Getting a consent form back with every box filled in
A permission slip is easy to write and surprisingly hard to write well. This walks through what belongs above the tear-off line, why an empty medical box is worse than a bad answer, how the named-form option cuts down on chasing, and which bits of the wording you should change before you send it out.
What the line under the form is counting
Below the preview there is a short grey line with three counts on it. All three are worked out again every time you change a field. Parts begins at one, because the permission question is always on the sheet. Then it adds one for each box you tick in the Parts of the form panel. There are ten of those boxes, so the count can only run from 1 to 11.
Sheets is easier. Pick one blank form and it is one. Pick one form for each child and it is the length of your class list. The third count is simply how many names were read out of the list box.
Try it on the example the page loads with. Eight of the ten part boxes start ticked; medicines and food are the two left off. So parts is one plus eight, which is nine. The class list holds six names. The mode is one blank form. The line reads One blank form, then 9 parts, then 6 names in the list, with a small dot between each. Switch the mode to one form for each child and the first bit becomes 6 forms, one for each child. The nine and the six do not move.
The sentence under that guesses at paper, and it does real measuring to get there. A copy of the finished form is put in a hidden box parked off the left edge of the window, and that box is set to the width the form will truly print at. An A4 page is 210 mm across and 297 mm down. The print rule on this page leaves a 14 mm margin on all four sides. That leaves 182 mm across and 269 mm down.
Those millimetres have to become screen pixels before anything can be measured. The tool works at 96 pixels to the inch, so one millimetre is 96 divided by 25.4, which is about 3.78 pixels. The hidden box therefore comes out 688 pixels wide, and one printed page is 1017 pixels tall.
The copy is then measured top to bottom, and the answer goes through three steps. Divide the measured height by 1017. Take 0.03 off. Round up, and never go below one. That 0.03 is worth about 30 pixels, or roughly 8 mm of paper. It is there so a form that runs two lines past the bottom is not announced as a two-page form.
The edge of that rule is sharp and easy to follow. A form measured at 1047 pixels gives 1.029. Take off 0.03 and you have 0.999, which rounds up to one sheet. One pixel taller, at 1048, you get 1.030, then 1.0005, and that rounds up to two. A fuller form at 1800 pixels gives 1.770, then 1.740, so two sheets. Print that for six named children and the note says about 2 sheets for each form, so roughly 12 altogether.
Money goes through the browser's own currency formatter, using whichever of the 30 codes you picked from the list. Type 12.50 with the pound code and the form shows it with a pound sign and two decimal places. If the browser cannot handle a code, the tool writes the code and the amount side by side rather than drawing nothing.
The spreadsheet file treats the same amount quite differently. It writes a bare 12.50, with no symbol, two decimal places, and a dot for the decimal point, so that the column can be added up. Japanese yen is the one code in the list written with no decimal places at all.
Press Download .csv with the example loaded and you get a header row plus six rows, one for each name. The mode makes no difference here, only the list does. The ten headers, in order, are Pupil name, Class or group, Slip returned, Permission given, Medical notes given, Emergency contacts given, Photo consent, Amount due, Amount paid and Notes. The amount due header also carries the currency code in brackets, so with the pound picked it reads Amount due (GBP). The first row is the child's name, then the class exactly as you typed it, then five empty columns, then 12.50, then two more empty ones. Every row ends with a carriage return and a line feed, which is what most spreadsheet programs expect.
The file name is built from the activity. Visit to the Natural History Museum goes to lower case, every run of anything that is not a letter or a digit turns into a hyphen, and the result is cut to 60 characters. That gives visit-to-the-natural-history-museum-returns.csv.
Where the paper guess bends, and what nothing checks
The whole measuring trick assumes A4. The page's print rule asks for A4 portrait, and the 182 by 269 mm box is built from that one page size. There is no Letter setting anywhere in the tool. If your printer is loaded with a different size, the driver will do whatever it does, and the sheet count was never asked about it.
