Your devices

Two screens sit behind your profile and between them they answer the questions that actually matter about access: what can prove it is me, and where am I currently signed in.

Passkeys

A passkey replaces a password with something your device already does well — unlocking itself. Your phone or laptop checks your face, your fingerprint or its PIN, and vouches for you. Nothing that could be guessed, phished or reused elsewhere ever leaves the device.

The Passkeys screen describes their job in one line: they protect high-impact staff actions with device-backed verification. That is the second reason they exist. Certain actions inside a school workspace — the ones that change what the system will let happen to a child — ask for a passkey at the moment you do them, not just at sign-in. Without one, those actions are simply not available to you.

Add a passkey creates one for the device you are holding right now.

Each passkey in the list is labelled with how far it reaches:

• Synced — kept in your Apple or Google account, so it already works on your other devices in that ecosystem. Add one on your iPhone and your iPad has it.
• This device only — it exists on this device and nowhere else. Lose the device and the passkey is gone with it.

The distinction is worth reading before you rely on a single one. Alongside each passkey the screen shows when it was created and when it was last used, and Revoke removes it.

Adding another device

If your passkey is the this-device-only kind, a second phone needs its own. You cannot copy one across, which is exactly what makes it worth having.

Add a device, on the passkeys screen, handles it. It produces a QR code and a link, both good for a few minutes, and tells you how long is left.

Open that QR code or link on the device you want to add. It lands on a page headed Add this device, which says something reassuring and true: the link already knows your account, so there is nothing to type. One tap and the new device creates its own passkey, then offers to take you to the sign-in screen.

Two things are worth understanding about this.

The new device is not signed in and does not need to be. The whole point is to set up a device that has never seen your account. The link itself carries the authority, briefly.

The secret rides in the part of a web address that is never sent to a server. A link like this normally leaves a trail through every system it passes on the way. This one does not: that portion of the address stays inside the browser by design, so the code cannot end up in a server log or in somebody’s records of who visited what.

If the code has been used or has simply sat too long, the new device says so and tells you to generate a fresh one on your other device. There is deliberately no retry button — retrying on the new device cannot mend a spent code, and a button that pretended otherwise would only waste your time.

Where you are signed in

The Sessions screen lists every device with a live sign-in on your account: what the device is, when the session started, when it was last used, and roughly where from. Your current device is marked as such.

Revoke this session ends one of them. Use it the moment a phone goes missing, or when you notice something in the list you cannot account for.

Sign out all devices ends every session at once, including the one you are using. The confirmation says exactly what will happen and makes you type the words REVOKE ALL to go through with it. That friction is proportionate: this is the button for a lost phone or a suspicion that somebody else has your account, and it should be hard to press by accident and easy to find when you need it.

Afterwards, everybody — you included — signs in again.

The habit worth having

Look at the sessions list occasionally, and clear out devices you have stopped using. A school gate phone that was replaced last term should not still hold a live sign-in, and the only person who will ever notice that it does is you.