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Moving a school onto a new safeguarding system is not a single switch. Signal onboarding runs in six stages, and each one is designed so you never lose access to your records or make an irreversible decision before you are ready. You will not be doing all of this alone. Stages 1 to 4 are yours to drive at your own pace. Stages 5 and 6 are done for you by the Signal team, with you approving the outcome. You can follow the same journey inside Signal itself. Go to Go live setup in the sidebar, where a guided tour walks you through each stage and a checklist tracks what your school still has to do.
The Signal setup guide showing the onboarding stages, with the Migrate and Tidy Your Data stage open

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The six stages at a glance

1

Try the demo

Explore a fully working version of Signal with sample data. No commitment.
2

Subscribe

Switch on your live school account. Demo data is cleared out.
3

Connect your MIS

Students, staff, classes, and attendance flow in automatically.
4

Import your previous records

Bring your existing safeguarding history across from your old system.
5

Get a tailored review

We analyse how your school actually records concerns and recommend how Signal should be configured for you.
6

Migrate and tidy your data

We apply the agreed configuration and clean up your imported records to match it.

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Stage 1: Try the demo

Every school starts with a demo. You get a complete, working copy of Signal loaded with realistic sample students, staff, incidents, and attendance, so you can judge it properly rather than watching a sales walkthrough. Use this stage to test the things that matter to you: record a concern, try the AI assistant, look at Insights, and invite colleagues in to give their view. See Demo & Subscriptions for what the demo includes and how to explore it.
The Integrations area is switched off during the demo. Everything else is available.

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Stage 2: Subscribe

When you are satisfied Signal is right for your school, an Owner subscribes from Settings. Subscribing clears out all the demo students, staff, and incidents so you begin your live account with a clean slate. Your school’s configuration — categories, locations, events, staff accounts, and workflows — is kept.
Download any policy documents you uploaded during the demo before you subscribe. Subscribing removes all policies and uploaded documents, and they cannot be recovered.

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Stage 3: Connect your MIS

With your subscription active, connect Signal to your management information system. Signal supports Arbor, Bromcom, and Wonde. This is what populates your live account with real people: students, staff, year groups, classes, and attendance, all kept up to date automatically from then on. You never maintain a student list by hand. See MIS Integration for what each provider needs and how long the first sync takes.
Connecting an MIS requires the Owner, DSL, or Deputy DSL role.

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Stage 4: Import your previous records

Your safeguarding history matters, and starting from an empty system is not acceptable. Once your MIS is connected, Signal can import the records from your previous safeguarding system so that a student’s history follows them. What is imported:
  • Historic incidents, with their original dates and descriptions
  • The categories and tags your old system recorded against them
  • Attached documents and files, where your previous system provides them
Imported incidents are matched to the students already synced from your MIS, so they land on the right timelines.
Talk to us before you start this stage. What can be imported, and how cleanly, depends on which system you are coming from and what it can export. We will tell you honestly what to expect.

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Stage 5: Get a tailored review

This is the stage schools find most valuable, and it is the one most often skipped elsewhere. Every school records concerns differently. Your previous system’s categories will have grown organically over years — some used constantly, some used twice in 2019, some meaning the same thing under two names. Copying that muddle into Signal would simply carry the mess forward. So once your records are imported, the Signal team analyses how your school actually recorded concerns and produces a written recommendation covering:
  • Categories — which concern types you genuinely use, which to merge, and which to retire
  • Locations — the places your records show incidents actually happen
  • Events — the follow-up actions and external involvements you record most
  • Custom fields — the extra details your school captures that deserve their own field, so they become reportable rather than buried in free text
  • Category rules — where a particular concern type should always require more detail
We send you this as a plain-English recommendation with the reasoning and the numbers behind it. Nothing is applied until you agree it.
This review is grounded in your real imported data, not a generic template. If your previous system shows that 60% of your records were logged under one catch-all category, we will tell you, and recommend what to do about it.

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Stage 6: Migrate and tidy your data

Once you have agreed the configuration, the Signal team applies it for you:
  • Your agreed categories, locations, events, and custom fields are created
  • Your imported historic incidents are re-mapped onto the new structure, so old records become searchable and reportable in the same terms as new ones
  • Duplicate and redundant entries from the old system are tidied away
The result is that your history and your future records share one consistent structure. A report covering the last three years works, rather than breaking at the point you switched systems.
You can keep using your old system while you switch. Once your configuration is migrated, any later import is translated into your new structure automatically, so records created in the meantime arrive correctly categorised rather than blank.

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Your go-live checklist

Once you subscribe, the Go live setup page adds a checklist of everything that needs to be in place before your staff start recording concerns in Signal.
The go-live checklist is only shown to Owners, and only once your school has subscribed. During the demo you see the guided tour on its own.
You do not tick anything off yourself. Each item watches your school’s actual setup and completes on its own as the work is done, so the list always reflects where you really are. Items you can action yourself have a button taking you straight to the right page. The two the Signal team runs for you — your records import and your tailored review — are marked accordingly, and we complete them with you.
While anything is outstanding, a Go live setup link appears in the sidebar with a count of what is left, and a prompt appears on your dashboard. Both disappear once you are ready to go live.
The go-live checklist on the Go live setup page, showing a mix of completed and outstanding items with the progress bar highlighted

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When everything is done

When the last item completes, the checklist confirms you are ready to go live and the sidebar and dashboard prompts stop appearing. That stays settled: if something changes later — a workflow is deleted, or an MIS connection is replaced — you will not be prompted to set your school up all over again. The page itself remains available, so you can look back at it whenever you want.

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Revisiting the tour

The guided tour is there to introduce Signal itself — the dashboard, students, incidents, and Insights. Once you have been through it, it folds away so the checklist takes the lead. Click Replay the product tour on the Go live setup page to open it again at any time.

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How long it takes

Stages 1 to 3 typically take a few days, mostly waiting on your MIS provider to approve the connection. Stages 4 to 6 depend on how much history you are bringing across and how quickly the recommendation is agreed. Most schools are recording live concerns in Signal from the end of stage 3, and running reports across their full history by the end of stage 6.

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Need help?

Contact support@signalschools.com at any stage. If you are switching from another provider with time left on your contract, ask about the Pay for One Promise — we can cover the overlap so you are never paying twice.