Houses & teams.

Of every module in YESS, houses is one of the most culturally specific. A school that runs houses doesn't need to be told what they are — they are woven through assemblies, sports day, the prefect structure, the welfare system, the trophy cabinet. A school that doesn't run houses can ignore the module entirely.

This handbook makes a point of being honest about scope. The houses module today is the identity and membership layer — the house catalogue, the head of house, the roster of who belongs, kept as history for the alumni record. The points and competitionlayer — house points awarded, an inter-house leaderboard the whole school watches — is designed and on the roadmap, but it is not built yet. We tell you exactly which is which so you can plan around it.

A house is the home a student keeps for years, across every class they pass through.

The houses catalogue lives at /dashboard/houses. It opens on a grid of house cards — each one carrying the house's colour swatch, its name, its short code, its motto, the head of house, and a live member headcount — above a summary of total houses, active houses, and total members across the school.

Creating or editing a house is a single centred form. A house carries a name, a unique code (no two houses in a school share one), an optional motto, a primary and secondary colour, an emblem image, a head of house drawn from staff, a display order, and an active flag. Houses are soft-deleted — retiring a house hides it without erasing the history of who once belonged to it.

A house is nothing without its members. Each student's membership is a record in its own right: the student, the house, who assigned them and when, a reason, and — crucially — an active flag with an end date. When a student moves house or leaves, the old membership isn't deleted; it is ended and preserved. That is what lets the alumni record answer “which house was Pascal in, 2018 to 2024?” years later.

Open a house from the catalogue and you land in its mini-world at its detail page. The hero shows the house's emblem, colours, and motto; a vital strip carries the member count, the head of house, and the display order; and the Members room lists every student in the house with their photo, ID, and section, each one a click away from their full student record.

Who can manage houses

Two permissions gate the module: houses.view, which every signed-in role holds, and houses.manage, which creates, edits, retires houses and assigns students. Five roles carry manage by default — school admin, principal, vice-principal, head of department, and the hostel warden, who in boarding schools often runs house affiliations alongside dormitory allocation. Teachers, students, and parents can see houses but not change them. Every change is captured in the audit trail.

This is the part of the handbook to read carefully. The houses module today delivers identity and membership in full. The competition layer — the part most people picture when they hear “house points” — is designed but not yet built. There is no points table, no inter-house leaderboard, and no competition record in the platform today. Here is what is coming, named plainly so you don't plan around a feature that isn't there yet.

Founding. An administrator creates the school's houses — name, code, colours, emblem, motto — and names a head of house for each. The catalogue shows them in display order.

Populating. Students are assigned to houses, often at intake. Each assignment is dated and attributed; the member headcount and class distribution fill in on every house's detail page.

Through the years. A student keeps their house as they move up the school. The occasional move — a transfer, a re-balancing — ends one membership and opens another, and the history of both is preserved.

Graduation. A student leaves; their membership is ended, not erased. Their house remains part of their record — the thread the alumni directory can pick up.

Retirement. If the school ever retires a house, it is soft-deleted: hidden from the active catalogue, but its members' history stays intact.

Houses sit at the centre of a school's pastoral and social life, and touch several modules — fully today, and more once the competition layer ships.