Look up a student

Looking a student up needs a connection. Taking the register does not.

That difference catches people out, because you reach this screen from places that work offline — so it is worth knowing before you are standing in a corridor trying to check something.

Finding a student

On the Classes tab, tap Find a student… at the top, then type a name or an admission number. You need two characters before anything is searched — one letter shows Keep typing to search… rather than a list, which is easy to mistake for the app ignoring you.

Only the first 50 matches are listed — alphabetically by surname — and nothing says so, which is worth knowing if you search two letters in a large class.

If nothing comes back you will see No students match “…” with what you typed, so you can tell a typo from a genuine miss.

You can also open a student by tapping their name on the class register, or in an at-risk list. That opens the same screen — so it needs a connection too, even though the register itself does not.

You only find students you teach. A colleague’s class will not appear, and if you have not been assigned any classes yet, every search comes back empty — check the Classes tab first.

What you can see

Each student has three tabs — Profile, Performance and Attendance — and each loads separately, so one being slow does not hold up the others.

What you see depends on your relationship to that student, and the app tells you which one you are:

	Form teacher of their class	Subject teacher only
Profile, class, date of birth	yes	yes
Performance, including class position¹	yes	yes
Attendance	yes	yes
Guardian names and contact details	yes	no
Health information	yes	no

¹ Class positions only appear once the term’s report cards have been compiled. Until then the screen says so and shows no position — that is not a limit on what you may see.

A form teacher sees a You are the form teacher badge on the profile. A subject teacher sees a note saying that guardian contacts and health records are visible to the form teacher — so if you are hunting for a parent’s phone number and it is not there, the screen tells you who does have it.

That split is deliberate: contact details and health notes follow the person responsible for the child’s welfare, not everyone who teaches them.

Performance is more than your own subject

A subject teacher’s yes in that table is not limited to the subject they teach. Performance shows the child’s results across every subject, and their position in the class.

Neither Performance nor Attendance says which period it covers, and they do not fall back the same way.

• Performance shows the current term; with no school calendar it drops to 1st Term figures.
• Attendance shows the current term’s dates; with no calendar it quietly widens to the last twelve months.

That second one is the trap, and it hides exactly what you are looking for. A twelve-month window spreads a recent run of absences across as many as a hundred and eighty school days.

A child who has missed the last three weeks shows about 92% measured across a year — and about 75% measured across the term. Same child, same absences. Nothing on screen tells you which one you are reading.

When there is no signal

This screen needs a connection, even from the register

Student lookup and all three tabs read from the school each time. None of what they show is stored on your phone.

With no signal you will get Couldn’t search, or an error in place of a tab’s contents. Nothing is broken and nothing is lost — there is simply nothing to show. Try again where you have a signal.

The trap is the register: it works offline, and tapping a child’s name there opens this screen, which does not.

Your students’ names and admission numbers are kept on the phone — that is how the register works without a signal — but the search does not use them, and the three tabs have nothing stored at all.

Opening a profile first does not save it

If you know you will need a student’s details somewhere without coverage, look them up and write down what you need before you go.

The app does not keep a copy. Leaving the screen discards what was loaded, so coming back to the same student offline fails exactly as if you had never opened it.

If a student disappears

An error is not always a signal problem. If a student moves to a class you do not teach, they drop out of search and their profile opens but will not load — the Profile tab explains that you can only view students in the classes you teach, but Performance and Attendance show a bare technical error, with nothing to say the student is no longer one of yours.

The same happens to last year’s students when a new session starts.

And if you were a child’s form teacher and they move to a class where you only teach a subject, you keep the academic tabs but lose guardian contacts and health information. Nothing announces the change: the You are the form teacher badge simply disappears and the subject-teacher note takes its place.

Other screens that need a connection

This is not the only one. Messages, alerts and at-risk lists do too; the Teachers overview has the full list.