groups: how to create and use them

If you'd like parents to be able to book appointments with a member of staff that does not usually teach their child - such as the Special Education Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo), the Headteacher, specialist teacher(s), or for an Options evening - you need to set up a Custom Group. This links a teacher (or teachers) on your system to a selected group of students, so that when parents log in to book appointments they see that teacher pre-selected for them automatically.

If you need to split a class, create as many custom groups as are required to replace that class, then go to the Classes step of Configure Evening to add the custom groups to your evening, then untick the original class itself.

If the staff member you want to use is not currently listed in your system, see step 3 below.

Creating or Editing a Custom Group

1. Go to Data > Custom Groups and either click on an existing Custom Group to edit the teachers/students in that group, or on Add Custom Group to create a new one.
2. Enter a Name for the group so you can easily identify it when you need to use it, and so that parents can identify what the subject of their booking will be - for example "French - Mr Jones" or "Additional Maths - Form 4" etc.
   
   

   You should make sure that the name does not exactly match one of your existing classes. For example if you have a " History" class then you could call the custom group "History." or "History - Year 9" etc.
   
   You cannot rename an existing Custom Group. You will need to first delete it, then recreate it with the new name.
   
   Deleting a group will not affect any existing bookings made against that group.

Change Teacher Membership and Change Student Membership allow you to add or edit the teachers and students involved with the group - see below for more details.

3. Change Teacher Membership allows you to specify the teachers that will be assigned to the group. Choose the teacher(s) you want and click Update Membership.
   

   If the teacher you want is not listed, it means that they are not currently in your system and you will need to manually add them by following this guide: Manually Adding or Editing a Teacher
   
   If you chose more than one teacher you can then specify that one is the Main Teacher - this will be the default one to take bookings when you use the custom group.

   

   Where there is more than one teacher the group will act like a Shared Class ( for those teachers added to the group only) and the options listed in the article on using the Class Teachers page will be available when you are configuring your evening.

4. Change Student Membership allows you to specify the students that will be assigned to the group. Choose the combinations of students you want - this acts in exactly the same way as the students filter used when setting up an evening or event - then click Update Membership.
   

5. Finally click Save to save your group.

Once your groups are created you can use them when creating evenings, both

• in the student filter that defines who can log in to make bookings
  
  and/or
• in the same way as you use a class (the groups will appear underneath your normal classes in Configure Evening > Classes and need to be ticked to add them to an evening).