Welfare Notes allow school staff to log observations, pastoral and welfare notes about students on Satchel One which can be accessed from a range of locations.

When looking for a particular student, you can either click on a student or type their name into the search bar at the top of your page where you will be taken to the students profile.

Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Welfare Notes’ tab and select ‘Create note’.

Depending on your MIS set-up, you may see relevant student inclusion data under the student’s name, as well as their recent login activity to the right.

Now, you can write a note about this student, whether it be health or medical needs, behavioural notes or anything else you may need to note to yourself or communicate to other members of staff.

You can also choose to add multiple attachments by clicking ‘Attach file’ . A paperclip icon will appear to indicate an attachment has been added when viewing a Welfare Note.

If this note is only required for your own reference, you can simply click 'Save'.

If you'd like this information to be made easily accessible to your colleagues, you could choose to toggle the ‘Share’ switch at the bottom of the page; this will send an instant notification to all staff that teach this student, alerting them that a new note has been added which they should read.

💡 The first time you share a note, you’ll receive a pop-up explaining that it will be broadcast to staff at your school but it will never be visible to students and parents. Please confirm this to proceed.

Once your note has been saved and shared, you can see who has viewed the shared note by clicking ‘Viewed by…’.

When a note has been shared, any staff that have not yet read the note will be able to see a blue flashing dot over the student's name around Satchel One; this indicates that there is a new shared note. The flashing dot will disappear once the note has been read.

If there’s a Welfare Note that you feel is particularly important and you'd like to see this each time you visit a student's Welfare Notes, you can click the pin icon in the top right corner of the note. This will ‘pin’ the information to the top of the Welfare Notes tab so it’s easy to see each time you visit the student’s profile.

💡The note will only be pinned for you and will not affect your colleagues unless you are a SENDCO.

Notifications for Welfare Notes can be managed by individuals within 'Account Settings'.

By scrolling to the 'Manage Notifications' area, staff will be able to opt in and out of both web browser alerts and emails notifications depending on their preference.

When a new note is shared, staff that teach the student (and anyone with the SENDCO role in Satchel One) will see a notification on the bell icon of the web browser.

Staff can follow this link to view the note and can also click 'See all notifications' and filter by 'Welfare Notes' to see every notification of this type they have received.

If you are SENDCO staff and wish to receive notifications for all shared Welfare Notes, even if you’re not linked to these students via classes, you can set this up by going to Account Settings and setting your role to ‘SENDCo’. You will then be able to enable notifications for All Shared Welfare Notes.

As an Admin user, you can also change a member of staff’s role. To do so, please go to Manage Users.

As a SENDCo member of staff, the notes you pin affect the view for all staff across the school and those pinned notes will be displayed at the front of all others, with the most recently pinned item appearing first. For this reason, SENDCOs may wish to create and pin high priority notes so that these are not overlooked.

As a SENDCo or Admin you can also choose to edit or delete any Welfare Notes, whereas other staff can only edit or delete notes they have created themselves.

Staff can find student Welfare Notes in various locations on Satchel One, including:

You can use the filter option to view your personal notes only or shared notes only at any time, as well as using the ‘Search notes’ bar to look for keywords you’d like to find.

When you’ve chosen your filtering options, you can click the ‘PDF’ button at the top right which will give you a summary of those notes.