Running a round of parent–teacher meetings

A round is created by leadership or admin — not by a teacher — and covers either the whole school or a named set of roster groups. It carries its own booking window, which is deliberately separate from the day the meetings happen: booking usually opens a week ahead and closes the night before.

A round stays in draft until somebody opens it. Families are only ever sent rounds that are open or closed, so a half-built round cannot be booked into by a family who found the page early.

• Title, the roster groups it covers, and the booking window.
• Leaving the groups empty means the whole school.
• Only management and admin can open a round. A teacher cannot.

Each teacher offers their own times against the open round, with a room or a video link. Slots are short and explicit rather than a general availability window, because a family needs to know when to arrive rather than when you are broadly free.

A teacher cannot offer the same moment twice, and an overlapping slot is refused when it is created. This is checked on the server, so it holds even if two tabs are open.

A family sees the slots for the round, books one, and sees their own booking in full. Somebody else's booking shows only as taken — never who took it, because a slot reading booked by a named family would tell every other parent who attends the school.

When booking is not open, the page says why rather than only that it is shut. Booking opens on a date, has closed, or the round has not been opened yet are three different answers, and only one of them means come back later.

After the conversation, the slot carries an agenda and notes, and any number of actions — each with an owner and a due date. This is what turns a round of meetings from an evening into a record: a booking system that stops at confirmed leaves nothing behind to follow up.

Only staff can write a meeting up, and a teacher can only write up meetings that are theirs. Leadership and admin can write up any meeting in the round.

• Agenda and notes sit on the slot itself, alongside who wrote them and when.
• Actions carry an owner and an optional due date, and are either open or done.
• Writing notes is what makes the outcome visible to the family.

The notes and actions reach the family, who can mark that they have read them. That acknowledgement is stored as the moment it happened rather than a flag, so a school chasing a follow-up can tell the difference between a family who has not read the outcome and a meeting nobody wrote up.

Those two states look almost identical from the outside and mean opposite things: one needs a reminder to the family, the other needs a reminder to the teacher.