Leave management

Leave is where the academic calendar stops being background configuration and starts changing numbers. Every day count in staff leave comes from walking the requested range one day at a time against that year’s working-day configuration: Sundays, configured off-Saturdays and any date flagged as a holiday are dropped, and only the remainder becomes the stored working-day count and the entitlement deduction. With no active year covering the dates it falls back to Monday-to-Saturday with Sunday off, which is why the calendar comes first.

Approval has consequences that are awkward to unpick. Approving staff leave deducts the balance, writes an on-leave projection for each working day, and - when a substitute is named - creates confirmed cover rows against every published timetable slot the absent teacher holds on those weekdays. Rejecting a previously approved leave reverses the deduction and cancels the cover. Deleting one does the same, but only Principal-level roles or Admin may delete an approved leave.

The two tracks

Staff leave in order

1. Set entitlement defaults per academic year and leave type; a per-teacher entitlement overrides the default.
2. A teacher applies with dates, type and reason, optionally a half day and an attachment. The request is refused if it overlaps another pending or approved leave for the same teacher.
3. An approver decides. A short balance blocks approval and the error states both days needed and days left; an explicit override flag approves anyway.
4. Optionally name a substitute at approval. Cover appears under the timetable substitute tools and on the substitute’s My substitutes list.

Student leave in order

1. The student applies for themselves, or a parent opens /student-leave?childId= for a linked child - notification deep links already carry that parameter.
2. Dates must sit inside the active academic year, and an overlapping request for the same student is refused.
3. Only a pending request can be decided, and students or linked parents may cancel while it is still pending. After a decision the record is final.

Handoff and limits

Staff leave hands off to the timetable, which owns the cover rows and reports coverage gaps, and to notifications for the applicant and substitute. It does not reach payroll: loss-of-pay types are recorded but no deduction is calculated. Student leave hands off only to notifications. There is no multi-step approval chain, cover is built solely from published slots, and a half day marks the teacher out for the whole day as far as cover is concerned.