Two more soft spots sit in the same guess. It measures the first form only and then multiplies by how many children you have, so it assumes every child's form is the same height. And it cannot see your print dialog. A header and footer added by the browser, a scale set to something other than 100 per cent, or a margin you changed yourself will all shift the real answer. Add the 8 mm it forgives, and a form it calls one sheet can still put a line or two on a second.
The dates it offers are a guess too, though a careful one. Open the page with the date boxes empty and it fills both. The trip is put 21 days out. Twenty-one days is three whole weeks, so it lands on the same weekday as today, and it only moves if that day is a Saturday or Sunday, in which case it steps forward a day at a time. The return date is then 11 days before the trip, stepping backwards off a weekend the same way.
That backwards step is why the gap is not always 11 days. Open the page on Wednesday 15 April 2026 and the trip is set to Wednesday 6 May. Eleven days before that is Saturday 25 April, so it steps back one more day and lands on Friday 24 April. The gap is 12 days. A Thursday trip lands on a Sunday and has to step back twice, which makes it 13. It also only fills a box you left empty, and it works the dates out fresh on every load, so the example never goes stale.
The tool speaks up in exactly six situations, and that really is the whole list:
Now the gaps in that list. Nothing asks for a sensible lead time. A return date on the morning of the trip passes quietly, because the only test is whether it falls after the trip, not how far before it. The past-date test compares whole days at midday, so a form dated for today is not flagged. Phone numbers, addresses, staff names and spelling are never looked at.
A date the tool cannot make sense of does not raise an error; it simply disappears. To be accepted, a date needs four digits for the year, a month from 1 to 12 and a day from 1 to 31. It is then rebuilt and checked that the month has not shifted, which is how 31 April gets thrown out: rebuilding it lands in May. A rejected date prints as a blank ruled line, and that is easy to miss. Times are checked in much the same way, with an hour of 23 or less and minutes under 60. Every date is built at midday rather than midnight, so nothing slips back a day for readers west of Greenwich.
The class list has a few habits worth knowing. Names split on line breaks, commas and semicolons, so a list pasted from a register in any of those shapes works. Runs of spaces collapse to one. Anything longer than 80 characters is cut to 80. Repeats are matched without regard to capital letters, so a second Sam Lee comes out as Sam Lee (2), and a second sam lee as sam lee (2). Only the first 120 names are kept.
Last, the plain text copy is not quite the printed form. In named mode the .txt writes the body once, using the first child on the list, then numbers the rest underneath and says so in a line at the end. And on the tear-off slip, a free trip prints a box saying there is no charge on paper, while the .txt leaves the money lines out altogether. If the text file is the one you are passing round, read it before you send it.
- You chose one form for each child but pasted no names, so a single blank form is shown instead.
- You pasted more than 120 names. It says how many were left out, and suggests splitting a year group into classes.
- The school name is empty, so the words School name print at the top.
- The return date falls after the trip date.
- The date of the activity has already gone by. It suggests checking the year as well as the day.
- The cost part is switched on with a real amount, but the How to pay box is empty.
One sheet of paper doing two different jobs
A consent form is really two documents that happen to share a page. The top part is a letter. It tells a parent where their child is going, what time the coach leaves, what it costs and who to ring if something happens. The parent wants to keep that. They will stick it on the fridge and look at it again the night before, when they are trying to remember whether it is a packed lunch day.
The bottom part is a form. It asks questions, it collects a signature, and the school needs it back. Those two jobs pull in opposite directions. If you print them as one block, either the parent keeps the whole thing and you get nothing, or you get the whole thing back and the parent has no idea what time to drop off.
That is why this tool lays the sheet out the way it does. Letter at the top, questions in the middle, and a slip along the bottom that tears off cleanly. The parent keeps the part they need and hands back the part you need, and nobody has to photocopy anything twice.
What belongs above the line
The panel on the right fills in the letter. School name and class come first, then the activity itself. The description box is where you say what the children will actually do, in words a parent will read. "Educational visit" tells nobody anything. "A guided tour of the dinosaur gallery, then a fossil workshop run by museum staff" answers the question a child will be asked at teatime.
