Covers & Cancelled Classes

When a teacher is away, a scheduled period has to go one of two ways: somebody else teaches it, or it doesn’t happen at all. The Substitutions page handles both, period by period, for a single date.

One decision per period, per date

A period on a given date can have a cover or be cancelled — never both. Choosing one replaces the other, so you can always change your mind without leaving a contradictory record behind. Neither one touches the underlying timetable: the next week runs as normal.

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The difference between the two

	Assign a cover	Cancel the class
Use it when	Another teacher can take the period	Nobody can take it — the lesson simply won’t run
Students and parents see	The period with the covering teacher’s name	The period struck through and marked Cancelled, with your reason
Class register	Owed as usual — the covering teacher fills it in	Not owed, and cannot be filled in
Attendance	Taken as usual	Cannot be taken
Register compliance	Counted as a scheduled period	Not counted — it never should have happened

That last row is the practical reason to cancel a class rather than just leave it alone. An untouched period still counts as scheduled, so an unlogged lesson shows up as the teacher failing to fill in their register. Cancelling it removes the expectation.

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Cancel a class

1. Open Scheduling → Substitutions from the sidebar.

2. Pick the Date, then pick the Absent teacher. Every period that teacher was due to teach on that date is listed under Periods to cover.

3. Find the period you want to call off and click the ban icon (🚫) beside its Assign button.

4. Enter a Reason — optional, but it’s what students and parents see on their timetable, so “Teacher off sick, no cover available” is far more useful than nothing.

5. Confirm with Cancel the class.

The period now shows a Cancelled badge with the reason beneath it.

Cancelling removes an arranged cover

If the period already had a substitute assigned, the confirmation dialog says so. Going ahead removes that cover — the class will not happen at all, and the teacher who was covering is no longer expected.

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Put a cancelled class back

Click Restore class on the cancelled period. It returns to the normal timetable, becomes available for a cover again, and the register is owed as usual.

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Who sees a cancellation

Who	Where it shows
Students	Their timetable and home screen — struck through and marked Cancelled. A cancelled period is never shown as the lesson happening now or up next.
Parents	The child’s Today at school list, struck through with the reason
The teacher	My Substitutions → Your cancelled classes, and the period stops being listed as a register they still owe
Administrators	The Covers & cancellations list for that date, Week mode on the timetable, and the audit log

Students and parents are notified

Cancelling a period pushes a notification to every student who actually sits in it, and their linked guardians — in the app and to their device. The message names the subject, the class, the day and the period, and carries your reason:

Class cancelled — Mathematics Mathematics (Grade X-A) on Mon 5 Oct, Period 3 is cancelled. Teacher off sick, no cover available

Putting the class back on — whether by Restore class or by assigning a cover after all — sends a matching “Class back on” notification, because the people told it was cancelled are the people who need to know it isn’t.

Who is and isn't told

For a regular subject, that’s the class’s current roster. For an elective, it’s only the students enrolled in that offering — the rest of the class is in a different room and is never told their lesson was cancelled. Students who have left the class are not notified either.

Arranging or changing a cover sends nothing: who teaches the lesson changes, but the lesson still happens, and notifying on every cover would train people to ignore the ones that matter.

Notifications go to the app and the device, not email. A schedule change is time-sensitive, and a teacher off sick can mean five cancelled periods at once — emailing every guardian five times would be costly and quickly ignored. Tell us if you’d rather cancellations also went out by email.

Cancelling a whole day

There’s no single “cancel this teacher’s whole day” button. Pick the teacher and date, then cancel each listed period — every period they were due to teach that day is already in front of you. If the whole school is closed, use a holiday on the academic calendar instead; that’s a school-wide day off rather than a handful of called-off lessons.

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Seeing it on the timetable

The Timetable grid has two modes, switched from the toggle above the grid:

Mode	What it shows	What a click does
Pattern	The recurring weekly timetable — “Maths, Period 3, every Tuesday”. No dates, no covers, no cancellations.	Edits the pattern itself, for every week
Week	One real week, with dates in the day headers. Covered periods are tagged Covered by …; cancelled ones are struck through with their reason.	Opens Substitutions for that date and teacher

Use ‹ and › to move between weeks, and This week to jump back.

Pattern editing is switched off in Week mode — on purpose

A cell in Week mode means one specific date. If the same click could also rewrite the pattern, it would be far too easy to change every future Tuesday while trying to fix a single one. So in Week mode the grid stops editing the pattern and sends you to Substitutions instead.

Printing a week

The download button follows the mode you’re in:

• Pattern mode gives you the plain timetable — the generic wall chart, unchanged.
• Week mode gives you a PDF headed Week of 13 – 19 Oct 2026, with dates in the day headers, cancelled subjects struck through, covering teachers named, and a short legend at the foot. This is the version worth pinning up in a staff room, because it tells people what is actually happening.

What students see

A student’s My Timetable carries the same tags for the current week, so checking Thursday’s lessons on a Tuesday shows a class that’s already been called off rather than one that looks like it’s still running.

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Permissions

Arranging a cover and cancelling a class both need the timetable: manage permission — the same permission that edits the timetable itself. Teachers without it can see the outcome on their own schedule but can’t cancel their own classes; that stays an office decision.