What are Categories?

This help section explains what categories are in SOCS Co-curricular. Once categories have been setup, you are able to add activities to these categories. 

SOCS Co-curricular helps you present the School’s Co-curricular offering to staff, parents and pupils. The information here will assist you in the best way to set up your co-curricular categories based on your school's needs. 

In this section the words “activity” or “activities” is used throughout, but this could be replaced by the word “club” or “clubs”.

Categories and Activities Overview

Every activity added to SOCS co-curricular must be assigned to a category. Categories can contain many activities. You can have as many categories as you require and you have full control over renaming, editing and adding new categories. 

Categories are important when an online sign-up window for parent/pupils is taking place as you can:

• Limit students choices to a set number of activities within a certain category.
• Include or exclude an entire category from sign up
• Some reports can be filtered by category
  
  

Categories can be easily changed should the school choose to adopt a different approach to how activities are presented to pupils/parents in the future.

Choosing the Right Category Approach for my School

There are two approaches to setting up categories and it is important during the initial setup that you find the optimal setup for your school. You can either:

Option 1: Categorize by the “style” of activity e.g. Drama, Music, Games.

• This allows you to limit the pupil selections by type of activity, so they can only choose, for example, 1 music, 1 drama and 2 sports activities.
• Schools that have a varied co-curricular timetable often use this approach e.g. activities that do not necessarily slot neatly into days/time slots across a school year and are open to multiple year groups across the school structure.
• Schools that use “First Come, First Served” as their sign-up methodology often approach the setup of categories in this way.

Option 2: Categorize by the “time slot” the activity takes place e.g. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Monday Lunch, Monday After School etc.

• This allows you to limit pupils to selecting a set number of activities at a particular time. In this scenario, clashes are more obvious when pupils are making their choices (although clash management is built in to both option 1 and option 2).
• Schools that have defined periods for activities often use this setup. For example, they may have an activities afternoon on a Tuesday every week.
• Schools that use “preferences” as their sign up methodology often setup their categories this way. See more information about Preferential Sign-Up here.

Schools that share a licensce between a Junior and a Senior school can approach categories in both the ways we outline above.

If you are planning to use Preferential Sign Up the best option is generally option 2 (time slot), as pupils can only set their preferences within one category.