Then the practical facts, which the tool sets out as a plain two-column list: date, the time they leave, the time they are back, where they are going, and how they are getting there. Any of those left empty prints a ruled line instead of nothing, so a form you are still waiting on details for is still usable. You can print it and write the coach time in by hand.
Two of the fields matter more than they look. Staff in charge names a human being, which is what a worried parent scans for. Contact number on the day is the number that is answered while the trip is happening, which is not always the main school number. Put the office hours next to it if the office closes before the coach is back.
Why an empty box is the worst possible answer
Here is the failure that this form is built around. A parent gets the sheet, signs it, and leaves the medical section blank. What does that mean? It could mean their child is perfectly well. It could mean they were interrupted, or the sheet was signed in the car park, or they assumed the school already knew about the inhaler.
You cannot tell the difference, and the difference matters. A teacher standing in a museum with a child who has suddenly gone quiet does not want to be working out whether the silence on the form was deliberate.
So every question here that could be answered with silence has a box to tick instead. "There is nothing we need to know." "No medicines are needed." "No special diet." A ticked box is an answer. A blank space is not. It costs the parent one second and it turns an ambiguity into a statement you can rely on.
It also gives you something to chase. If a slip comes back with neither the box ticked nor anything written, you know to ask, instead of quietly assuming.
Two contacts, not one
The emergency contact section prints a small grid with two rows, and that is on purpose. One number is not a contact. It is a hope. The person who put their mobile down is in a meeting, driving, on a ward, or in a factory where phones live in a locker.
Each row asks for a name, how that person knows the child, and two numbers. The relationship column earns its place: if a stranger answers and says they are the childminder, staff need to already know that the childminder is on the list.
If your school already holds all this centrally, you may not need the section at all, and you can untick it. But a trip is exactly the situation where the central record is back at school and the person who needs the number is standing on a pavement. Many schools ask for it again on the slip for that reason alone.
Photographs: one question with three answers
Photo consent is usually written as a yes or a no, and that is why so many parents leave it blank. Plenty of families are perfectly happy for a picture to go up on a classroom display and not at all happy for it to appear on a public social media account. Forced to pick one word for both, they pick neither.
So this form offers three boxes: inside school only, inside school plus the website and social media, or no pictures at all. Parents can answer honestly, and staff get an answer that is actually usable when someone is picking photographs for the newsletter three weeks later.
The wording also says a parent can change their mind by telling the office. That line costs you nothing and heads off the most common complaint, which is not about the photograph but about feeling stuck with a decision made in a hurry on a Tuesday morning.
The slip repeats itself for a reason
The tear-off slip at the bottom looks redundant. It carries the activity name, the date and the return date again, right underneath a letter that already said all three.
It has to. Once it is torn off, the slip is on its own. It goes into an envelope, then a tray, then a folder, and by the time anyone looks at it again the letter it came from is on a fridge two miles away. A strip of paper with a signature and the word yes on it proves nothing. A strip that says which trip, on what date, and that a named person gave permission, is a record.
The slip also asks about money separately: enclosed, or already paid at the office. That saves the office reconciling a pile of signatures against a payment list, because each slip says which it is.
If your school collects replies some other way, untick the slip and the form ends at the signature line.
One blank form, or one for each child
The last panel decides who the forms are for. One blank form gives you a master to photocopy. That is the right answer if you want thirty identical sheets and do not mind the children writing their own names.
The other option takes your class list and prints a form for each child with the name already on it, at the top of the questions and again on the tear-off slip. It sounds like a small thing. It is not. A named form is harder to lose in a bag, and it removes the single most annoying category of returned slip: the one with a signature, a tick, and no name anywhere on it. Trying to work out which of thirty children a nameless slip belongs to is a genuinely miserable ten minutes.
Paste names one to a line, or separated by commas. Up to 120 are used. If two children share a name the second is numbered, so they each get their own sheet rather than sharing one.
The same list feeds the tick list you can download as a spreadsheet file, which is covered further down.
