Getting started
Helping families at the desk
What to say and what to check when a parent or pupil comes to the office about sign-in, fees, transport, leave, or a missing hall ticket.
Getting started guide for day and boarding schools.
Last updated August 29, 2026
Families arrive with a symptom, not a diagnosis, and the useful first question is almost always the same one: can they sign in, and does the dashboard show the right child? Access problems and content problems look identical from the counter but need completely different handling. Access is yours to fix. Content - unpublished homework, unpublished results, an unmarked register - belongs to a teacher, and promising a fix you cannot deliver is what turns a two-minute conversation into a complaint.
Cannot sign in
- Check the tile first. Guardians use Parent, pupils use Student; the wrong choice signs them out again with an explanatory message.
- Confirm the guardian record exists at /parents and carries a portal login. A record without one produces a successful sign-in and an empty dashboard.
- Send a fresh link rather than hunting for the old one. Requesting a new link deletes the previous token, links from the sign-in screen last fifteen minutes, and the welcome link issued at account creation lasts twenty-four hours.
- If the account was created for them, expect a forced password change: the app sends them to /profile before anything else and will not let them navigate away until it is done.
- Password links only reach parents and pupils. Staff who have lost a password need an administrator, not a magic link.
Right login, wrong data
Every family screen carries the child in the address, so a bookmark saved last term or a link forwarded between parents can genuinely show a sibling. Attendance is at /parent-dashboard/attendance, results at /parent-dashboard/grades, homework at /parent-dashboard/homework, timetable at /parent-dashboard/timetable, syllabus at /parent-dashboard/syllabus, transport at /parent-dashboard/transport, and fees at /fees/me. Notifications build these links from the record that triggered them, so the reliable instruction is to open the alert rather than an old tab, or to use the child switcher on /parent-dashboard.
Fees, transport, and leave
- Counter payment: take it at /fees/collections and check the receipt email marker on the payment row before they leave.
- Online payment: send them to /fees/me and then to /fees/pay-online on their own phone. A missing Pay button means online payment is switched off, not that the balance is clear.
- Paid but the balance looks wrong: compare the instalments settled at /fees/payment-history with the ones still outstanding rather than recording a second payment.
- Live bus: only visible while a driver has a trip running, so check /transport/day-sheet before telling a parent the tracking is broken.
- Leave: families apply at /student-leave and the class teacher decides. Approval records the absence but never marks the register.
Common questions
Quick answers in plain language.
A parent insists their password is correct but sign-in keeps failing. What is usually happening?+
They are on the wrong tile. The sign-in screen asks which kind of account you hold before it takes credentials and checks the answer afterwards, so a guardian who picks Staff is authenticated and then immediately signed back out with a message saying this is not a Staff login. Ask them to choose Parent and try the same credentials again.
Can the office correct an attendance mark a family disputes?+
No. Marks are written and corrected on the register at /attendance, which only the class teacher, co-class teacher, and leadership can save. Approving student leave does not write an attendance row either, so a family with approved leave still needs the class teacher to mark the day. Take the details and pass them to the homeroom teacher.
Why can a pupil not download a hall ticket that staff can see?+
Families are held behind two gates that coordinators bypass entirely: the exam session publish date must have passed, and the individual paper must be published. Until both are true the request is refused with a message saying the schedule has not been published yet. Check it from a family account, not from yours.
A parent asks to see both children under one login. Is that possible?+
Only if both guardian records were created with the same portal user, which cannot be done after the fact because a login is created per record and email addresses must be unique. In practice the family ends up with two logins, one per child. Tell them plainly which login shows which child rather than promising a merge.
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