Requests and messages from parents

Three items in the Queues part of your menu are all the same shape of work: something has come in from a family, and it is sitting there until somebody in the office deals with it. Each opens on what still needs you rather than on everything that ever happened.

Pickup requests

Pickup requests is headed by a count of how many need a decision. A parent asks for one of three things — an Early pickup, a Late drop-off, or a Planned absence — and each row leads with the learner’s name, then who asked, what they asked for, the time they asked for, who is expected to collect, and any reason they gave.

The status chip is amber while a request is Pending, green once it is Approved or Completed, and quiet grey for anything already closed — declined, expired or cancelled. Nothing here is red, because none of it is an emergency.

Approve explains itself before it commits: approving lets the guardian collect this learner at the requested time, and everyone registered for this learner will be notified. That second half matters. Approving does not quietly file a note — it tells the whole family, so a second parent who was not expecting the child to leave early finds out when the office does.

Decline insists on a short reason, because the parent is told the outcome either way and a bare refusal helps nobody. The screen will not let you save without one.

Class teachers can also work this queue for their own classes, which is covered in the classroom chapter.

Late pickups

Late pickups is the only one of the three the school raises against itself. Nobody submits anything: the app watches who is still checked in after your school’s pickup curfew and opens a row for each learner still waiting.

Two things it deliberately does not do. It raises nothing on a day your school is closed — weekends, public holidays, out of term. And it ignores a learner whose check-in belongs to an earlier day, because one row nobody ever closed would otherwise raise a fresh alert, and a fresh email to that family, every morning for weeks.

Each row leads with the learner, then how many minutes past curfew they have been waiting, the curfew time itself, when they arrived on site, and the last contact anybody logged. The chip reads Waiting, Guardian contacted, Escalated or Collected. It stays amber while a learner is simply waiting; it only turns red when an escalation has itself been sitting unanswered for half an hour. A child waiting twenty minutes for a parent stuck in traffic is not an emergency, and colouring it as one teaches staff to ignore the colour.

Three actions, each explained before it saves. Log contact records that you reached out, with room for a note like a voicemail left. Mark collected closes the row. Escalate — administrators only — notifies the duty staff that a learner is still on site well past curfew, and takes a note for the on-call team. A fourth button, Notifications, jumps to exactly what was sent to that family about this, which is the first question a parent asks.

Class teachers can work this queue too. It is the one part of the administrator workspace they are deliberately let into, because at half past three the person still with the child is usually the teacher.

Parent messages

Parent messages is the inbox: replies, sick notes and requests from parents and guardians, newest first. Messages arrive on whichever channel the family already uses — a WhatsApp reply, an email, an SMS — and staff concerns raised inside the app land here too.

It opens filtered to Needs reply. You can widen that to all statuses, handled, auto-handled or dismissed, filter by type, and search by parent or learner name. Types name what the message is: a sick note, an early pickup, a late drop-off, a request to stop WhatsApp, email or SMS, a message where the app could not work out which learner is meant, a plain freeform note, or a teacher concern.

Above the list sits a red Emergency messages section. A guardian who replies with the emergency word on the channel the school wrote to gets pinned to the top of this screen, and every administrator gets a push notification about it. It is an alert and nothing more: it does not start a lockdown, hold a check-out, or send anything on its own. An inbound message can be faked, so a person decides. Acknowledging or replying unpins the card into the ordinary list below.

Opening a message shows the conversation — the family’s note, then each school reply — with a short plain-language summary of what the app thinks is being asked. Three actions: Reply, which goes back on the channel the parent used; Acknowledge, one tap that tells the parent the school received it; and Mark handled, for the ones you dealt with by phone.

Two honesty features are easy to miss. A message whose sender could not be verified carries a warning telling you to treat it with caution — which matters most for a forged sick note or a forged request to stop notifications. And a full phone number or email address is never shown, only enough to recognise the person.

A teacher’s concern cannot be replied to from here, and the screen says why: replies go to parents on the channel they wrote from.