Notices & events

Telling everyone something, and putting holidays on the calendar. 2 minutes per notice — and one of these screens quietly drives payroll.

Sidebar → Communicate

Publishing a notice

Notice Board → Add

Field	Notes
Title	What it is
Content	The body
Published at	The date it carries
Priority	Normal, High or Urgent
Show as popup	Forces it in front of people rather than waiting to be found
Popup expires at	When to stop forcing it
Recipients	Everyone, staff, parents, or one class

Saving publishes the notice and sends notifications to everyone it is addressed to, on whichever channels your school has enabled.

A notice to "everyone" messages every account in the school

Parents, students, teachers and admins, all at once. On a 1,200-student school with SMS enabled, that is a four-figure message count and a real bill.

Address notices as narrowly as they deserve. "Class 5 trip permission" goes to Class 5, not to everyone.

Save the popup for things that genuinely cannot be missed

Exam date changes, closures, fee deadlines. If everything is a popup, people learn to dismiss popups — and then the one that mattered gets dismissed too. Always set an expiry so it stops nagging on its own.

What teachers can send

A teacher may only send notices to a class they are allotted to. They cannot address staff, all parents, or the whole school — attempts are refused with "You are only authorized to send notices to specific classes."

That is deliberate. Class-level communication is a teacher's job; school-wide announcements are not.

Posting to social media

A notice can be pushed to your school's Facebook or Instagram page at the same time, if your provider has connected those accounts. The post is the title, the content as plain text, and your school name.

Read it as a stranger before you tick that box

A notice written for parents who already know the context — "Buses will follow the revised timing from Monday" — reads very differently on a public page. Anything with a child's name in it should never go out this way.

A class notice reaches anyone who was ever in that class

Recipients are matched on enrolment in that class across any year, not only the current one. A family whose child was in Class 5 two years ago and has since left can still receive a Class 5 notice.

If a former parent asks why they got a message, this is why.

Events and holidays

Communicate → Events & Holidays

Field	Notes
Title	Sports Day, Diwali Break
Type	Event or Holiday
Start and end date	A range is fine
Applies to (holidays)	Everyone, students only, or staff only
Audience	The whole school, or one class
Description	Optional detail

Events appear on the dashboard calendar and in the parent app.

Holidays change staff payroll

A holiday marked as applying to everyone or to staff only is removed from the month's working days, which is what payroll divides salary by.

So the events calendar is not decorative. Get the school's holiday list in before you run the first payroll, or salaries are calculated against the wrong number of working days — and nothing warns you.

A holiday marked students only does not affect staff working days. Use it for days the children are off but staff are in.

Enter the year's holidays in one sitting

Sit down with the official calendar at the start of the session and enter the lot. It takes twenty minutes, it feeds the parent app, the dashboard and payroll, and it is the single easiest thing in this system to forget until it is expensive.

What reaches whom

Recipient choice	Who gets the notification
All	Every account in the school
Staff	Teachers and school admins
Parents	Parent and student accounts
Class	Parent and student accounts linked to that class

Real example

Apex Academy's first term:

• 40 notices, of which 31 were class-level and sent by teachers
• 3 popups: an unscheduled closure, an exam date change, and the fee deadline
• The whole year's holidays entered in August, before the first payroll ran

The mistake they avoided, having read this page: their first draft of the closure notice was addressed to everyone and ticked for Facebook. It named the reason, which involved a member of staff.

Common problems

What you see	Cause
Nobody received a notice	No channels are enabled, or the cron job is not running — notifications are queued
A huge SMS bill after one announcement	A notice addressed to everyone with SMS enabled
A teacher cannot send a school-wide notice	By design. Only admins can address the whole school
A teacher cannot send to a class	They are not allotted to it
A popup will not go away	No expiry was set. Edit the notice and set one
A former parent received a class notice	Recipients include anyone enrolled in that class in any year
Payroll working days look wrong	Holidays are missing from the calendar, or marked students-only
A holiday appears for staff who should have worked	It is marked as applying to everyone. Change it to students only
The social post did not appear	The Facebook or Instagram account is not connected. Ask your provider