Student & parent logins

How families get into the parent app, and the one setting you should ask your provider about. 10 minutes to read, and it prevents a bad afternoon.

Admitting a student creates two accounts automatically — one for the student, one for the parent. Nobody has to create them, and there is no separate user screen.

What gets created

	Username	Password
Student	The student email you entered, or S + admission number	The admission number followed by the date of birth as DDMMYYYY
Parent	The parent email you entered, or P + the father's phone digits	The father's phone number, digits only

A student admitted as 0042, born 5 March 2015, with father's phone 9876543210:

	Username	Password
Student	S0042	004205032015
Parent	P9876543210	9876543210

These passwords are guessable, and you should treat them that way

A parent's password is their own phone number. Anyone who knows a family's phone number can sign in as that parent and see the child's marks, attendance, fees and contact details.

This is a starting password, not a secure one. Three things to do about it:

1. Tell families to change it at first login. Put it in the message you send with the credentials
2. Ask your provider to enable passwordless OTP login. Then a parent signs in with a code sent to their phone and the weak password stops mattering
3. Never use these logins yourself to "check something" for a parent. Anything you do is recorded as them

Give explicit emails at admission where you can

A student or parent email entered on the admission form is used as the username instead of the generated one. It is easier for families to remember, and it makes password resets by email possible.

Sending credentials to a family

Open the student's profile. Two buttons:

• Send Student Pass
• Send Parent Pass

Each one sends the login details on whichever channels your school has enabled — email, SMS, WhatsApp — and shows them on screen so you can read them out.

Sending credentials RESETS the password to the default

This is the single most surprising behaviour in the system, and the one most likely to generate an angry phone call.

Send Parent Pass does not resend the password the parent is using. It sets the password back to the father's phone number and sends that. A parent who carefully chose a good password last month is now back on a guessable one — and their chosen password no longer works.

Use it for families who have never logged in, or who are genuinely locked out. Do not use it as a "reminder".

The safer reset

Further down the student's profile there is Regenerate Password, separately for the student and the parent.

That generates a random password — not the predictable default — and shows it once on screen. The old one stops working immediately.

Use	When
Send Student / Parent Pass	First-time setup, or the family never received anything
Regenerate Password	Someone is locked out, or you suspect the account has been shared or compromised

Regenerate Password does not message anybody. You read the new password off the screen and pass it on yourself.

After a bulk import

Imported students and parents get exactly the same generated logins and predictable passwords, and no message is sent to anybody.

So after an import you have a school full of accounts whose passwords are phone numbers, and nobody knows they exist. Plan the announcement as part of the job:

1. Import the students
2. Send credentials class by class, so you can watch for delivery failures
3. Include "please change your password" in whatever letter or message goes home
4. Consider asking your provider to turn on OTP login before you announce it at all

One parent, several children

A parent account linked to more than one student sees all of those children under one login, and switches between them in the app.

This only works if the children were linked to the same parent account at admission. If a family somehow ended up with two accounts, the fix is to re-link the second child to the first parent account — not to create a third.

What families can actually see

Parents and students sign in to the parent app, or to the same web address you use, and see only their own records: attendance, marks, fees, homework, notices and the school calendar.

They have no access to anything staff-facing. Nothing you do on the roles and permissions screen affects them.

Common problems

What you see	Cause
A parent says their password stopped working	Someone clicked Send Parent Pass, which reset it
A parent cannot log in at all, and never could	Check the username — if no email was given it is P + phone digits, not the email address they expect
A family sees only one of their two children	Two parent accounts exist. Re-link the second child to the first account
Credentials are "sent" but never arrive	Your school's email/SMS/WhatsApp is not configured. The details are still on screen
A student cannot log in after their date of birth was corrected	The default password is built from the date of birth. Regenerate it
A parent has no phone number on record	Their password was set to a random six-character code at admission. Use Regenerate Password and give them the new one
You want everyone on OTP instead of passwords	That is a platform-level setting — ask your provider