Teacher appraisals

Run an appraisal cycle at /teachers/appraisals: weighted criteria, draft to published to acknowledged, and who can see what at each step.

Students & families guide for day and boarding schools.

Last updated August 29, 2026

Appraisals are a light performance record rather than a full HR review platform: a cycle defines the review window and the rating dimensions, and each appraisal is one evaluator writing about one teacher for one academic year. The whole workflow lives at /teachers/appraisals. Use it when the school wants scores and written feedback on file that the teacher has demonstrably seen, not as a workflow engine with multiple reviewers and sign-off stages, because that is not what it does.

Who can do what

Role	Access
Platform Admin, Principal, Vice Principal, Admin	Create and edit cycles and appraisals for staff in their school, publish, and delete drafts.
Teacher	Read their own published and acknowledged appraisals, and acknowledge with a comment. Nothing else.
All other staff roles	Blocked at the page with a notice that appraisals are for teachers and HR leadership.

Set up a cycle

A cycle carries a name, an academic year, a start and end date, a status of DRAFT, ACTIVE, or CLOSED, and at least one criterion. If you do not define criteria the system seeds five with equal weight: classroom instruction, classroom management, student engagement, professional collaboration, and professional growth, each marked out of ten. Weights are relative, so a criterion with weight two counts twice as much as one with weight one. Closing a cycle stops new appraisals being attached to it, which is how you draw a line under a review round.

Run an appraisal

Create the appraisal against a teacher, an academic year, and usually a cycle. The evaluator defaults to whoever creates it and can be changed to another member of staff.
Score each criterion and add comments. Strengths, areas for growth, goals, and a development plan are separate free-text fields on the record.
Save as a draft while it is being written. Drafts are visible to HR only.
Publish when the conversation has happened. The teacher gets a notification with the score and a link to the record.
The teacher acknowledges, optionally adding their own comment, which moves the record to acknowledged and stamps the date.

Why a save is rejected

Message	Cause
Cannot add appraisals to a closed cycle	The cycle status is CLOSED. Reopen it or pick another cycle.
Academic year must match the selected cycle	The appraisal year and the cycle year differ.
Criterion scores require an appraisal cycle with criteria	Per-criterion scores were sent without a cycle that defines them.
Score is required when no criterion scores are provided	A cycle-less appraisal needs an explicit overall score.
Teacher not found in your school	The teacher is inactive, is not a staff account, or belongs to another school.
Only the evaluated teacher can acknowledge this appraisal	Someone other than the teacher tried to acknowledge, or the record is still a draft.

Common questions

Quick answers in plain language.

A teacher says their appraisal page is empty. What is missing?+

The record is still a draft. Teachers only ever see their own appraisals with status PUBLISHED or ACKNOWLEDGED, so a complete draft is invisible to them. Publishing also sends the teacher an in-app notification linking straight to the record.

How is the overall appraisal score calculated?+

When the appraisal is attached to a cycle with criteria, the total is derived: each criterion contributes its score divided by its maximum, multiplied by its weight, and the result is rescaled to a mark out of ten. Editing the total directly has no effect in that case — change the criterion scores. Without a cycle you enter a single score between 0 and 10 yourself.

Can an appraisal be deleted after it has been published?+

No. Only draft appraisals can be deleted; a published or acknowledged record has to be moved back to draft first. This is deliberate — publication is the point at which the teacher has been told.

Can a teacher write a self-assessment before the review?+

Not as a separate stage. The only text a teacher contributes is the comment they can add when acknowledging a published appraisal. Everything else — strengths, areas for growth, goals, development plan — is written by the evaluator.