How the school reaches you

You are not going to open this portal every day, and the school knows it. Almost everything you learn about your child’s day arrives as a message. Settings, the third tab, is where you decide how those messages find you.

Nothing here has a Save button

Start with this, because it changes how the whole screen behaves. Every setting on this page takes effect the moment you change it, and confirms in place: a short line appears saying what was saved — Language saved. for one, or a sentence naming the channel you just switched on or off. There is nothing to submit and nothing to remember to press before you leave.

There used to be two buttons on this page both saying the same thing, saving different things, several screens apart. A parent who changed their language and pressed the nearer one saved their quiet hours instead; a parent who flipped a switch and went looking for a save button found one that did not apply to it. Every other control here already wrote immediately. The buttons were the exception, and they were the trap.

One Save survives, and it earns its place: quiet hours, sitting directly beside the two time fields it writes. A pair of times is not finished until both are filled in, so it is the one setting on the page that has a moment of completion worth pressing.

Your language, first

The first thing on the screen is Language, as three buttons — English, Afrikaans, isiZulu — each written in its own language, with the one currently in use marked.

It is first because it is the control most likely to be needed by the person least able to find it. It used to be at the bottom of the page, behind a dropdown and a save button, which meant a parent who reads isiZulu had to recognise the English word for account, scroll past everything else, work a picker and then press a button they could not read. Three buttons named in their own languages need none of that: a reader looking for isiZulu is looking for the word isiZulu, never for its English or Afrikaans name.

Choosing one changes what you see here and the language the school’s messages arrive in, and it travels with you — your next phone and your next link already speak it.

The channels the school can use

Then one row per way the school can reach you — WhatsApp and email — each with a plain line of state and a switch, the same switch every other setting on this page uses.

On means it is on and confirmed. Not confirmed yet means the school has your number or address but you have not yet confirmed it — nothing is sent there until you do, and the row tells you the way back: ask the school office to send the confirmation message again. Off means it is off, and where the record shows who did it the row says so — Disabled by you, or Turned off by the school office — rather than telling you that you did something the school did. Not offered by this school means the school has not switched that channel on at all; better to be told that than to be shown a switch that does nothing, so no switch is offered on that row.

Not reaching you is the important one. It appears when messages on that channel have repeatedly failed to arrive, and it comes with something you can act on:

Recent WhatsApp messages have not been getting through. Please check the number the school has for you is correct.

with the same for email. It is amber, never red. Nothing here is hidden behind a status nobody explains: when a channel has quietly stopped working, this page says so.

A note on what a switch here does and does not do. Turning a channel off silences the routine traffic; it does not un-confirm your number or your address. Those are two different facts — whether the school has proved it can reach you, and whether you want it to — and for a while the portal kept them in one place, so a parent who switched WhatsApp off and on again silently lost the confirmation and with it the channel.

The weekly summary

Weekly summary is one message every Friday afternoon with your children’s week at school — Your children’s week, every Friday. It is on unless you turn it off, and the switch shows the positive — Send me the weekly summary — so you are never left working out whether the setting means yes or no.

Different for one child?

Under a disclosure with that name sits the detail most families never need and a few families very much do.

Opening it gives you Alerts for each child, and every child gets their own set of switches: app notifications, email, WhatsApp and SMS. WhatsApp only appears when the school actually offers it.

This is the setting most parents want and do not know exists. A child in matric who walks home alone is a different proposition from a Grade R who is collected. You can have every arrival for one and none for the other. Each switch saves as you flip it and confirms on the child it belongs to.

It sits behind a disclosure rather than in front of everybody because for a family of four it is sixteen switches, and sixteen switches was the first thing every family used to read on this page. Hidden by default, it is a capability. In front of everyone, it was the page.

Quiet hours lives here too, because it is the same kind of decision — when, and about whom. It takes a From and an Until, and does exactly what it says underneath: We hold routine updates between these times.

Held, not thrown away. A check-in that happens inside your quiet window is kept and sent afterwards. And if several piled up overnight, they arrive as one message in the morning rather than as a burst of six — which is the difference between a useful summary and a reason to turn everything off.

Set both ends or neither; a half-set window is not a window. Turn off quiet hours clears it, and the card says Quiet hours are off when there is nothing set.

Notifications on this phone

App notifications is the message that arrives on your phone the way any other app’s does. This section tells you whether any of your devices has it turned on and how many do, and offers to turn it off on the phone you are holding. Turning it on is a chapter of its own, and it is the last one here.

The pitch for it lives here now, and nowhere else in the app except the one quiet line under your children on the front page. There used to be three separate invitations on a single visit, one of them the only filled button on the landing screen — an app asking to be installed before it had told a parent the thing they opened it for.

Your link

Then one line saying the date your link works until, with a way to ask for a new one beside it.

It is here rather than at the foot of every visit to the front page. Nobody opens the portal wanting to read about when their link expires; a parent who wonders about their link comes looking, and this is where they look. The chapter on your link explains what expiry means and what to do about it.

The school’s number, once

At the foot, when the school has given one, the school’s name and phone number, as something you can tap to dial.

This is the only place in the parent portal that names the office. That is a deliberate correction. Six different sentences used to tell a parent to contact the school, and for any school that had not recorded a phone number every one of them rendered as an instruction to make a call with the number taken out. A portal that cannot name a number does not tell a parent to phone; it says what it knows, and it names the number here, once, when there is one to name.

The order the school tries

You do not choose the order, and it is worth knowing what it is.

For an ordinary arrival or departure, the school tries your app notification first, then email, then WhatsApp, then SMS — and it stops at the first one that gets through. So if you have the app notifications on, most messages cost the school nothing and reach you fastest. That is not a coincidence; it is why the app is offered.

For the messages where an hour’s delay defeats the point — your child still at school long after collection time, an answer to a pickup request, a check on an unexplained absence — WhatsApp moves ahead of email.

An emergency does not use an order at all. It goes out on every channel you can be reached on, at the same time. There is nothing to fall back to when the message is that the school is in lockdown.

What always gets through

At the foot of the per-child settings, in its own note, is the rule that outranks every switch on this page:

Emergency, safety and late-pickup alerts are always sent, whatever your settings.

That is not a disclaimer. No switch on this page, and no quiet-hours window, can hold back an emergency, a lockdown, a drill, or the message that your child is still at school when they should have gone home. You can shape the routine traffic as much as you like. The three things you would never want to miss are not yours to turn off, and they are not the school’s to forget.

Confirming a new phone number or email address

Before the school can send to a phone number or an email address, you have to confirm it is yours. That is why a channel can show as enabled at the school and still not reach you: an unconfirmed contact is deliberately left silent rather than quietly failing.

How you confirm depends on where the school sends it.

On WhatsApp there is no link and nothing to open: the message asks you to reply YES, and replying is the confirmation. STOP opts you out instead. (JA and YEBO work just as well.)

On email and SMS the school sends a short-lived link, and opening it shows a page headed Confirm your contact details. It checks the link and then tells you plainly which of four things happened:

• Done — you will now receive school notifications on this channel. The contact is confirmed and messages will start arriving.
• This channel is already verified. Nothing to do; you have probably opened an older copy of the same link.
• This link has expired. Ask the school to resend your verification.
• This link is not valid. Ask the school to resend your verification.

For the last two, the school office can send a fresh link — there is nothing you can fix from your side, and trying the old link again will not help.