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Guide 17 · Everyone

The events calendar

One place to publish holidays, PTA meetings, exams and other dates — and choose who sees each one. Parents and students get a quiet “Upcoming events” card in their portal; staff see what's coming on the school side. Here's how it works, and how it differs from the term calendar.

Publish: school admin See: staff · parents · students Not the term calendar

§ 01What it is

The events calendar is your school's noticeboard of dated things: a mid-term break, a PTA meeting, the start of end-of-term exams, sports day, a class trip. A school admin adds an event once, picks who it's for, and it appears — in a month grid on the admin side, and as an Upcoming events card in the parent and student portals.

Each event carries a small set of fields: a Title, an optional Description, a Type, an Audience, an All day toggle, a start and an end (Starts / Ends), and an optional Location. The available types are Holiday, PTA, Exam, Sports, Trip and General — they colour-code the calendar so the right things stand out at a glance.

§ 02Events vs. the term calendar

These are two different things, and it's worth being precise about which you mean:

The events calendarThe term calendar
A free-form list of notices and dates you publish to people — holidays, PTA meetings, exams, trips. The structural setup of the school year — term start/end dates and which days count as school days.
Add one anytime. Each event is purely informational; deleting it changes nothing downstream. Part of academic-year setup. It underpins attendance, gradebook windows and report-card periods.
Audience-scoped — you choose staff, parents and/or students. Applies to the whole school; not a per-audience notice.
Don't confuse the two Adding a “Mid-term break” event tells people about it — it does not change which days the school treats as teaching days. If you need attendance and the gradebook to skip those days, set that in the term calendar during academic-year setup, not here.

§ 03Creating & publishing an event

Publishing is a school-admin job, done in School Admin under Events:

  1. Open Events. You'll land on the current month — a grid of days with any events shown as coloured chips, plus a list below. Use ‹ and › to move between months.
  2. Press New event. A form opens with Title, Description, Type, Audience, an All day checkbox, Starts / Ends and Location.
  3. Fill in at least a title. Pick a Type and an Audience (see § 04). Leave All day ticked for a date like a holiday; untick it to set specific start and end times for, say, a 4pm PTA meeting.
  4. Press Create event. It appears immediately on the grid and in the list — there's no separate “publish” step, and no draft state. If a title is missing you'll see “Title is required.”; if the end is before the start, “The end must not be before the start.”
  5. To change one later, click its chip on the grid (or Edit in the list), adjust, and press Save changes. To remove it, use Delete in the list or Delete event in the form.
All-day vs. timed With All day on, the start and end are plain dates — set a different end date for a multi-day window (a week-long break shows as Mon → Fri). With it off, you pick exact times. Times are stored in UTC and shown to each viewer in their own local time.

§ 04Who sees what

Every event has an Audience, and that's the whole access model — there's no per-person sharing. The four choices are:

  • Everyone — staff, parents and students all see it.
  • Staff — teachers, school admins and other staff.
  • Parents — linked parents/guardians only.
  • Students — students only.

Each portal viewer sees events for their own role plus anything marked Everyone. So a parent sees Everyone + Parents events; a student sees Everyone + Students; teachers and admins see Everyone + Staff. Someone with more than one role at the school — a parent who also teaches there — sees the union of both.

Worked example A staff-only planning meeting → set Audience to Staff, and parents and students never see it. A school-wide holiday → Everyone. An exam window you want students and their parents to plan around → publish it to Everyone (or run two events if the wording should differ).

§ 05The “Upcoming events” card

Parents and students don't get the full calendar — they get a compact Upcoming events card in their portal. It lists the next events they're allowed to see, soonest first, each with a type tag, the title, when it is, and the location if one was set. By default it shows the next ten.

It's read-only — there's nothing to click or manage. When there's nothing scheduled (for that audience), it simply reads “No upcoming events.” If the events service can't be reached for a moment, the card shows “Events are unavailable right now.” and recovers on its own; nothing is lost.

Why a parent might not see an event If a parent says an event is “missing,” check its Audience first — a Staff event will never reach them. Also note the card only shows upcoming dates: an event whose end time has already passed drops off automatically.

§ 06Practical notes

  • No reminders are sent by this calendar. Publishing an event puts it on the portals; it does not, on its own, send an SMS or push notification. Treat it as a noticeboard, not an alert.
  • Times are local to the reader. You enter times once; every portal renders them in the viewer's own time zone. Stick to all-day events for whole-day dates so there's no time-zone ambiguity.
  • Deleting is safe and reversible by re-adding. Removing an event only takes it off the calendar and the cards — it has no effect on attendance, grades or anything else.
  • Only school admins publish. Teachers, parents and students consume events; creating, editing and deleting them is limited to the school-admin role.
  • Past events tidy themselves. The portal card hides events that have ended, so it stays a short, relevant list without you having to prune it.

Up nextRelated guides

Admin sideRunning your school in School Admin → Parent sideThe parent portal, explained →
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