Take Effective Disciplinary Action By Gating Students in Boardingware

Let's face it. There will always be students that misbehave. It's human nature. But when students start to repeatedly misbehave, then you may need to take disciplinary action.In boarding schools, "Gating" students from going on leave or signing-out to certain activities has proven to be a very effective form of punishment. But most of the time it can be tough to manage and keep track of exactly which students are gated and how long they're gated for. Not anymore.To help you enforce effective disciplinary action, we've made it possible for you to gate students on the Boardingware platform.

Gating Made Easy

Gating students in Boardingware will restrict them from being able to request leave or sign-out for a chosen period of time. During this time period, parents also won’t be able to apply for leave on behalf of their children. This ensures that the rules of gating can be properly enforced with no chance of being overridden by unauthorized users.

When you gate a student, it’s easy to customise the details of the record to suit the nature of the incident. You will have the option to:

• Set the duration. Here you can decide how long you’d like to enforce the gating effect for. You can choose from one of our pre-set time periods (For the rest of the day, Indefinitely until ungated, 1 hour, 2 hours or 3 hours) or set your own custom time frame. With a custom time frame, you can even schedule the gating period to start at a specific time in the future.
• Provide context. Provide details about why a student is being gated to add context for staff and historical records. There’s also room to leave additional comments that will be sent along with the alert to students, staff and parents.
• Send alerts. By default, Boardingware will alert the student being gated and staff members following the student. You can also choose to send an alert to notify parents of the gating incident.

Enforcing The Rules of Gating

Gating is an effective way to take disciplinary action, but enforcing the rules of gating can be an arduous process. Here are 4 ways Boardingware takes the hassle out of gating students:

1. Automate gating restrictions

Students know that when they’re gated, they’re not allowed to request leave or sign-out to certain activities. But If a student chooses to ignore this and attempt to sign-out anyway, Boardingware will automatically block the request and display an alert reminding them how long they are gated for.

Likewise, when a staff member attempts to sign out gated students, an alert will instantly remind them which students are currently gated from leave. Authorized staff can then choose to remove gated students from the selection or override the gating rule and progress with the sign-out process.

2. Inform and Align Residential Staff

When a student is gated, it’s important to ensure that all your duty staff are on the same page, so that you can effectively manage and keep an eye on gated students.Boardingware makes this easy. In addition to notifications, staff can use filters on the home board to quickly see exactly who is gated, check up on the activity feed to see recent pastoral and gating activity, or dive into a student's historical records for a deeper understanding of what happened.

3. Manage the gating status

You can edit and update the details of a gating record at any time. You can extend the gating period if students continue to misbehave, add a comment to provide more details about the incident or reward well-behaved students by “ungating” them early. Ungating students is also helpful for when students are gated indefinitely or need to be granted early release from their gating period.

4. Control gating permissions

The Gating feature has been added as another user permission option for staff. This means that you can control who has authority to gate students as well as who can manage and edit student records.The gating feature is now accessible to all Boardingware customers. To learn more about how you can get started with gating, check out our help guides below:

• Gating a Student
• Applying different duration periods

Curious to see how Boardingware works? Click here to book a personal consultation with one of our experts or visit this link to watch a 20-minute demo video.