Practitioner Accounts: Portable Staff Profiles and Training

A Practitioner Account is a professional identity that belongs to the individual staff member, not to your organisation. It stays with the practitioner if they later work with a different Forest School provider that also uses Oakline, rather than being recreated from scratch every time someone changes employer.

This is separate from your ordinary staff account, which continues to control sign-in, session assignments, timesheets and pay for your organisation exactly as before.

What a Practitioner Account is

One login the practitioner controls, independent of any single Oakline tenant.
A personal record of their own training, qualifications and professional experience.
An optional public profile they can choose to publish, listing at oakline.app/practitioners.

Your organisation's own staff record, DBS number, pay rate, session assignments and timesheets are unaffected. A Practitioner Account adds a personal layer on top; it does not replace your staff management.

Inviting an existing staff member to create one

Open Staff.
Find the team member's row and, in the Practitioner Account column, select Invite. This requires an email address on the staff profile.
Oakline emails the practitioner a link to set up their account — or, if that email address already has a verified Practitioner Account from elsewhere, to confirm linking your organisation to it.

While the invitation is pending, the same column shows Invitation pending with a Resend option, which sends a new link and invalidates the previous one. Once accepted, it shows Connected with the practitioner's account email.

This does not create another staff row, change the staff member's status, or affect their current membership with your organisation. Their staff record, payroll, timesheets and training history all stay exactly where they are.

A practitioner can also sign up independently

A practitioner does not need an invitation from your organisation to have a Practitioner Account — they can create one on their own, for example if they work with several providers or want a professional profile before joining any of them. If they later join your organisation with the same verified email, Oakline links to their existing account rather than creating a separate one.

What changes about training records

Training a practitioner adds under their own account belongs to them, not to your organisation — it is a separate record from anything your team creates directly in Managing Staff.

A practitioner can choose to share a training record with your organisation while their membership is active.
Your team sees the shared record's details and can mark it verified or declined for your own compliance purposes. Verifying does not let you edit the practitioner's title, provider or dates.
If the practitioner turns sharing off, or their membership ends, the shared reference is removed — the practitioner keeps the record itself.
Training your organisation creates directly for a staff member (in Managing Staff and Training and Compliance Records) remains a separate, tenant-owned record either way. The two are not merged automatically.

Public profiles

A practitioner may choose to publish a public profile at their own web address. This is entirely their decision — your organisation cannot switch it on or off for them, and cannot see anything they have not chosen to share with you directly:

Practitioners choose which experience entries appear; your organisation does not see this list either way — it is not part of your staff record.
Contact email and phone are optional and off by default; a practitioner opts in to publishing each one separately.
Training only appears on a public profile if the same record is already shared with an active organisation membership.

Current feature boundaries

Oakline does not currently provide:

importing a training record your organisation created directly into a practitioner's own account;
practitioner review or acceptance of a tenant-created training record;
visibility of a practitioner's DBS documents or status on their public profile;
a search or filter beyond the plain directory listing at oakline.app/practitioners.

Frequently asked questions

Does inviting a Practitioner Account create a new staff member?

No. It links the practitioner's existing staff record to a personal account they control. Nothing about their status, sessions, pay or history changes.

What happens to training I already recorded for this staff member?

It stays exactly where it is, as a tenant-owned record in Managing Staff. It is not moved or duplicated into the practitioner's own account.

Can I see everything on a practitioner's public profile from the admin area?

You can view it the same way any visitor can, at their public web address. Your admin area does not show private or unpublished profile content — only training the practitioner has actively chosen to share with your organisation.

Can a practitioner work with more than one organisation?

Yes. A Practitioner Account is not exclusive to one tenant, and shared training can be visible to every organisation the practitioner has an active membership with.