Where do you find your school's calendar link?
Most schools already publish their calendar in a form your phone can subscribe to. It is usually one long web address, and once Cyril has it the term dates, INSET days, trips and fixtures arrive on their own and stay right when the school changes them.
The hard part is finding it, because every school system puts it somewhere different and almost none of them call it a calendar link. It is worth doing once. Below is where it lives on the systems British schools actually use, and what to ask for if none of this matches.
What am I actually looking for?
A link, not a document. It is usually a long web address that ends in .ics, or that contains ical, webcal or subscribe somewhere in it. Schools label it in all sorts of ways: Subscribe, Add to calendar, Export, Calendar feed, iCal, Sync.
A PDF of term dates is not the same thing and is worth knowing about, because it is what most schools offer first. A PDF is right on the day it is published and silently wrong the day a date moves. A subscription link keeps updating. If you only have the PDF, send that to Cyril anyway and it will read the dates out of it, but the link is better.
Where is it on SOCS?
SOCS is the one most independent schools use for fixtures and the co-curricular calendar, and its calendar is public, so there is no login to get past. The link is on the calendar page itself, usually behind a control marked Subscribe or iCal.
There is a fuller guide for SOCS specifically, including what to do when the calendar stops updating, so rather than repeat it here: how to subscribe to your school's SOCS calendar.
Where is it on iSAMS?
iSAMS is a management system rather than a website, so the calendar lives inside the Parent Portal and you have to be logged in. Open the Calendar or Diary module and look at the top of the month view for Subscribe, Export or a small calendar icon.
Schools can turn the subscription feed off, and some do without realising it affects parents. If there is no Subscribe control at all, that is what has happened, and it is the office that can switch it back on.
Where is it on Firefly?
Firefly is a learning portal, so the calendar in it is often a view of something else rather than the original. Look under the Calendar tab for Subscribe or Export.
If your school uses Firefly alongside SOCS, and many do, take the SOCS feed instead. It usually carries more, particularly fixtures and trips.
Where is it on Arbor?
Arbor is common in state schools. In the Parent Portal the calendar sits under your child's profile rather than at the top level, which is why it is easy to miss.
Arbor does not always give parents a subscription link, and when it does not there is nothing on your side to find. Use the school's own term dates page instead, or simply forward the newsletter that carries the dates to Cyril.
Where is it on ParentMail or Weduc?
Both are built for sending messages rather than publishing calendars, so in most schools there is no subscription link to find and you can stop looking.
That is not a loss. The dates are in the emails they send, and an email is the thing Cyril reads best: forward one and the trip, the deadline and the payment come out of it dated. Setting up automatic forwarding once means you never have to think about it again, which is the other guide.
What if it is just on the school's website?
Plenty of schools, particularly primaries, publish term dates as an ordinary page or a PDF and have no feed at all. Look under Parents, Key Information, or Term Dates.
That still works. Send Cyril the link or the PDF and it reads the dates out of it. What it cannot do is notice when the school quietly changes one, which is the argument for a subscription link where there is one.
What do I ask the office for?
School offices are asked this often enough that the word usually lands straight away. What works:
Could you send me the calendar subscription link, the iCal or ICS feed, so the term dates appear in my phone's calendar automatically? I cannot see a Subscribe option in the parent portal.
Two things worth adding. Ask for the whole-school calendar rather than one year group if you have children in different years, because most systems publish both and the year-group one silently omits half of what you need. And if they reply that there is not one, ask whether they can send the term dates as a document instead: that is a fair answer from a school with no feed, and Cyril can work from it.
