Social interactions in TrackEd record students you want to keep together (positive) and students you want to keep apart (negative). The interactions stay attached to the students in an ongoing way rather than for a single year, so the information is available next time you build classes, run an enrolment interview, or review groupings.
In this article
Adding interactions from the list view
Adding interactions from the profile page
Adding interactions from the enrolment interview
Two-way and one-way positive interactions
Social interactions in Class Builder
Positive and negative interactions
TrackEd uses two types of social interaction. A positive interaction marks two students as ones you would like to keep together when forming classes. A negative interaction marks two students you would like to keep apart. Both types persist with the students from year to year, so you do not need to recapture the information at each rollover.
Adding interactions from the list view
The list view is the quickest place to enter social interactions. From the List page, click List again to open the list of lists and choose Social Interactions. The view displays one row per student with fields for the related students you want to link as positive or negative.
Scroll to the student you want to record an interaction for, then add the names of the linked students. Past entries from previous years are shown alongside any new ones, so you can see the full history at a glance. For more on switching list views, see Exploring the list views.
Adding interactions from the profile page
The Profile page also has a social interactions section under the Extras tab. This is useful when you are already on a student’s profile and want to add or check an interaction without switching views. The same data shown here also appears in the list view and on the enrolment interview form. For more on the profile, see Configuring the student profile.
Adding interactions from the enrolment interview
The Enrolment Interview form has a Social tab that includes a social interactions section, plus a free-text notes box on the right. The notes box is useful when a student names a friend or sibling who is not yet in TrackEd, since a formal interaction record requires both students to exist in the system.
Capture the names in the text box during the interview, then add the formal interaction once both students have been imported. See Enrolment Interviews for the wider workflow.
Two-way and one-way positive interactions
By default, all social interactions are two-directional. If you record a positive between Student A and Student B, both students show the interaction on each other’s records. The same applies to negatives.
There is a setting to use one-way positive social interactions. When that setting is on, a positive interaction only counts in the direction it was entered. This is intended for friend-request workflows where you want to honour at least one of each student’s requested friends, rather than treating every request as a mutual link. Negative interactions stay two-directional regardless of the setting. See Settings Page Reference for where to find the toggle.
Social interactions in Class Builder
As of 2026 Class Builder can now automatically take negative social interactions into account when generating class allocations with an optional checkbox. It also surfaces positive and negative links visually so you can act on them. Once classes have been built, students with a positive interaction in a different class are flagged with a grey box, prompting you to consider moving them together. Students with a negative interaction who have ended up in the same class are flagged with a red mark, showing a placement to consider.
Use the search panel on the right to find the partner student’s class and move students manually between classes to resolve the flags. See Class Builder for the wider class-building workflow, and Importing future students for getting next year’s cohort into TrackEd in time for class composition.
