Messages

Messages is your secure mailbox with the service — the teachers who teach your children, and the office. It is on the menu for everybody signed in.

Where to find it: Messages

Reading and replying

Your messages come in Inbox and Sent folders, a page at a time. Open one to read it and reply, and the thread stays together so a conversation does not scatter.

Why messages are not just emails

A secure message stays inside the Portal, and you get an email telling you one has arrived. That means the service can write about your child without personal details travelling through email — and it means a message cannot be forwarded on by mistake. It is also why a reply here reaches the right person: it goes back to whoever wrote to you, not to a general inbox.

Writing a new one

New message asks who it is for. As a parent you choose the child and then their teacher, so the message arrives with the context already attached.

You can add attachments, within the limits your service sets.

Notify an absence

Notify absence is on this page as well as on a lesson. Choose the pupil, the upcoming lesson and the reason, and it reaches the teacher as an absence rather than as a message somebody has to read and act on.

Use this rather than a message whenever your child will miss a lesson — it is the one that lands on the register.

Asking for help instead

If your question is for the service rather than a teacher — about an invoice, an application, how something works — Help is the better route. See Help.

See also

• My Schedules — message a teacher about a particular lesson
• My Dashboard — unread messages appear in Actions Required