Your link, and getting it back

You never have to remember your link, write it down, or keep it safe. It comes to you again every time the school tells you something.

Where it comes from

Every routine message the school sends you about your child — the one that says they have arrived, or that they have left — carries the link at the bottom. So the newest message in your inbox always has a working one in it. Lose the link and the next check-in brings it back.

It is the same link each time, not a new one per message. That is deliberate: it means the link you added to your home screen last term is the link that is still being sent to you today.

Why it is private

The link is the only thing standing between a stranger and your children’s page, so it is built to be worth nothing to anyone who has not been sent it. It is a long run of random characters. There is no name in it, no school in it, and no identifier of any kind that could be picked apart or guessed at.

The first time you tap it, the app quietly trades it in. It checks the link once, puts it away privately on that phone, and sends you on to a plain address with no secret in it. From then on the address bar carries nothing about you — but the phone stays signed in, so you can bookmark the page or add it to your home screen and it opens straight to your children.

Treat the link like a key to the house. Anyone who has it can see your children’s page. Never forward it. If you need another adult to collect your child, there is a proper way to do that, and it is a chapter of its own further on.

Whose page am I looking at?

Every screen carries a line naming it: you, and your children. It sits in the header, under the school’s name, and reads Signed in as Sarah — Thabo, Naledi — your name first, then theirs.

It is in the header rather than on a page because it has to be true everywhere. A parent halfway through sending the school a sick note is exactly the person who needs to know whose account it will be recorded against, and the answer must not live two screens back.

That line exists because one phone in a household is normal, not unusual. Two parents, a parent and a grandparent, a phone that gets handed across the kitchen table. When each of you has your own link and only one of you can be signed in at a time, the one question that matters before you send the school anything is whose page is open. So the answer is on the page, always, rather than something you have to work out from which children are listed.

Opening a link that turns out to be somebody else’s

If you tap a link belonging to another parent — a message forwarded to you, a phone you share, an old link from a different family — nothing happens quietly. The app stops and asks.

It shows you two cards side by side. On one, the parent signed in on this phone now, with their children and their school. On the other, the parent the link you just opened belongs to, with theirs. Underneath, a plain reminder that anything sent to the school — a sick note, a pickup request, a message — is recorded against whoever is signed in. Then two choices: open the new one, or stay where you are.

Until you choose, nothing has changed. The session you had is still the session you have.

The reason it asks at all is that this is not a small mistake to make. Without the question, a single tap on a forwarded link would have swapped the phone over to the other family without a word — and everything you sent the school after that would have gone in under their name, to their school’s office, while your own child quietly stopped appearing on the page. It would have looked like nothing had happened, which is what made it worth stopping for.

Your own link never triggers this. Re-opening the link you already use, or opening the portal for the first time on a new phone, goes straight through as it always did. The question is only ever raised when the link belongs to a different parent from the one signed in.

Signing out

Beside the identity line there is Sign out. It clears your session from that phone.

Think before you use it, because it is not the sign-out of an app you have a password for. There is no password here. Once the phone is signed out, getting back in means opening a link the school sent you, or asking for a fresh one from the recovery page below. The app says exactly that before it does anything, and waits for you to confirm.

It is worth having for a phone you are handing on, a device in a shared space, or a moment when you would simply rather the page was not sitting there open.

How long it lasts

Settings tells you the date your link works until, with Ask for a new one beside it. Using the link pushes that date out again, so a link you actually open never runs out. Only a link that has been left completely untouched for a long stretch of months lapses on its own.

That sentence used to sit at the foot of every visit to the front page, which is the wrong place for it twice over: nobody opens the portal to read about when their link expires, and a parent who does wonder goes looking in their settings. It is now in the one place somebody would think to look for it, and nowhere else.

Three reasons it can stop working

It lapsed. Nobody opened it for months and it timed out. Nothing has gone wrong; you just need a new one.

Your contact details changed. An older-style link is tied to the phone number and email address the school held when it was made. Change either at the school and that link stops opening, on purpose — so a link sitting in an old inbox or on an old number cannot keep working after you have moved on. You will see Your contact details have changed. A new link will arrive in your next message.

The school cancelled it. If a link is forwarded to somebody it should not have reached, the school can kill it outright. Every copy of it stops working at once, and a fresh one comes with your next message.

Whatever the reason, the page you land on says so in plain words, and offers you Recover your link underneath. That is the way back in — you do not need to phone anyone. It is offered on every screen in the portal now, not only the front page: a link that lapses while you are reading your child’s attendance is the same problem wherever you were standing when it happened.

A failure that a new link would not fix is answered differently, and only ever one of the two is offered. Losing your signal, or a moment when the school’s system does not answer, gets Try again instead — because a fresh link would not help, and offering a remedy beside a placebo is worse than offering the remedy alone.

Sending yourself a fresh link

The recovery page asks for one thing: a way to reach you that the school already has. Choose Phone or Email, type it in, and tap Send my link.

The answer is always the same, word for word:

If we have that on file, a fresh secure link is on its way. It can take a few minutes to arrive.

It says that whether or not your number was recognised, and that is on purpose. If the page confirmed a hit, anybody could sit there typing numbers to find out which ones belong to parents at your child’s school. It refuses to be that tool, even for you. The cost is that a typo looks exactly like a success.

So if nothing arrives after a few minutes, the most likely explanation is that what you typed is not what the school has on file — a different number, an old email address, a digit out of place. Try the other one. If neither works, phone the school and ask them to check the contact details they hold for you, because the same details are what every message from the school is being sent to.

There is a limit on how often you can ask, both from one device and for one number or address. An ordinary parent needs one link and will never notice it. It is there to slow down somebody who is not you.