Parental Consent
How a permission request finds exactly the right families — rule-based student selection, a confirmed recipient list, custom questions, and a per-child record of every answer.
Ask the right families, once, and keep the record
Consent is where schools quietly lose hours: a spreadsheet of who was asked, a WhatsApp group of who replied, and no defensible record when it matters. Below, one school builds a museum-trip permission from scratch — describing who it is for in rules rather than by hand, checking the real names those rules produce, and adding the questions it actually needs answered — then reads what has come back on a swimming gala it sent out last week. Both sit in the same register, at the two stages every school has running at once. Every screen is the real application, live with sample school data.
Draft the request
Consent requests live with the student records they belong to. The register shows every request the school has issued, its deadline, and how many families have replied — so nothing sits half-answered without anyone noticing.
The consent register
Every request in one place: what it was for, when responses are due, and the granted / declined / outstanding split. Drafts sit alongside live requests, so a form can be built over several sittings before anyone is contacted.
Composer 1 of 4 — what you are asking for
The composer is a four-step flow, one step at a time. Step one: the consent type, a title families will recognise, the full explanation in rich text, and the date you need an answer by. The explanation is where the detail lives — dates, costs, what to bring — so guardians are not chasing a separate letter.
Describe who it is for
This is the part that usually becomes a spreadsheet. Instead of ticking hundreds of names, the school describes the group in rules — and the platform resolves them to people, live, as the rules are edited.
Composer 2 of 4 — selection by rule, not by hand
Three lists that read as one sentence: start with a group, narrow it by condition, then remove the exceptions. “Everyone in JSS2 and JSS3, boarders only, except these four students” is four clicks and stays legible a year later.
Composer 3 of 4 — confirm the actual names
A count is not a recipient list. The third step resolves the rules to real students — with a warning for any whose guardians have no email address or phone number on file, before the request goes out rather than after.
Ask what you need to know
Most consent requests need more than a yes. Dietary requirements, a contact number for the day, a pickup preference — the school builds those questions itself, in whatever shape the answer needs.
Composer 4 of 4 — build the questions
The same form builder the school already uses for job applications. Add a question, choose the kind of answer — short text, a dropdown, radio buttons, checkboxes, a number, a switch — mark it required or optional, and reorder by dragging.
The request, at home
Guardians do not get a form to print. The request appears in their own portal, alongside everything else about their children, with the deadline in plain sight and one decision to make per child.
What still needs an answer
The parent portal opens on the requests that are still outstanding, with overdue ones marked. A guardian with three children sees one list, not three.
Answer, per child
The school’s explanation in full, then the questions it asked, then the decision. A guardian with two children on the same trip answers twice — because one may be going and the other may not.
Watch it land
Now to a request that has already gone out — the inter-house swimming gala. As replies arrive, the office sees them against the recipient list it confirmed, not against a guess, so when the deadline passes the outstanding families are the ones who genuinely have not answered.
Responses and the audit trail
The register carries a live count per request — granted, declined and still outstanding — against the recipient list that request was published to, not against the whole school. The selection rules stay attached to the form, so “why was this child asked?” has an answer long after the event.
Who has replied
Opening a request lists every family it reached, with their decision, which guardian gave it and when. The ones who have not answered sit in the same list rather than in a separate report, so chasing is a matter of reading down the page.
One family’s answer, in full
Open a reply and you get everything that family told you: their decision, each question with the answer they gave, and anything they added in their own words. Questions they skipped are shown as unanswered rather than quietly dropped — “they didn’t say” is information too.
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.