Signing In & Your Account
Four populations, three kinds of credential, one door. A pupil signs in with the registration number on their ID card and their date of birth; staff and guardians use an address. Then the parts nobody demonstrates and everybody needs: the invitation that sets a first password, the reset that follows a forgotten one, two-factor, the idle and absolute timeouts that end a session, what the school can put on those pages, and where a request for help goes.
A nine-year-old does not have an email address
Every platform sold to schools assumes the person signing in has a working email account they check. For staff that is true. For guardians it is mostly true. For a JSS 1 pupil it is neither true nor fixable, and a product that insists on it quietly hands the pupil’s portal to their parent. So the same sign-in form takes a registration number and a date of birth — the two things a child can be relied on to know and a school can be relied on to hold — and the rest of the journey follows from there: the invitation that issues a first password, the reset when it is forgotten, the second factor for the accounts that hold everybody else’s data, and the timeouts that close a session left open on a shared staff-room machine.
On this page
Three ways in, one form
The sign-in page is served before a tenant is known — there is no school context until somebody identifies themselves — which is why it runs on its own lightweight store and why the school’s branding is remembered by the browser rather than resolved from a URL. Returning to sign in should feel like returning to your school, not to a vendor’s login box.
Sign in
One form, three credentials. Staff and guardians use their email address. A pupil uses the registration number printed on their ID card — `BFA/2026/00010` — and their date of birth, because that is the pair a school actually holds for every child it teaches.
Forgotten it
A different photograph from the sign-in screen, deliberately: somebody who has just failed to sign in is looking at a second screen, and repeating the first one’s artwork makes the two hard to tell apart at a glance — which is the one thing this screen must not be.
Setting a new one
The reset page, arrived at by its emailed link. Five requirements, enforced identically here and on the four other forms in the product that take a password — one shared policy, so a rule cannot hold on the reset page and lapse on the change-password one.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “Three ways in, one form” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
The first time, and proving the address
An employee does not sign themselves up. The school creates the record and invites the address, which means the first credential is always issued rather than chosen — and the first thing the product asks the new colleague to do is replace it.
Set your password
The invited employee’s first visit. Not the same screen as a reset, and the distinction is load-bearing: this person has never had a password, so there is nothing to “forget”, and the copy that would tell them to check their email for a reset link would be describing the email they are already holding.
Verify your address
Proving the address belongs to the person using it. Separate from setting a password because they answer different questions — one is “can you get in”, the other is “can we reach you”, and a school that has confirmed the first and not the second will discover it the day it needs to send a report card.
Confirmed, and straight on
Following the link is the last thing anybody does on this journey. The page confirms the address and sends them to wherever their account belongs — a school still being set up resumes its wizard, a member of staff lands in their portal, and somebody still on an issued password is sent to choose their own first.
And changing it later, voluntarily
For somebody who already knows their password and wants a different one. It asks for the current password, which the reset screen cannot and must not — that is the whole difference between the two pages.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “The first time, and proving the address” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
What is yours, and what is the school’s
Each portal has an account page, and all three draw the same line in the same place: your identity belongs to the school and is read-only; how you get in belongs to you. A member of staff cannot rename themselves, and the school cannot choose their second factor.
A member of staff
The Profile tab: who the school says you are, beside the details you keep up yourself. Security and the signature block are tabs of their own across the top, because each is a separate decision.
How you get in
The Security tab is the half of the page that belongs to the person rather than the school: the password, and the second factor behind it.
Your signature
A staff signature is printed on documents the school issues, and the person it belongs to is the only one who should be able to replace it.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “What is yours, and what is the school’s” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
The same page, on a pupil’s side
Narrower, and narrower on purpose. A pupil’s record is the school’s — class, registration number, guardians, standing — and the only thing on this page they own is the password.
A pupil
The same shape, narrower. A pupil’s record is the school’s: class, registration number, personal details and the primary guardian — all of it read-only, and deliberately so.
Their own standing
The Discipline tab shows a pupil the record adults keep about them: recent incidents, and the actions that followed.
The one thing they own
The Security tab is a single card, because the password is the whole of what a pupil owns on this page.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “The same page, on a pupil’s side” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And the portal that had no account page at all
Guardians were the one portal with no account page: the user menu simply had no “Account” row for them. A parent had nowhere to change their password and, once the second factor arrived, nowhere to turn it on.
A guardian
This is that page, and it is deliberately the narrowest of the three: the Profile tab is the guardian record, read-only.
What a guardian owns
The Security tab: the password, and the second factor a parent previously had nowhere to turn on.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “And the portal that had no account page at all” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
What reaches you, and how you work
Two shared pages behind the same account menu, on all four portals. Between them they answer the two questions a person has about a tool they did not choose: what is going to interrupt me, and can I make this fit how I work?
Your notifications
Everything the platform has routed to this account, across every portal they have access to — the in-app record beside the email or SMS that also went out. The tab across the top is where the same page turns into the settings for it.
Preferences
How the product behaves for this person, saved to the account rather than to the machine — which matters most in the place these are actually used, a shared staff-room computer.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “What reaches you, and how you work” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
These pages, in the school’s colours
Everything above is the platform’s. This is where a school makes it theirs — and the signed-out surfaces are the ones that matter most, because they are the only pages people outside the school ever see. Branding is part of the base platform, not a paid add-on: it stopped being a SKU when a white-labelled front door turned out to be table stakes rather than an upsell.
The artwork on the way in
One route per signed-out page, each with its own imagery and copy. These were a single page with tab parameters hand-synced to the URL so a link could point at one; a real route does that for free, and the strip across the top is the one every other sub-module uses.
And the one nobody plans for
The forgot-password screen has its own artwork for the reason the platform’s default does: it is the second screen somebody sees after failing, and it has to look different from the first. A school that brands only its sign-in page gets two identical screens back.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “These pages, in the school’s colours” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
When it still goes wrong
The honest end of a journey about getting in. Report-a-problem is an overlay rather than a page, reachable over any screen in the product, so a person reports the thing they are looking at instead of navigating away from it and then describing it from memory.
What you sent, and where it got to
Every request this account has raised, with its status. It replaced a link out to the marketing site’s public sales enquiry form — which asked a signed-in teacher to retype their name, their school and their role, all three of which the product already knew.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “When it still goes wrong” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
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.