Tags assign students into named groups (often for at-risk monitoring or a traffic-light tracking system) and a student can carry as many tags as you like. Custom fields are 25 free-text labels you can use for stages of a process, dates, or any data point that does not fit elsewhere on the profile.
In this article
Setting up tags in Settings
Naming tags for reuse over time
Adding tags to students
Finding tagged students
Comparing tagged groups over time
Removing tags
Working with custom fields
Tags vs custom fields
Tags and custom fields are two separate ways of attaching extra information to students. Choose between them based on the shape of the data you want to capture.
Tags assign students into groups. You control the tag names, you control which students carry which tag, and a student can hold any number of tags at once. Tags suit categorical data: a monitor group, an at-risk group, and an on-track group are the basis of a three-colour traffic-light system, for example.
Custom fields are free-text data. You get up to 25 custom fields per school, you set the label, and you enter whatever text you want against that label per student. Custom fields suit data that does not split cleanly into groups: stages of a process (where ten tags would be unwieldy), dates, free-text notes, or anything you want to import from OneSchool or a spreadsheet.
Setting up tags in Settings
Before you can apply a tag, it has to exist in the school’s tag list. Open the Settings page and go to the Tags list. This is the full list of tags available across your year levels.
Add a new tag by entering a short, descriptive code, choosing which year levels it should be available for, and (optionally) adding a memo describing what the code means. The memo is useful for staff who arrive later and need context on what a tag was used for. See the Settings Page Reference for the wider Settings page walkthrough.
Naming tags for reuse over time
Tag names work best when they are short, descriptive, and include a point in time. A naming pattern like AR26T1, AR26T2, AR26T3 captures both the meaning and the period the tag was applied. This lets you compare the same group across reporting periods and see who has changed status between terms.
Adding tags to students
There are two ways to apply tags. Tagging a Found Set is the fast option; tagging one student at a time is the slow option.
To tag a Found Set, first find the group you want. Pick a cohort from the Home page, then open the Find Panel and run a search (e.g. students failing in at least one subject area). Once you have your Found Set, use the Select tag option at the top of the page, choose the tag you want, and apply it to all students in the set. The tag is added to every student in one action. The Results Search is a good companion here for fine-grained achievement, effort, and behaviour criteria before you tag. For pasting in a list of student IDs (e.g. from a spreadsheet of tagged or flagged students) to recall as a Found Set, see ID Search and Excel file drop, which works well in combination with the tagging workflows above.
To tag a single student, open the Profile page, click through to the student, choose the pink Tags option, and add the tag from there. This works for one-off cases but is not the right approach for a whole cohort.
Finding tagged students
Once tags are in place, you have two ways to recall the tagged group at any time.
The Tag Search on the Tags menu is the most direct option. Pick the cohort scope (selected cohort or current students across the whole school), choose the tag you want, and click Find Students. The Found Set returns every student carrying that tag.
The Find Panel also includes a manual tag search under the Class, staff and tags options. This one matches by text, so the stem naming approach pays off here. Typing at risk 21 in the manual tag search returns anyone with that prefix, regardless of which term the tag was applied. Typing the full tag name returns only that specific tag. The Tags-from-list option in the same panel lets you multi-select tags and apply a date range or omit rule; see Search tags by date range for that workflow.
Comparing tagged groups over time
The Selectable Tags List view (on the List page) is built for comparing multiple tagged groups side by side. Pick up to 12 tags as column headings, and the view shows which students carry which tag across each column. This makes it easy to see who was tagged in term 1 but not term 2, who was added in term 2, and who has moved out of a group between periods.
Sort the list by the selected tag columns to group the matches visually. Use the pink Export button and choose Export Student Data to save the full table to Excel. The exported file includes the student IDs, names, roll classes, and a column per tag with the actual tag name as the data point, which is useful for tracking tagged groups outside TrackEd.
Once you have a Found Set sorted the way you want, build an instant datawall from the same group. A 15-per-page datawall is a quick overview for a tagged cohort. A 9-per-page datawall has space for case management notes during a staff meeting, walking through individual cases on a tagged group.
Removing tags
There are three ways to remove tags, depending on the scope.
To remove a tag from a single student, highlight the relevant row on the profile or list view and click Remove this tag. The tag is cleared for that one student only.
To remove a tag from a whole Found Set, use the same option but apply it across the set. This wipes the tag from every student currently in the Found Set.
To delete a tag from the system entirely, go to the Settings page and the Tags list, find the tag, and delete it. TrackEd will warn before deleting. This is the cleanest way to clear out a tag that is no longer in use.
Working with custom fields
Custom fields live in the profile area next to the tagging section. The profile shows the full list of custom field slots, each with a label and a value per student. You set the label once (e.g. AARA Notes) and that label then applies across the whole school. You can use the field for whatever text you want, per student.
Once a value is entered, you can find every other student with the same value, which is what makes custom fields searchable in the same way tags are. Custom fields also accept imports: data from OneSchool or any spreadsheet can be brought in to update the custom field for many students at once. See Custom Fields template for the import workflow.
