Assignable colours and traffic light corners

TrackEd’s assignable colours feature lets you overlay six coloured dots on student photos to flag groups like ATSI, EALD, ATAR-eligible, or tagged students. Traffic light corner colours add green/yellow/red shading for attendance, GPA, effort and behaviour numbers based on cutoffs you set. Both work across the profile, list views, datawalls, ProgressTracker, ClassMat, and SmartWall.

Common use cases: Flagging ATSI, EALD, or ATAR-eligible students in PLT meetings, surfacing at-risk groups using tag-based colours, applying green/yellow/red bands to attendance and GPA across reports, hiding sensitive flags on student-facing profiles while keeping them visible to staff, and standardising colour meaning across the school.

Note: This video was recorded in 2021 and has been flagged for replacement.

Training video — Video: Assignable colours [2021]

Available colour options

You have six dot colours to work with: green, yellow, red, blue, orange, and purple. There are only six because of the limited space available over a student’s photo. For each colour, you set what it represents at four year-level ranges: P-2, 3-6, 7-9, and 10-12.

The available options are ATSI, AIMS, ICP, Custody Order, Out of Home Care, EALD, DDA, ATAR Eligible, and Tag. ATSI, AIMS, ICP, Custody Order, Out of Home Care, EALD, and DDA come straight from OneSchool, so once a student is imported with one of those flags set to yes, the matching colour will appear automatically.

ATAR Eligible is calculated inside TrackEd. It looks for the right combination of courses based on the timetable import and the VET tab, so as long as those are up to date, the colour will appear for any student on an ATAR-eligible pathway.

Heads up: Three older options shown in the video (Specific Education Requirement, Medical Condition, and Independent Status) have been retired in TrackEd and are no longer used.

Setting up your assignable colours

Go to the Settings page and choose Assignable colours from the green menu. You’ll see the six dots laid out across columns for each year-level range. Click on any cell and pick the option you want that colour to mean for that year range.

Most schools use the same meaning across all year levels, but the year-level split is there so you can tailor things like ATAR Eligible or AARA for senior years only, or apply different at-risk tags in primary versus secondary. For a wider tour of the Settings page, see Settings Page Reference.

Using tags as a colour

The Tag option is the most flexible. When you choose Tag, you also pick which specific tag the colour should respond to. Tags are groups of students you maintain in TrackEd, so this gives you full control over which students show which colour.

A common setup is at-risk levels: green for an On Track tag, yellow for Monitor, and red for At Risk. The colours then appear automatically across all your reports as you tag and untag students. For more on tags, see Tagging groups of students.

Showing or hiding colours per page

On the right-hand edge of the Assignable colours settings page, you can control which areas of TrackEd show the dots. The toggles cover the profile, list view, datawall, photo wall, ProgressTracker, ClassMat, and SmartWall pages.

A green button means the colours are visible on that page; a pink button means they’re hidden. The most common setup is to keep the dots visible everywhere except the profile and photo wall, since those views are more likely to be shown to or shared with students.

Saving and standardising

You can save your colour configuration as a template and recall different setups later, but only use that if you have a specific reason to. The stronger recommendation is to settle on one school-wide meaning for each colour and stick to it, so staff get used to what each dot means across every report.

Once your colours are configured, you can hover over any student photo on a datawall, ProgressTracker, ClassMat, or SmartWall to see what each dot represents for that student. A colour key also appears at the bottom of the printed reports for reference.

Traffic light corner colours

The traffic light corner colours sit on a separate page in Settings called Colour Codes. In the top-left of that page, you set green, yellow, and red cutoffs for attendance, GPA, effort, behaviour, and QCE scores.

The cutoff between yellow and green sets the minimum green number, meaning equal to or greater than. Attendance expects a number between 0 and 1, so 94% would be entered as 0.94. GPA, effort, behaviour, and QCE use whole numbers. The cutoff between yellow and red sets the minimum yellow value the same way.

Important: Below the cutoff settings is a global setting that controls whether attendance is calculated as percentage present or percentage present plus approved absences. The default is percentage present, which counts every penalty absence. This setting is often overlooked but has a real impact on which students fall into each band.

Where traffic light corners appear

Four buttons on the Colour Codes page control where the traffic light corner colours show in TrackEd. The default is visible on datawalls and hidden on ProgressTracker, ClassMat, and SmartWall pages.

Some schools turn them on across all four areas to add extra colour cues to data conversations; others find that level of colour cluttered and prefer the cleaner default. Adjust based on what suits your team’s data review style.