Cover when a teacher is away

A register belongs to its teacher. Only the form teacher takes a form class’s daily register, and only a subject class’s own teachers take its subject register — which is right on every ordinary day and a problem on the day that teacher is off sick. Cover is how the office hands those registers to somebody else for exactly the days the teacher is away, without changing who the class belongs to.

Arranging cover

Arrange cover asks three things, in order.

1. Who is away? Choose the teacher. Their registers appear underneath — the form class they take, if any, and every subject class they teach — with how many learners each one holds.
2. First day and Last day. A cover runs from the start of the first day to the end of the last, in the school’s own days, and can be arranged up to a month at a time. Cover for a later week can be arranged today; it simply does nothing until its first day.
3. Who takes it, for each register. Different registers can go to different people: the form class to one colleague, the Grade 11 Physical Sciences class to the other science teacher. Nobody — leave it leaves a register uncovered, which is the honest answer when nobody will be in that lesson.

A reason is optional and stays with the office: Sick, Training, On leave or Other. The covering teacher sees the name of the colleague they are covering for and the dates, never the reason.

Anyone who holds the teacher role or the school administrator role can cover. Gate officers cannot: a register is a teacher’s statement about who was in the room, and the gate already has its own record. Arranging cover does not ask for your passkey. It is a routine, daily piece of office work; instead, every arrangement and every early end is written to the school’s audit trail with who did it, and stays listed on this screen.

What the covering teacher gets

Exactly the registers they were given, on exactly those days, and the learner list each register needs. They find them on their home screen under Covering today, take them the way they take their own, and the register says at the top that they are covering and for whom. When it is filed it carries both names — who filed it, and whose register it is — so a register taken on a cover day is never mistaken for the regular teacher’s.

A cover does not hand over anything else. The absent teacher’s sick notes, pickup approvals and late pickups stay where they were, because those are decisions about a family, not a record of a lesson, and a colleague standing in for a day should not be making them. The day after the last day, the registers are simply gone from the covering teacher’s screen; nobody has to remember to take them back.

When the office takes a register

The office does not take registers directly. When there is nobody to stand in, choose Me (office) as the one who takes it. The register then appears on this screen against your name, marked Covered by you, with Take register beside it, and you take it exactly as a teacher would. Doing it this way means a register taken by the office is attributed like any other covered register — who took it, and for which absent teacher — rather than appearing as an office override with no story behind it.

The cover screen

The screen is in three parts. Cover today lists every register being covered today, grouped by the absent teacher, with who is covering each one and whether the register has been taken yet — Register taken or Not taken yet. This is the list to glance at mid-morning: an untaken covered register is a lesson nobody has accounted for. Coming up lists cover already arranged for later days. Ended early keeps the arrangements that were stopped before their last day.

End cover stops an arrangement at once, for example when the teacher comes back a day early. It asks first — End this cover now? — because whoever was covering loses the registers immediately. Registers already taken under the cover stay exactly as they were filed.