Running a student-led conference

A conference is scheduled by a teacher or leadership against a named student, with a date and a time. It opens as a slot with nobody booked into it.

Staff can change anything on the record — the student, the class, the date, the time, the status and the prep. That breadth exists so a teacher can fix a mistake made by anyone, not so they are expected to fill the prep in themselves.

Families book a slot and can release it again. Those are the only two fields their role may touch — the booking state and who booked it — so a family cannot reschedule the meeting or edit anything the child has written.

That limit is applied to the request rather than to the screen, so it holds whatever a browser sends.

The student chooses the goals they want to talk about, the evidence they will show, and writes a reflection. These three fields are the only ones a student's role can change, and they are the substance of the meeting.

This is what separates a student-led conference from a parent–teacher meeting: the child arrives with a case they have assembled, rather than sitting alongside while two adults discuss them. If the prep is empty, the conference is a parents' evening with an extra chair.

• Goals, evidence and reflection belong to the student.
• A student cannot move the slot, book it, or close it.
• Prep can be edited right up to the meeting.

Closing the conference is a staff action, and the prep stays on the record afterwards. A completed conference is a durable account of what a child said about their own learning — which is worth more later than the fact the meeting occurred.

A slot nobody booked simply stays open. It is not recorded as a missed meeting, because an unbooked slot is as likely to mean too many slots as an absent family.

Conferences are filtered to the students a caller may see, worked out from their session when the request arrives. A student sees their own, a family sees their child's, and staff see the school's.

Asking for a conference outside that scope is answered as not found rather than as forbidden, so a conference id cannot be used to confirm that a record exists.