Workspaces

Workspaces

A workspace is the top-level container for one trust’s data. Multiple academies (schools) live inside a workspace; data doesn’t leak between workspaces.

For most trusts, this is invisible — they have one workspace, they’re in it, that’s the experience. The workspace concept matters for:

• Hosted MAT services — a regional partnership running multiple trusts in one platform deployment
• Demo + training — separate environments for testing without polluting production
• Migrations — staging a new trust’s data before flipping over

What a workspace owns

Everything that’s the trust’s:

• Tickets, changes, problems, projects
• Assets, sites, buildings, rooms
• People (staff + pupils + parents + governors)
• SCR records
• Risks, policies, compliance controls, governance actions
• Custom configurations: SLA policies, automation rules, ticket templates, priority matrix
• Branding (theme, logo, palette)
• Roles + permissions assignments

What it doesn’t own (these are platform-global):

• Released features (every workspace runs the same Keystone version)
• The user identity itself (a single login can be a member of multiple workspaces)
• The list of seeded statuses, types, ITIL matrix (these seed into the workspace on creation but each is then editable)

Switching workspaces

Users with multi-workspace membership see a workspace switcher in the top-left of the screen. Switching is a hard reload (different data scope, different permissions, possibly different theme).

Most users only have one workspace and never see the switcher.

Settings

Per workspace:

• Name + slug — display + URL handle
• Locale + timezone
• Branding — see the Branding article
• Default landing page — what users see after login when they have no preference
• Workspace announcement — optional banner (“Maintenance Tue 8pm”)
• Feature flags — gradually-rolled-out features can be enabled per workspace

Creating a workspace

Only platform admins (not workspace admins) can create workspaces. The setup flow:

1. Pick a name + slug
2. Pick the locale + timezone
3. Pick a starter theme (or a fresh one)
4. Confirm — the workspace is created and seeded with: default departments, default ticket types/statuses, default SLA policy, default priority matrix, etc. (Compliance frameworks are not auto-seeded — install the DfE Academies Trust Handbook starter or author your own from Governance → Compliance.)

The first workspace admin is invited via email after creation.

Decommissioning

Don’t delete workspaces. Trusts that close their use of the platform get their data exported (a full archive in JSON + attachments) and the workspace is then archived — read-only, not visible in pickers, but still in the database for any future audit query.

A genuine delete (with data destruction) requires a separate platform-admin action and a 30-day waiting period. The wait is deliberate.