How do you subscribe to your school's SOCS calendar?

SOCS is a calendar and sports-fixtures system used mainly by independent schools in the UK. Around 260 schools publish a live calendar through it. When the school adds a match, moves a concert or confirms a term date, the calendar updates, and anyone subscribed to it sees the change.

Most schools give it their own address, so the calendar lives at something like calendar.yourschool.org. A small number use the shared address calendar.misocs.com. Either way the page looks the same: a week or month view of the school's events, usually with a filter for year groups, teams and categories.

1. Open the school calendar in a browser. The address usually starts with calendar. followed by the school's own domain. If you are not sure, search for the school name and "calendar", or look under Parents or Calendar on the school website.
2. Look for a subscribe, sync or feed option on the calendar page. SOCS calls this Calendar Sync. Clicking it gives you a link that ends in CalendarSync.ashx, sometimes followed by an ID number and a calendar code.
3. Copy that link. It is a calendar feed, not a web page, so opening it in a browser may download a file rather than show anything. That is normal.

If the school has set up filtered calendars (a single year group, a sports team, whole-school only), each one has its own link. Subscribe to the ones you need rather than the whole school.

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to Calendar, then Accounts, then Add Account.
3. Choose Other, then Add Subscribed Calendar.
4. Paste the link and tap Next, then Save.

The calendar appears in the Calendar app under Subscribed. It refreshes on its own, typically every few hours. You can change the refresh rate under Settings, Calendar, Accounts, Fetch New Data.

Android's built-in calendar does not subscribe to feeds directly. The usual route is through Google Calendar on the web (below), after which the calendar appears on the phone automatically. Some Android calendar apps can subscribe directly; look for an option called subscribe to calendar or add by URL.

1. Open Google Calendar in a browser on a computer. The mobile app cannot do this step.
2. On the left, next to Other calendars, click the plus sign.
3. Choose From URL.
4. Paste the link and click Add calendar.

Google refreshes subscribed calendars on its own schedule, which can be slower than the school's updates. Changes usually appear within a day.

In Outlook on the web, go to Calendar, then Add calendar, then Subscribe from web, paste the link and give it a name. In the desktop app, use Add Calendar, then From Internet.

• You imported it instead of subscribing. Importing copies the events once. Subscribing keeps them live. If you opened the downloaded file and added it, that was an import. Delete those events and subscribe using the steps above.
• The link is for a filtered calendar that has changed. If the school reorganises its calendars, old feed links can go quiet. Get a fresh link from the calendar page.
• Your phone refreshes slowly. Subscribed calendars fetch on a schedule rather than instantly. On an iPhone, check the fetch setting under Calendar accounts.
• The school has restricted the calendar. Some schools put the calendar behind a parent login. If the calendar page asks you to sign in, the feed may not be public, and the school office can tell you how to access it.

Yes, if more than one adult needs to see it. A subscribed calendar is per device, so a partner, a grandparent or a nanny each needs to add the link themselves, and each person sees the whole school calendar, not just the events that concern your child.

That is where a school calendar stops being enough on its own. It tells you when the match is; it does not tell you that the kit list arrived by email on Tuesday. Cyril reads what you forward to it and puts the calendar and the emails together into one plan per child, shared with the household, so nobody has to subscribe to anything. If your school publishes a SOCS calendar, Cyril already has it: the registry holds live SOCS calendars for 264 schools.

It ends in CalendarSync.ashx, usually with an ID number after it, on the school's calendar address. Of the SOCS schools in Cyril's registry, 271 publish from their own address and 7 from the shared calendar.misocs.com one, so the part before CalendarSync.ashx varies and the ending does not.

If the school has set up a separate calendar for that year group, yes. Each filtered calendar has its own link.

No. The calendar is published by the school and the subscription is free.

Because you have subscribed to the whole-school calendar. Use a filtered link if the school offers one, or use an app that filters by child.