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Setting up your school requires the Owner or DSL role. If you do not have one of these roles, ask your school’s Signal administrator for help.
Signal provides a role-specific onboarding wizard on first login that guides you through the key setup steps. The detailed settings reference below covers everything the wizard introduces.
When your school first joins Signal, there are a few key areas to configure before your team can start recording safeguarding concerns. You do not need to complete everything at once — you can return to settings at any time to make changes.

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Setup checklist

1
Set up year groups and classes
2
Year groups define your school’s academic structure — Reception through to Year 13. Each year group contains one or more classes (such as 7A, 7B, or 8Red).
3
Students are assigned to a year group and class, and these are used for filtering throughout Signal — in incident lists, insights, alert rules, and student searches.
4
Go to Settings > Year Groups & Classes to create your year groups and add classes to each one.
5
If you plan to connect your MIS (such as Arbor), year groups, classes, and students can be synced automatically. You may want to set up your MIS integration first to save time.
6
Add incident categories
7
Categories are how you classify safeguarding concerns. Common examples include Physical, Emotional, Neglect, Sexual, Online Safety, Attendance, and Behaviour.
8
Student incidents and staff incidents have separate category sets, so you can tailor each one independently.
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Go to Settings > Categories to create your categories. For more detail, see Setting up categories.
10
Configure locations
11
Locations represent the places where incidents might occur — classrooms, playgrounds, corridors, off-site locations, and so on.
12
Go to Settings > Locations to add your school’s locations. For more detail, see Setting up locations.
13
Add external agencies
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Agencies are the external organisations your school works with on safeguarding cases — social services, police, CAMHS, school nursing teams, and others.
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Go to Settings > Agencies to add your agency list. For more detail, see Setting up agencies.
16
Invite staff and assign roles
17
Add your colleagues to Signal and assign each person a role. Signal uses a hierarchical role system:
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RoleWhat they can doOwnerFull access to everything, including account managementDSLFull safeguarding access, including staff incidents and settingsDeputy DSLSame access as DSLAdminCan manage settings but has limited incident accessViewerRead-only access to student incidentsMemberAppears in the system but cannot log in
19
Go to Settings > Staff to invite team members and assign roles. For more detail, see Managing staff.
20
Upload safeguarding policies
21
Upload your school’s safeguarding policy documents so that Signal’s AI can automatically match relevant policies to incidents.
22
Go to Settings > Policies to upload your documents. For more detail, see Adding policies.
23
Set up workflows
24
Workflows automatically take action when incidents matching certain criteria are logged — alerting staff, emailing parents, or restricting visibility. For example, you might set up a workflow to alert all DSLs whenever a Physical incident is recorded for a student in the Children in Care group.
25
Go to Settings > Workflows to create your first workflow. For more detail, see Workflows.
26
Set up MIS integration (optional)
27
If your school uses Arbor, you can connect it to Signal to automatically sync student, staff, contact, and attendance data. This saves significant manual data entry.
28
Go to Settings > Integrations to connect your MIS. For a detailed walkthrough, see MIS Integration.

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Tips for getting started quickly

You do not need to have everything perfect before your team starts using Signal. Begin with the essentials — categories, a few locations, and your staff — then refine as you go.
  • Start with categories and staff. These are the minimum requirements for recording incidents. You can add locations, agencies, and policies later.
  • Connect your MIS early. If you use Arbor, setting up the integration first will automatically populate your year groups, classes, students, and staff.
  • Create a few alert rules. Even basic rules (such as alerting DSLs on all incidents) ensure nothing is missed from day one.
  • Upload your core policies. Start with your main safeguarding policy and child protection policy. You can add more over time.
  • Invite a small group first. Consider onboarding your safeguarding team before rolling out to all staff, so you can answer questions and refine your setup.