Consistent crisis detection, safer small-group reporting, and easier keyboard navigation

This week closes a gap in how urgent help requests are caught, tightens two reports so small groups of students stay properly protected, and fixes several places where the console and the student Help page did not work correctly by keyboard or screen reader.

Every path into First Six now checks for the same urgent language

A help request that describes being hurt by someone else, including first-person disclosures of assault, abuse, stalking, being unsafe at home, or having nowhere to sleep, is meant to be treated as urgent wherever it arrives: a crisis email to your responders, and an immediate-support message shown back to the student. That was reliably true only for a message sent through our own web app. On other paths into First Six, such as the mobile app or a direct integration, a message using the same language could be filed at normal priority instead. That gap is now closed: the full list of urgent phrases is checked the same way on every path a message can arrive by.

What did not change: the list of urgent language itself was not changed, and neither was what happens once a message is flagged as urgent. What changed is where the check runs, so it can no longer be skipped.

The Needs attention list no longer overlooks students who have never checked in

Insights' Needs attention list could not previously show a student who had never answered a single check-in, because it looked for a pattern in check-ins that a student with none could never match. That meant the group most worth a second look, students who have been quiet from the very start, was the one group the list was guaranteed to leave out. It now flags them under a new "Not started" badge, shown in amber rather than red because it reflects an absence of information rather than a sign of distress on its own.

Two reporting fixes tighten how small groups of students are protected

First Six suppresses any breakdown covering five students or fewer, so no individual can be identified from a report or a screen. Two separate gaps in that protection are now closed.

• The Support for Students evidence pack, the report built for accreditation and regulator conversations, was still printing the overall total next to a suppressed breakdown, which meant a withheld figure could sometimes be worked out by subtracting the numbers that were shown. The pack now withholds a second figure whenever showing the total would undo the first withholding, and says "Withheld" in words rather than leaving a blank a reader could mistake for zero.
• Separately, one of the screens behind Insights already hid small-group figures on screen, but the same protection had not been carried through to the interface behind it, so requesting the underlying data directly could still return an exact count for a group under five. That protection is now enforced everywhere the data can be requested, not only on the screen that displays it.

What did not change: the threshold itself, groups of five students or fewer, is unchanged. Both fixes make sure that threshold is enforced consistently everywhere, rather than changing what counts as too small a group to show.

Four accessibility fixes, one of them on the student Help page

• Students using the Help page with a keyboard could previously tab into fields and buttons inside help cards that were collapsed and not visible on screen, including the button that asks a staff member to check in on the student. Those controls are now correctly removed from the keyboard path while their card is collapsed.
• Staff using the console by keyboard no longer tab through a hidden navigation panel before reaching the visible one, which used to take several key presses through links that were off screen and never announced.
• On a phone, the staff console's top bar is now correctly announced to a screen reader as a page header, so someone navigating by landmark can reach the logo, search, and account controls directly.
• Unread counts, crisis counts, and error messages shown on the console's alert red are now easier to read in dark mode. The white text used on that red previously fell well short of the accessibility contrast standard and now comfortably clears it.

Settings pages in the console are now shown as a branching list

The console's Settings drawer lists eleven pages under four headings. Once you expanded a heading, its pages sat at the same indent as the headings around them, so nothing on screen showed which pages belonged together other than the label on the page you were currently viewing. The drawer now draws a branch from each heading down to its pages, lit down to whichever page you are on, so you can see both which group you are in and where you are within it.