Change freezes

Change freezes

A change freeze is a date range when changes can’t be scheduled without exec sign-off. It’s how the trust says “don’t risk anything during this period”.

When to declare a freeze

Common school-shaped freezes:

• First week of term — too many things are stabilising for IT to also be moving
• Exam weeks — GCSEs, mocks, internal assessments
• Parents’ evenings — evening + booking-system load matters
• OFSTED week — nobody wants to be the cause of a wifi outage
• Open evenings — first impressions matter
• Easter / Christmas eves — limited support available if something breaks

Annual recurring freezes can be declared once with a repeats_yearly flag.

What a freeze does

When a freeze is in effect:

• The Changes calendar shows the freeze as a banded background
• Submitting a change inside a freeze window flags it; the change requires a freeze_override justification
• The change can only proceed if it’s marked Emergency type with the helpdesk::change::emergency-during-freeze permission

It doesn’t stop tickets — incidents still happen, BAU work continues. It only gates planned changes.

What counts as an emergency override

The bar:

• A live, breaking incident that requires the change to fix
• A safeguarding obligation that can’t wait
• A vendor-driven deadline that lands in the freeze window through no fault of ours

The bar is not:

• “We forgot about the freeze”
• “It’s only a small change”
• “It’s outside school hours so it’ll be fine”

The override audit log is read by the SLT after every freeze, so don’t override casually.

Scope

Freezes can be trust-wide or scoped to one or more academies. A central trust upgrade might be safe at most academies but coincide with the open evening at one — scope the freeze to that academy only.

Notifying

When you declare a freeze, the system can optionally email all change submitters in the affected scope. The email includes the dates and the override criteria.

This is worth doing — it’s better to over-communicate than to have people spend a Friday afternoon writing a change plan only to discover Monday is in a freeze.