Working without a signal

Teaching rooms are often where phone signal is not. The app is built for that, but only for the parts where it matters — and it is honest about the rest.

What works with no connection

• Your diary — the lessons you have already looked at.
• The register — marking who was there, the lesson's outcome, absence reasons and a lesson note.

Everything else needs a connection, and the app says so plainly when there is none rather than appearing to work and losing what you did.

What the phone keeps

Three things, kept for you alone and inside the app:

• Each lesson as you last opened it — the pupils' names, their marks and the outcome. No medical details are kept on the phone.
• Your sessions as last listed, which is what Today and the Diary draw on.
• An outbox of registers you saved with no signal.

The lesson it keeps is the one you last opened, so a lesson you have never opened will not be there when the signal goes. Opening tomorrow's lessons once, somewhere with a connection, is the habit worth having.

What happens when the signal comes back

Anything in the outbox is sent. Each saved register carries the version of the lesson as you saw it, which is what makes this safe: if the office changed that lesson while you were offline, the server refuses your mark rather than overwriting their change.

A refused mark never just disappears

Every refusal becomes a notice you have to read, on Today and on the Diary, saying which lesson and why. Nothing is silently dropped and nothing is silently overwritten — but it does mean a refused register is still unmarked, so read the notice and mark it again against the lesson as it now stands.

The reason the office wins rather than the phone is that the office is working from the current picture: a pupil may have been moved, credited or finished since you last pulled the lesson down. Your phone cannot know that; the server does.

What is sent, and what is not

From an offline register, the server accepts the register marks and nothing else. That is deliberate — it stops a phone holding a stale copy of a lesson from quietly writing back everything else about it.

If you are about to teach somewhere with no signal

Open the lessons you will be teaching while you still have one. Mark them as normal during the lesson, and let the phone send them when you get back to a signal. Then glance at Today afterwards: if a mark was refused, that is where it will tell you.