Staff and teachers¶
Who does this: Staff Officer · Head of Department Where: the Employees app for files, Staff → for teaching and reviews How often: At hiring, at the start of each year, and at review time
Staff are the school's employees, in the system's own employee records — not a separate list of people kept beside them. A school that hires a cleaner and a maths teacher on the same day should not maintain two person registers.
What the school adds on top of the standard employee file is what a school needs: an Arabic legal name for the ID card, a per-school employee number, the date they actually joined, their teaching qualification and specialisation, their residency permit expiry, a WhatsApp number that is not assumed to be their mobile, and their home-country contact.
The staff file¶
Four groups of school-specific fields sit on the employee form:
| Group | Holds |
|---|---|
| Appointment | Employee number, joining date, whether they are teaching staff, visa type |
| Qualification | Qualification, specialisation subject, previous experience |
| Contact | WhatsApp number |
| Home Country | Contact name, phone and address |
Plus two tabs:
| Tab | Holds |
|---|---|
| Teaching | Their teaching assignments, and what they are class teacher or head of department of |
| Documents | Their document checklist — residency permit, passport, qualification certificate, work permit |
Details worth knowing¶
The employee number is a school series, allocated automatically, and it is what prints on a staff ID card. It is not the attendance badge number, which is meaningless on a card.
The Arabic name is not a translation. A school in the Kingdom holds a legal Arabic name and a legal English name, and prints both on the same card at once.
The joining date is not the contract start date. A teacher in their fourth one-year contract joined the school once. The contract date moves at every renewal; the joining date does not.
Residency permit expiry is recorded with the contract, beside the number, so renewing a contract keeps what the previous one said rather than overwriting it.
WhatsApp is recorded separately from the mobile. Expatriate staff commonly keep WhatsApp on a home-country number while carrying a local SIM, and school messages have to reach the number that receives them.
Teaching assignments¶
Staff → Teaching Assignments.
One assignment says: this teacher teaches this subject, to these classes, in this year — with the periods per week, and whether it is their primary subject.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Teacher | |
| Subject | |
| Academic Year | |
| Classes | One or more sections |
| Periods per Week | |
| Primary Subject | Their main teaching subject |
Assignments belong to a year¶
The same reason enrollments do. The maths teacher who took 6A last year takes 7B this year, and last year's timetable, lesson plans and mark sheets have to keep naming who actually taught them.
Rolling a year forward creates new assignments. It never edits the old ones. The Subjects Taught and Classes Taught shown on the employee form are read live from the running year — they are never a stored copy that could drift away from the history.
One rule the system enforces¶
A subject cannot be assigned to a grade that does not study it. Assigning Chemistry to a Grade 2 section otherwise turns up later as a timetable nobody can explain, or a report card row with no marks behind it.
A subject with no grades listed at all is unconstrained — that is master data nobody has filled in yet.
Class teachers and heads of department¶
- A class teacher is named on the section, under School → School Structure. This is who leave requests go to, so it is worth filling in before the term starts.
- A head of department is named on the academic department.
Both show back on the employee's own file, so you can see at a glance what a member of staff is responsible for.
Performance reviews¶
Staff → Performance Records.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Employee | Who is being reviewed |
| Academic Year, Term | When. A term is optional — a probation review lands on a date, not in a term. |
| Review Type | Probation Review · Lesson Observation · Term Review · Annual Review |
| Review Date | |
| Reviewer | The head of department, principal or supervisor who actually conducted it |
| Overall Rating | 1 Unsatisfactory · 2 Needs Improvement · 3 Meets Expectations · 4 Exceeds Expectations · 5 Outstanding |
| Review tab | Strengths, areas for development, goals for the next period |
| Employee Response tab | The employee's own comments |
The process¶
- The reviewer writes the record. It stays in Draft while they do.
- Submit to Employee — the review is now shown to the person it is about.
- The employee adds their comments and presses Acknowledge.
Reset to Draft is there for a correction before it goes out.
Two rules¶
Nobody reviews themselves
Enforced on the record, not in the form — importing last year's paper records is exactly where this goes wrong, and a review signed by its own subject is worse than no review, because it looks like one.
Non-teachers can be reviewed. A school reviews its accountant too, and refusing that would push those records back onto paper.
Who can read a review¶
| Staff member | Their own reviews only |
| Head of Department | Reviews of their own people, and the ones they conducted |
| Staff Officer | All reviews |
| Administrator | All reviews |
This is restricted at the level of the individual record, not just by hiding a menu. A head of department who can write reviews does not thereby get to read every review in the school, including their supervisor's.
Previous experience¶
Posts held before joining this school, with employer, role, country, dates, whether it was a teaching post, and a reference contact. The years are totalled on the employee's file.
An open-ended entry — "no end date recorded" — is counted up to the joining date, not up to today. Otherwise the recorded experience of a teacher who has been at the school for a decade quietly inflates by a year, every year.
Staff documents¶
The same checklist as everywhere else: residency permit, passport, qualification certificate and work permit arrive set up, and the school adds whatever else it holds. Expiry dates are recorded here and will feed the school-wide expiry watch list when it arrives. See Document checklists.