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Student groups let you organise students into meaningful collections. Groups are used throughout Signal — in alert rules, insights filtering, reporting, and access control — making them a powerful way to manage safeguarding across your school.

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Types of groups

You can create any groups that make sense for your school. Common examples include:

Vulnerability Groups

Children in Care (CiC), Child Protection Plan, Child in Need, and other vulnerable cohorts.

Support Groups

SEN (Special Educational Needs), EAL (English as an Additional Language), FSM (Free School Meals), and Pupil Premium.

Cohort Groups

Year groups, houses, intervention groups, or any custom grouping your school needs.

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Creating a group

1

Open student group settings

Navigate to Settings > Student Groups.
2

Click Add Group

Select the Add Group button.
3

Enter the group details

Give the group a name (for example, “Children in Care”) and an optional description to explain its purpose.
4

Save

Click Save to create the group.

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Adding students to a group

Once a group exists, you can add students to it individually.
1

Open the group

Navigate to Settings > Student Groups and click on the group you want to manage.
2

Add students

Use the Add Students button to search for and select the students you want to include.
3

Save

Confirm your selections. The students are now members of the group.

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Where groups are used

Student groups appear throughout Signal, making them a core organisational tool:
  • Alert rules — trigger alerts when an incident is logged for a student in a specific group. For example, alert all DSLs when an incident involves a Child in Care.
  • Insights filtering — filter charts and reports by group to analyse safeguarding trends for specific cohorts.
  • Reporting — include group membership in exported data for governor reports, Ofsted inspections, or local authority returns.
  • Access control — restrict which staff can view students in certain groups, ensuring sensitive records are only accessible to authorised staff.

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Managing group membership over time

As your school changes throughout the year, you may need to update group membership.
You can add or remove students from a group at any time by opening the group and editing its membership. Changes take effect immediately.
If a group is no longer relevant (for example, a time-limited intervention group), you can remove it. Historical data that referenced the group is not affected.