Communication & Messaging
One place for everything the school says — notices, direct messages and automatic alerts — sent to the right people, on the channels they actually read, with proof it arrived.
What this module is
School communication is usually scattered across a WhatsApp group nobody can audit, a bulk-SMS account with a separate login, a letter in a school bag, and a teacher’s personal phone number. Nothing is on the record, nobody can prove a message was sent, and when a parent says they were never told, the school has no answer.
The Communication module replaces all four with surfaces that already know the school. An announcement is aimed at an audience the platform can resolve — a grade, a class, a named student group, an access profile — because those are the school’s own records, not a mailing list somebody keeps up to date by hand. A direct message is a thread between two real accounts, held by the school rather than by either person.
It divides into five surfaces for the school office — announcements, messages, notification operations, moderation and policy — and gives staff, students and guardians the receiving end of each in their own portal. It also carries the delivery machinery every other module depends on: the fee reminder, the clinic notice and the leave-pass approval all leave through this module’s pipeline, which is why the delivery log below shows traffic no one composed by hand.
What you get
Audiences the school already has
Aim a notice at a grade, a class, a student group or a role and the recipients resolve themselves from the roll. There is no list to maintain, and no list to forget to update in September.
Proof of delivery, not hope
Every announcement carries read receipts, and every send lands in a delivery log with a per-channel outcome. "We told the parents" becomes a number rather than a claim.
Messaging the school actually owns
Parent–teacher conversations happen on school accounts, on the school record, subject to school policy — instead of on a teacher’s personal number where the school has no visibility and no recourse.
Moderation built in, not bolted on
Anyone in a thread can escalate a message; it lands in a school queue with the reported content attached and notifies administrators immediately.
One pipeline for the whole platform
Fee reminders, clinic notices, hostel leave passes and results releases all dispatch through this module, so a school configures its channels and templates once.
Failures that can be fixed
A bounced email or an unreachable phone number shows in the log as a failed channel, and can be retried on that channel alone rather than by re-sending to everyone.
How Communication & Messaging actually works
Everything below is the real application, running live on this page with sample school data — not screenshots. Each screen is the same one your team would use.
School office / Administrator
The office is where communication is produced and governed. These screens are the whole job: send a notice to the right people, hold the school’s own conversations, watch what actually went out, review anything escalated, and set the rules everyone else operates under.
Start at the communication hub
The module opens on a hub rather than a feed, because communication splits into two jobs that should not be confused: getting a message out, and governing how messaging works.
Work the announcement outbox
Every notice the school has written lives here — published, scheduled and draft together — so the state of school-wide communication is one list rather than a memory.
Compose to an audience the platform can resolve
This is the screen that makes the module different from a bulk-SMS account: the recipients are chosen as school concepts, and the platform expands them at send time from the live roll.
Hold the school’s own conversations
The same messaging workspace every portal uses, seen from the office: threads with guardians, teachers and students, each attached to the school rather than to whoever happens to be handling it.
Watch what actually went out
Announcements are only part of what a school sends. This is the delivery log for the whole platform — every fee reminder, clinic notice and results release — with the outcome of each channel and a way to fix what failed.
Review what has been escalated
Open messaging between adults and children is only defensible if someone is watching. Anyone in a thread can escalate a message, and it arrives here with the reported content attached.
Set the rules everyone operates under
The policy screen decides who may open a conversation with whom, and who may close one. It is short on purpose — these are the only two decisions that matter, and both are the school’s to make.
Teachers & other staff
Staff are on both sides of this module: they receive what the school publishes, and they hold their own conversations with guardians and the office. Neither requires a second app, and neither uses a personal phone number.
Read what the school sent them
A member of staff sees the notices aimed at them — staff-wide, their role, their classes — in their own portal, with the urgent ones marked.
Hold their own threads
The same messaging workspace, scoped to this employee: their conversations with the office and with the guardians of the children they teach, on the school’s record.
Students
Students are the audience schools most often communicate with badly — a notice read aloud once, a deadline on a noticeboard. Their portal gives them the school’s notices in writing, and a supervised way to ask a teacher a question.
The school’s notices, in writing
Announcements aimed at students land in their own portal, newest first, with priority marked. An exam timetable notice is now something a student can re-read at home.
Ask a teacher, on the record
Students get their own messaging workspace, limited to the teachers the school’s policy allows them to reach. Every exchange is held by the school and can be escalated.
Parents & guardians
Guardians are the audience this module changes most. Instead of a letter in a bag and a teacher’s personal number, they get the school’s notices in the same portal as their child’s attendance and fees, and a direct line that the school can see.
School notices where the rest of the record is
A guardian reads the same notice they were emailed or texted, kept beside their ward’s results, attendance and invoices rather than lost in a personal inbox.
A direct line the school can see
Threads with the form teacher and with the office, held on school accounts. The school sets whether guardians may open a conversation, and every message can be escalated by either side.
How it connects to the rest of the platform
Audiences come from the base platform
Grades, classes, student groups, guardians and access profiles are the school’s existing records. An announcement aimed at "JSS 2A" resolves from the live roll at send time, so a transfer or a new intake is reflected without anyone touching a list.
Every module’s notifications leave through here
The dispatch pipeline, the templates and the delivery log are shared. A fee reminder, a clinic visit notice, a hostel leave-pass approval and a results release are all requests in the same queue, which is why one place shows a school everything it has sent.
Fee chasing is a communication jobrequires School Fees & Finance
School Fees raises the overdue reminders and this module delivers them, to the guardian, on the channels the school configured — and shows the school which of them bounced.
Opt-outs are the recipient’s to set
A person can opt out of a channel in the shared notification centre, and the dispatcher checks that before every send — so a guardian who has opted out of SMS is not texted, however the notice was composed.
Access control is the school’s own
What a member of staff can send, read or moderate is governed by the same access profiles as the rest of the platform. Publishing a school-wide notice is a permission, not a job title.
Common questions
Can we send SMS as well as email?+
Yes. Each announcement chooses its own channels — in-app, email, SMS, or any combination — and the delivery log records the outcome per channel. SMS is charged per message by the provider, so it is usually reserved for genuinely urgent notices while email and in-app carry the rest.
Do parents and teachers need each other’s phone numbers?+
No, and that is much of the point. Conversations run between school accounts inside the portal, so a teacher never gives out a personal number and the school retains a complete record of what was said.
Can we stop parents from messaging teachers directly?+
Yes. The settings screen turns initiation on or off per role — parents, form teachers, subject teachers, students and administrators — so a school can allow parent-to-form-teacher threads while keeping subject teachers out of the loop, or route everything through the office.
What happens if a message is inappropriate?+
Anyone in the thread can flag it with a reason. The flag lands in the school’s moderation queue with the reported message attached, and administrators are notified in-app immediately. The school then resolves or dismisses it, and the outcome is recorded.
How do we know a notice was actually received?+
Two ways. Each announcement carries read receipts — how many recipients it reached and how many opened it — and the notification log shows the per-channel delivery outcome, including failures, with a retry for the channel that failed.
Can we schedule an announcement in advance?+
Yes. Set a send time and the notice is queued as a scheduled job; it publishes and dispatches itself at that moment. Until then it sits in the outbox marked as scheduled, and can still be edited or cancelled.
Is this a bulk-email marketing tool?+
No, and it does not pretend to be. There are reusable templates with variable substitution and a preview, and audience targeting by grade, class, group and role — but there is no campaign builder, no rich HTML editor and no open/click analytics beyond in-app read receipts.
Run your whole school on one connected platform
Start with the base package, switch on the modules you need, and give every parent, student and staff member a single place to log in.