The student lifecycle

Trial, follow-up, active, frozen, stopped. What each status means, and why keeping them honest is what makes the numbers work.

Every student sits in exactly one status, and every move between them is recorded with a date. Those recorded moves are what your retention, conversion and churn numbers are made of — there is no second source.

The statuses

| Status | Means | Who should be looking at them | |---|---|---| | Trial | A trial is booked, not yet attended | Front desk — make sure they turn up | | Follow-up | Attended the trial, has not signed up | Front desk — your hottest lead | | Active | Enrolled and paying | Everybody | | Freeze | Paused, expected back | Front desk — diarise the return | | Stopped | Left | Owner — why? | | Declined | Said no after the trial | Marketing — the reason matters | | No-show | Never attended the booked trial | Marketing — a reminder problem, not a fit problem |

Reactivation brings a stopped student back to Active.

The path most families take

Trial → attends → Follow-up → buys a package → Active.

That middle step is where academies lose the most money, because a family who attended and liked it is one conversation from paying. The follow-up list exists for exactly this moment.

Why the dates matter

Each transition is stamped: when the trial was booked, when it was attended, when they converted, when they stopped, when they froze.

Those stamps let you answer questions that are otherwise guesswork — how long a family takes to decide, which month you lost people, whether the branch that looks bad simply had one bad week.

Frozen is not stopped

A frozen family intends to come back and their packages are paused, with the expiry pushed out to match. A stopped family has gone. Recording one as the other distorts both your churn and your forward revenue.

If you do not know which it is, ask the parent. It is a two-minute call that changes what the business thinks is happening.

Related: Stop a student · Bring a student back · Freeze a package.