Oakline creates the working register from active bookings for each session occurrence. This keeps attendance connected to the family and child information already supplied through booking or the family portal, so the register helps you plan the session before anyone arrives, not just record who turned up.
For a public product overview, see Forest School register software, Full offline field capability and Forest School Learning Journeys.
Open the required session occurrence from the provider dashboard, bookings area or today's register shortcut. The working register separates active attendees from cancelled or refunded bookings.
Before you mark anyone present, the top of the register shows how many children are present, still to mark and absent, plus how many need a closer look because they have medical, dietary or SEND information recorded. Use Review to filter straight to those children, or the search box and the All children / To mark / Present / Absent filter to find someone quickly. Each row also shows compact SEND, Medical and Dietary badges so the team can see at a glance who needs extra attention during the session, without reading every field for every child.
Use the Present / Absent buttons beside each attendee. Selecting the button that is already active clears it back to to mark, so a child is never stuck in the wrong state. Attendance is stored against that specific occurrence, so a term booking can have a different result on each date.
Photo consent is shown in its own column right next to attendance, so staff can check who can and can't be photographed without switching screens. Switch to the Payments tab to see and update payment status and the fee bank for the same session.
From the register, authenticated provider and staff users can click anywhere on a child's row to open their full record in a side panel. Where the family or provider has recorded the information, it can include:
Use respectful, practical wording and record only information that is relevant, accurate and appropriate for the provider to hold. Oakline does not diagnose a child or replace professional healthcare, SEND, safeguarding or emergency advice.
Parents can maintain child information through their private family portal. Providers should still review records, ask families to confirm significant changes and follow their own procedures for urgent or clinically important information.
The register and child file require an authenticated provider or staff account within the tenant. Provider, staff and family portals are separated. Oakline does not currently provide a fine-grained permission switch for every individual field, so the provider must give access only to appropriate staff and remove it when responsibilities change.
Use Print Register to open the print layout. From the browser print dialogue you can print a paper copy or choose the browser's Save as PDF option.
Printed or downloaded registers contain sensitive personal data. Store, share and dispose of them according to the provider's data-protection and safeguarding procedures.
The same session occurrence connects the register to Learning Journey. Once attendance has been recorded, practitioners can add a shared session reflection and open a child marked Present to record an individual headline or learning focus, observation and optional next step.
When the entry is ready, publish it to the private family portal. Parents see only published records associated with their own children. See Using Learning Journey for the full observation, photo and publication workflow.
Attendance also controls who is eligible for an accident or incident record. When staff open Accident Logs and choose the session and date, only children marked Present on that session's register are offered in the child list. A booking on its own is not enough — the register has to show the child as present that day. This keeps the accident log aligned with who was actually on site, and is one more reason to mark attendance as soon as the session starts. See Accident and incident logs for the full workflow.
The register keeps working with no signal: attendance and key medical, allergy and SEND alerts remain available when connectivity is unreliable, once Oakline has had the chance to send the latest session information to the device while connected. Supported attendance changes are stored locally and synchronised after the device reconnects.
From that same offline field workflow, staff can also consult an existing risk-benefit assessment and write Learning Journey text observations with no signal; both queue to synchronise once connectivity returns.
Offline limits are important:
See Install the Oakline app for the wider offline workflow.