Money, dates and times you can set to suit
The cost field takes a number and the dropdown beside it decides how that number is written. Pick from about thirty currencies and the form shows the amount the way it is normally written in that country, symbol and all. Leave the cost empty, or type zero, and the form prints No charge instead, which is clearer than a blank space next to the word cost.
Dates are just as adjustable. The same day can print as 14 April 2026, Tuesday 14 April 2026, April 14, 2026, 14/04/2026, 04/14/2026 or 2026-04-14. This matters more than it sounds, because 04/05 means two entirely different days depending on which side of an ocean the reader is on. If your letters home use one style, match it here.
Times can be 24-hour or the more informal 9.15am and 3.30pm. For a letter to families, the second reads better. For a staff briefing sheet, the first is less ambiguous.
One more small thing the tool checks: if the return date you set is later than the trip date, it says so. That happens more often than you would think, usually by picking the wrong month, and it is not the sort of mistake you want forty parents to spot first.
Chasing the slips that do not come back
Sending the forms out is the easy half. Getting them back is the part that eats a week. The Download .csv button gives you a spreadsheet file with a row for every child on your list, and columns for slip returned, permission given, medical notes given, emergency contacts given, photo consent, amount due, amount paid, and a free notes column.
The amount due column is filled in with the trip cost for each child, as a plain number so the spreadsheet can add it up. The rest is deliberately empty. Open it in whatever spreadsheet program you use and tick things off as the envelopes arrive.
The reason to keep the tracking separate from the forms themselves is that the two get looked at by different people at different times. The teacher wants the forms. The office wants the money column. A single sheet that tries to do both ends up pinned to a wall with pencil marks all over it.
How much paper it will actually use
Underneath the form the tool says roughly how many sheets of paper each copy needs, and if you are printing one per child, how many that comes to altogether. It works this out by measuring the form against the printable area of an A4 page with the margins the print rules use.
It is worth watching. With every section ticked, a full consent form is genuinely about two sides of paper, and two sides times thirty children is sixty sheets before you have made a single spare. Unticking the sections your trip does not need brings it straight back down. A walk to the local park does not need a dietary section, a medicines section or a payment line, and without them the whole thing fits comfortably on one side.
The print rules also stop the awkward breaks. A signature line will not be split from the words above it, the emergency grid will not be sliced in half, and the tear-off slip stays in one piece. Nothing makes a form come back signed in the wrong place faster than a tick box orphaned at the top of a second page.
Press Print and choose Save as PDF as the destination if you want a file rather than paper. The Download PNG button next to it saves a picture of each form, which is handy for pasting into a newsletter.
Wording you should probably change
The sentences on this form are a reasonable starting point and nothing more. Rules about what a consent form has to say, who can sign it, and how long a school must keep it vary between countries and often between one school and the next. Whoever runs trips at your school will have a view, and it beats a template every time.
The first aid paragraph is the one to look at hardest. It asks a parent to agree that staff may give first aid and may agree on their behalf to urgent treatment if the parent cannot be reached. Some schools word this much more narrowly. Some are not permitted to ask for it at all in that form. Read it against your own policy.
The short note at the bottom about how the details are kept is also generic. It says the information is used only for this activity, seen by the staff leading it and the office, and destroyed once the activity and any accident record are closed. If your school has a proper privacy notice, point to that instead. You can untick the note entirely if it does not belong.
The class list stays on your machine
A completed permission slip is one of the more sensitive pieces of paper a school handles. Names, home phone numbers, allergies, medication. The class list you paste in to make the named forms is the same thing in miniature.
None of it goes anywhere. The form is built by your own browser from what you typed, and what you typed is kept in that browser so the page is still as you left it tomorrow morning. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing is sent to anyone.
You can check that claim yourself rather than take it on trust. Load the page, turn off the network, then type, tick, switch to named forms and press Print. It all still works, because there is nothing on the other end of a wire to work with.
The Start over button clears what is stored and puts the worked example back. Use it when you have finished a trip, or on a shared staff laptop, and the previous class list is gone.