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Your details
The profile screen — what MySentinel holds about you as a member of staff, how to change your password, and how to turn the app's notifications on for a device.
Every signed-in member of staff has a Profile, whatever their role, and it is reached the same way from every part of the app. It holds your account and your password, and it is the way through to your devices and your notifications.
What is on it
The Account panel is short, and short is the point. MySentinel holds very little about a member of staff:
- your email address, which is also how you sign in
- your role, which decides what you can see and do
- which school your account belongs to
- when your password was last changed
There is nothing else — no personal profile to fill in, no photograph, no phone number for you. A system that tracks children has no business collecting a staffroom’s worth of detail about the adults using it, so it does not.
Your role and your school are shown here but cannot be edited here. They are set by whoever administers your school, which is what stops an account from quietly enlarging its own reach.
Three buttons lead onward, to your notification devices, your passkeys and your sessions. Passkeys and sessions are covered in Your devices.
Changing your password
The second panel is Change password, and it lists the rules before you start rather than rejecting you afterwards. A new password must be:
- at least twelve characters
- made up of at least one letter and one number
- different from the one you are replacing
You enter your current password first. That is not bureaucracy — it is what stops somebody who finds an unlocked phone from locking the real owner out of their own account in ten seconds.
When the change succeeds, you are signed out and asked to sign in again, with the new password. Expect it, so it does not read as an error. Every other device signed into your account keeps its session; if the reason you changed the password was that somebody else might have it, go on to your sessions screen and sign out everywhere as well.
If the current password you typed was wrong, the screen says exactly that, and nothing has changed.
Notifications on this device
Notification devices is where you turn the app’s own notifications on for the phone, tablet or computer you are holding.
Tap Turn on for this device and the browser asks your permission. If you decline, the screen tells you the notifications were not allowed on this device — that decision belongs to the browser and MySentinel cannot overrule it. You can change your mind later in the browser’s own settings for this site.
Turn off on this device switches them off again for that device only.
Underneath is the list of devices already registered for your account, with the browser each one is and when it was last seen. If it is empty, it says so.
Two things about that list are worth understanding.
Notifications are per device, not per person. Enabling them on the gate phone does nothing for your own phone, and the list is what makes that visible. If you expected an alert and did not get one, this list is the first place to look.
Some browsers cannot do it at all, and when that is the case the screen says so instead of offering a button that would fail. On an iPhone or iPad in particular, notifications only work once MySentinel has been added to the home screen — a browser tab cannot receive them, however many times you tap the button.
Registering a device here is also not the same thing as a parent’s messages. Guardians receive their notifications through their own channels, set up separately; nothing on this screen affects what a family receives.