The Paper Diary That Doesn't Survive Month-End
A school chaplain working across a secondary campus logs interactions continuously throughout the term — a Year 9 student referred by a teacher for anxiety, a Year 11 student who stopped by between periods, a family crisis flagged by a parent phone call that required an action plan. Each interaction goes into a paper diary at the end of the day. At month-end, the ACCESS Ministries report requires those interactions to be sorted by type, counted by referral source, and summarized by outcome — a process that means hunting through thirty days of handwritten entries and manually tallying counts that a filtered database produces in ten seconds.
This template is the digital diary that makes month-end filing a sort operation rather than an archival excavation.
Source of Referral: Who Found the Student and How
Five referral pathways: Staff, Student, Parent, Chaplain/Ongoing, Quick Chat. These are the categories ACCESS Ministries uses to understand how chaplaincy services are accessed across the school community — whether students are self-referring (indicating the chaplain has established trust within the student body), being directed by teachers (indicating integration with pastoral care systems), or being brought in by parents (indicating the service is visible to families).
Chaplain/Ongoing marks students already in a continuing engagement — return visits from previous months, students the chaplain is monitoring after an earlier crisis or concern. Quick Chat is the lightweight interaction category: a thirty-second hallway conversation that doesn't rise to pastoral care but still represents a contact point that the report requires.
Sorting by Source of Referral at month-end groups these categories without manual counting. The report section that asks "how many students were staff-referred this month" is answered by a count query, not a page-by-page tally.
Outcome: What the Interaction Produced
Outcome is the disposition field: Ongoing (the student needs continued engagement), General (the conversation addressed the presenting concern without a formal action), Action Plan (a structured next-step plan was created), Referral (the student was directed to an external service — counselor, mental health service, family support), Quick Chat. These five categories capture the clinical weight of each interaction.
The Outcome = Referral category is the one that generates the most documentation burden in paper systems. A referral requires tracking: who was referred, to whom, when. In this template, the Main Issue text field carries that narrative, and the Date field anchors the interaction in the timeline. Filtering for Outcome = Referral at month-end produces the complete referral list for the period — the subset that the supervisor needs to review and that the compliance report requires to be counted separately.
Year Level and Pastoral Care: The Demographic Filter
Year Level groups interactions into three bands (7-8, 9-10, 11-12, Quick Chat). ACCESS Ministries reports track whether chaplaincy contact is distributed across year cohorts or concentrated in specific year groups — a pattern that informs deployment decisions. A chaplain whose entire month of pastoral care interactions is concentrated in Years 11-12 may be underserving the junior school, or junior students may simply not be accessing the service.
The Pastoral Care boolean distinguishes formal pastoral care interactions from general presence and Quick Chat contacts. Not every interaction a chaplain records carries the same weight — a brief conversation at recess is logged differently from a forty-minute session with a student in crisis. The boolean allows the report to count genuine pastoral care engagements separately from the broader contact count that includes casual interactions.
The template's instructions specify the workflow: record daily from the paper diary, sort by field at month-end, clear after the report is filed. That last step — clearing the data monthly — keeps the database from accumulating identifiable student interaction data beyond the reporting period, which is both a practical maintenance step and a privacy consideration for records that, even without student names, could be re-identified in a small school context.