Permission Slip Template

A consent form that fits on one page

Every outing needs a signature before a child leaves the premises, and retyping the same form each term is time nobody has spare. Fill in the heading and your school name, decide which optional sections you want on the page, and the generator lays out a single branded sheet: pupil name and class at the top, then the activity and where it is going, then the date with departure and return times beside it, then a consent statement with signature and date lines under that.

Deliberately plain. A parent reading it at half past eight on a Tuesday evening should be able to sign it inside a minute, and that rules out anything decorative.

The four sections you can drop

Cost, transport, emergency contact and a medical notes box all start switched on. All four switch off.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. A free walk to the local library involves no coach and no charge, and an empty cost field on a form does not read as inapplicable, it reads as something the parent has failed to fill in. Leaving a box out is clearer than leaving it blank.

Cost and transport share a row when both are showing and take the full width when only one is. The medical and dietary box is taller than the rest and carries two ruled lines inside it, on the grounds that allergy information is the last thing on this form anyone wants squeezed into a margin.

The pupil name and class fields can also go. Drop them when the slip is being photocopied blank for a whole class to complete by hand.

Getting them back

Put the return deadline on the sheet before you print it. If there is nowhere obvious, put it in the title. Then keep a class list and tick them off as they come in, because chasing three unsigned slips on the morning of the trip is precisely the failure this form exists to prevent.

For a weekly club, generate one slip covering the whole term rather than eleven of them. And once the activity is over, remember what you are holding: names, phone numbers and medical information on paper, which belongs in your normal retention and disposal policy rather than in a drawer somebody forgets about.

Why it photocopies well

Field labels sit in tinted strips above white boxes. That survives a third-generation photocopy considerably better than pale grey text on white does, which is the failure mode of most forms built in a word processor.

The page is built for A4 and US Letter from one file and stays on a single sheet, so a class set is one page per child with nothing to collate. There is no answer key, because this is a form and not a worksheet. And the PDF is assembled in your browser, so the school name and heading you type never leave the machine you typed them on.