Mōrena Helen
Thank you for your reply. As we are hosted we use an external database enrolment plugin called Conduit. This works perfectly with our SMS and creates course shells, enrols the students and teaching staff into those shells. The problem is we end up with an abundance of these shells (which we metalink to the main content course as we have several delivery sites) which we'd like to hide from the users dashboard.
The Conduit plugin doesn't have the same level of automation when working with cohorts - otherwise that would be our preferred method of enrolment.
I think the only possible workaround may be to hide all courses from the teacher role, then unhide the content courses on creation, but the feeder courses will remain hidden. The only problem with that is having future courses visible to students before a teacher has made the necessary changes. I wonder how providers deal with that issue, I see Moodle 4.3 allows courses to show/hide to students on the start dates - maybe that's the solution I need!