Running a school
Permissions and spending caps
Booking training and committing spend are separate grants, and a cap limits an order rather than a year.
On this page
Beyond the role, each person carries two separate permissions and, if they have the second, a cap. All three are set by a School Admin on the person's own page, reached from People and permissions.
The two grants
| Grant | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Book training | Reserve places on courses and name delegates. |
| Commit spend | Place an order: subscriptions, products, anything in the basket. |
They are separate because the jobs are separate. A subject lead who books courses for their department should not thereby be able to commit the school to a three-year agreement, and a business manager who does the buying may never book a course.
Somebody with neither can still use the site: browse the catalogue, read guidance, work through e-learning, keep their own record. That is most people, and it is the right default.
The cap
A cap is a limit on a single order, not a budget for the year. Somebody with a cap of £250 can place as many orders under £250 as they like; what they cannot do is commit £900 in one go.
It is checked against the gross, so VAT counts. That is deliberate: the gross is what the school pays.
What happens at the limit
Nothing is refused and nothing is lost. An order over the cap becomes a request: it is put in front of the School Admins, exactly as the person built it, and released with one click. See approvals.
That is the difference between a cap and a block. A block sends somebody to find you in the corridor; a cap turns the same conversation into a screen you can deal with from home at eight in the evening.
Setting them well
- Give a cap that covers the ordinary case, so approvals stay rare enough to be read rather than clicked through.
- Review them when somebody changes job rather than once a year.
- A cap of zero is not the same as no permission: no permission is clearer to the person and to anybody looking at the page later.
Nobody raises their own
You cannot change your own permissions or your own cap. A permission you could grant yourself would not be one. Where yours is in the wrong place, ask another School Admin; where your school has only one and it is you, ask in the help bubble.
What is recorded
Every change to a role, a grant or a cap is in your school's activity log, with who made it and when. See the activity log.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.