For principals, on a browser

The principal's console

You share almost the whole console with your admin. What is distinctly yours is the oversight and the approvals: who is in class right now, who arrived when, and the handful of decisions Bellmeir deliberately sends to a person instead of letting a record change itself.

Read this alongside the admin guide. A principal and an admin share almost the whole console, so the module-by-module walkthrough lives once, in the admin web console guide. This page covers what is specifically yours: the line between the two roles, and the decisions that only a principal should be making.

Principal or admin: where the line falls

The two roles overlap heavily on purpose, so the school never stops because one person is away. Four things sit on the admin's side of the line, and they are all about creating rather than running.

CapabilityPrincipalAdmin
The setup wizard, one time school onboarding
Creating logins, deactivating users, resetting passwords
Marking a class register directly
Entering marks directly
Approving attendance corrections
Approving leave and acknowledging day notices
Publishing exam results to families
Reviewing lesson plans
Overriding a teacher's presence record
Managing staff, the calendar and the timetable
Fees, payroll, transport, infirmary, library, the registers

The reason the register and mark entry are not yours is not seniority, it is authorship. Attendance belongs to the class teacher and marks belong to the subject teacher, and a record is worth more when the person who observed it is the person who wrote it. Where a teacher genuinely cannot, the admin fills in and the record says so.

Your morning: Live and presence

Live and presence is the screen to open first, and it answers two different questions behind two tabs.

  • Live, what is happening right now: which period each class is in, which teacher should be with them, which registers are still unmarked, and which classes have a cover problem
  • Review a day, the presence roster for any past date. When somebody asks "what time did she come in on the 12th", this is the answer, and it is a different question from today's register
An informed absence reads differently from an unexplained one. If a teacher has filed a running-late notice, the live board shows them as late, informed rather than simply absent. It is still a cover problem, it is just no longer a mystery.

The approvals that are yours

Bellmeir deliberately routes a handful of decisions to a person rather than letting a record change itself. These are the ones that land on you.

Attendance corrections

A teacher who marked a child wrongly raises a correction rather than quietly rewriting the register. You approve or reject it on Corrections. This is what makes an attendance record a record.

Leave, including half days

Leaves and notices holds every application. A half day carries the session the person will be away for, so you know which periods need covering. Approving a half day stamps it as half a day, and the monthly summary counts it as half a present day for payroll.

Day notices, which you acknowledge rather than approve

"I will be in by 9:30." Nothing is deducted and nothing reaches payroll. Acknowledging it is a statement that the office knows. If somebody refiles for the same day because their plan changed, it returns to pending so you see it again.

Publishing exam results

Publishing reaches every family in the school at once, so it asks you to confirm first. So does unpublishing, because a report card that disappears is as loud as one that arrives.

Lesson plan review

Open a teacher's plan, read it, and leave your comments on it. The teacher sees your feedback against the plan itself.

Grievances

Parent concerns raised from the app arrive here with a trail, so a complaint has a status rather than living in somebody's inbox.

Staff hours, and the three screens that answer three questions

These look similar and are not interchangeable. Knowing which is which saves a lot of arguing.

  • Staff attendance, today's register: present, absent, half day or on leave, plus hours. One date across everybody, which is the morning round
  • Staff timings, the date-range report: who has been arriving at what time, over a week or a month
  • Live and presence, Review a day, the presence roster for one past date

Two things worth knowing about the numbers so you can trust them:

  • Teachers tap to check in, so their arrival is a real timestamp. Everybody else is written in from the gate register by the office, so a blank row means the paperwork has not been done, not that nobody turned up
  • If the office records somebody as present without an observed time, the row stays timeless rather than inventing an arrival. Reporting the moment the clerk clicked would create a late mark for somebody who was in at 07:55 and forgot to tap

Lateness is measured against your school's start time plus a grace period you set in Settings. If no start time is configured, the report says so instead of showing zeroes, because a column of zeroes reads as "nobody was ever late".

Every member of staff is an employee, not just a login. You, the accountant, the doctor, the librarian and the receptionist all have a payslip, a leave balance and a row on the register. That is why My HR is on your own sidebar too.

Academic leadership

  • Timetable and Substitutions, build the week, and cover an absent teacher with suggested substitutes rather than a phone call round the staff room
  • Exams and exam analytics, grade distribution, subject comparison and how a class moved between exams
  • Syllabus, coverage per class and subject, which is the honest version of "are we on track"
  • Observations and lesson plans, the two records of teaching quality
  • Discipline, every incident in the school, and resolving one is an office act rather than the filing teacher's
  • Teacher assignments in settings, the class by subject by teacher mapping, and the place you set each section's class teacher
Assign a class teacher to every section. Daily attendance is marked by the section's class teacher and by nobody else. A section with no class teacher has nobody who can mark it, and the register will simply sit unmarked.

Reading the numbers honestly

Two rules run through every screen in the console, and both exist so the figures stay worth reading.

  • Unmarked is not zero. A register nobody has opened yet shows as unmarked. Averages and rankings skip it, so at 9:15 the classes that have not marked yet do not fill your worst-attendance list
  • Colour means state, never decoration. A tinted figure is a threshold you set being breached, not a designer wanting variety. You set those thresholds in Settings

Reaching families

  • Announcements, a broadcast message to the groups you choose
  • Circulars, a paperless notice with an attachment, and a record of who has read it
  • Parent meetings, set the dates and slot lengths; teachers see their own bookings
An announcement cannot be edited after it is sent, only withdrawn. It has already reached parents' phones, so quietly rewriting it would be a fiction. Everything that has not left the building can be corrected in place.

Everything else, module by module

Students, admissions, attendance oversight, fees, payroll, transport, the infirmary, the library, the front office, certificates, stores, labs, maintenance, clubs, houses, alumni, the calendar and settings are all yours and all documented in one place: the admin web console guide.