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Staff Groups let you organise staff members into meaningful teams. They serve two main purposes in Signal:
  1. Alert routing — direct alert notifications to specific groups so the right people are informed.
  2. Visibility exclusions — keep a whole group out of a sensitive incident in one go, rather than naming each person.

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Common examples

Here are some Staff Groups schools typically set up:

Safeguarding Team

The DSL and Deputy DSLs responsible for managing safeguarding concerns.

Year Group Leads

Heads of year who need visibility of incidents involving students in their year group.

Senior Leadership Team

Senior leaders who need oversight of safeguarding activity across the school.
Other examples include Pastoral Team, SEN Team, and Attendance Officers — whatever groupings make sense for your school.

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Creating a Staff Group

Creating and managing Staff Groups requires Deputy DSL or above, or the School Admin role.
1

Open Staff Group settings

Navigate to Settings and select Staff Groups from the sidebar.
2

Click Add Group

Select the Add Group button in the top-right corner.
3

Name the group

Enter a clear, descriptive name for the group (for example, “Pastoral Team” or “Year 7 Leads”).
4

Save

Click Save to create the group.
Add Staff Group form with the group name entered

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Adding and removing members

Once you have created a Staff Group, you can manage who belongs to it:
1

Open the group

On the Staff Groups settings page, click the Manage staff members icon next to the group you want to edit.
2

Add a member

Use the search box to find a staff member by name. Selecting them from the list stages them as a pending addition — they are only added to the group when you save.
3

Remove a member

Click the remove button next to any member in the list to remove them from the group.
4

Save changes

Click Save to apply your changes.
Each member in the list is labelled either Manual (added by you) or MIS managed (synced from your MIS). MIS-managed members cannot be removed manually — changes to those memberships must be made in your MIS.
A staff member can belong to multiple Staff Groups. For example, a Head of Year might be in both the “Year Group Leads” group and the “Pastoral Team” group.
Staff group members dialog showing the current members, each with a Manual badge

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Archiving a Staff Group

Archiving a group hides it from active lists without permanently removing it. This is useful when a group is no longer in use but you want to keep it available to restore later.
1

Open Staff Group settings

Navigate to Settings → Staff Groups.
2

Archive the group

Click the Archive icon next to the group you want to archive.
3

Confirm

Confirm the action in the prompt. The group will no longer appear in active lists.
To see archived groups, enable the Show archived toggle on the Staff Groups settings page. To restore an archived group, click the Unarchive icon next to it.
Staff groups list with Show archived enabled, showing an archived group with Unarchive and Delete buttons

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Permanently deleting a Staff Group

Permanent deletion cannot be undone. The group and all its manual memberships will be removed.
A group must be archived before it can be permanently deleted.
1

Archive the group

Follow the steps above to archive the group first.
2

Show archived groups

Enable the Show archived toggle to make the archived group visible.
3

Delete the group

Click the Delete icon next to the archived group and confirm.

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MIS-synced Staff Groups

Some Staff Groups may be synced from your MIS and are marked with a sync indicator. Their memberships are managed automatically by Signal and cannot be changed manually. Any changes to synced group memberships should be made in your MIS, and Signal will reflect them at the next sync.
MIS-synced groups can be archived if you no longer need them in Signal, but their memberships will continue to be updated by the MIS sync while they remain active.

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Using Staff Groups for alert routing

Staff Groups are particularly powerful when combined with workflows. When you create a workflow, you can choose a Staff Group as the recipient for an Alert Users action. Every member of that group will receive the alert when a matching incident is logged. For example, you might create a rule that says:
“Alert the Pastoral Team whenever a student incident is logged in the Attendance category.”
This ensures the right people are notified without you having to select individuals one by one. If someone joins or leaves the group, the alert routing updates automatically.

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Groups named after a class or year group

Signal can alert the class staff for whichever class a student is in, without you naming the group on the workflow. This lets a single workflow cover every class in the school. For this to work, each class needs a Staff Group named after it, with Staff on the end: The name must match exactly. If you connect your MIS, these groups are usually created for you. Otherwise, create them here and add the relevant teachers.
If a class has no matching Staff Group, no class staff are alerted for students in that class. Other recipients on the workflow are unaffected.
See Alerts for how to switch this on.

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Using Staff Groups to limit visibility

Staff Groups can also be used to keep people out of a sensitive record. When you set visibility exclusions on an incident, you can exclude a whole Staff Group in one go rather than naming each person. Exclusions work as a deny list: everyone who would normally see the incident still sees it, except the staff and Staff Groups you exclude. There is no way to limit a record to one group only — to lock a case down tightly, mark it DSL only, which hides it from everyone except DSLs, Deputy DSLs, and Owners.
Keeping an individual member of staff away from a particular child is a different tool — see student restrictions, which are set per staff member, per child.

Roles & Permissions

Understand the role system that works alongside Staff Groups.

Workflows

Set up workflows that route alerts to Staff Groups.

Managing Staff Members

Add, edit, and remove staff in your school.