What is My School Portal?

It is a website and app that gives parents one place to see what the school holds about their child: the calendar, reports, invoices, forms, messages and contact details. The school connects it to its own management system, the software that holds the register, the timetable and the fees ledger, and the portal shows you the parent-facing view of that data.

Each school has its own portal at its own address. There is also a central gateway at login.myschoolportal.co.uk, which does not log you in directly: it asks you to find your school in an alphabetical directory and sends you to that school's portal. So there is one front door, and behind it a separate portal per school.

It depends on what the school has switched on, but a typical portal shows:

• Calendar of school events, fixtures and term dates, usually filtered to your child.
• Reports and grades, published at the end of term or after assessments.
• Invoices and fee statements, with the option to pay online if the school has enabled it.
• Forms: consent for trips, medical updates, clubs and options choices.
• Messages and notices from the school, sometimes duplicating what also comes by email.
• Contact details the school holds for you, which you can usually update yourself.
• Timetable for secondary pupils.

Some schools use it for almost everything; some use it for reports and fees only and send everything else by email.

The school sends an invitation email with your portal address, usually the school's name followed by myschoolportal.co.uk, and a link to set a password. From then on you log in at that address, or start from the central gateway and pick your school out of the directory, or open the app.

Yes, and on both stores: My School Portal on the App Store, and Access My School Portal on Google Play. You identify your school the first time you open it, and it supports biometric login where the device has it.

If your children are at more than one school that uses My School Portal, the app lets you switch between their profiles from a single account rather than keeping separate logins. It switches between them; it does not show them together.

The common causes, roughly in order:

• Wrong address. The portal is per school. Searching for a login and picking the first result can land you on a different school's portal. Use the address from your school's email, or find your school in the central directory.
• Invitation expired. The set-up link in the invitation is time-limited. Ask the school office to resend it.
• Two parents, one account. Each parent should have their own login. If one of you set it up with a shared email, the other will not be able to reset a password against their own address. Ask the school to add the second parent.
• Old app cached to a previous school. If you have moved schools, the app may still point at the old portal. Sign out fully and enter the new one.
• The school has not published anything yet. An empty portal at the start of September is normal; reports, invoices and the full calendar arrive when the school pushes them.

If none of those fits, the school office is the right first call. The portal carries no parent-facing support route of its own, and the school is the party that administers your account.

Yes. Each parent can have their own login against their own email address. The school controls who is set up, so the request goes to the office rather than into the portal.

Usually by email, when something new is published: a report, an invoice, a form to complete. Some schools also turn on app notifications. Either way the notification tells you something is there; the content is in the portal, not in the message.

No. ParentPay is a payments system used mainly by state schools. SOCS is a calendar and fixtures system. My School Portal can display a school's SOCS calendar inside it, but they are separate products from separate companies.

It shows you what the school has decided to publish, for the schools that use it. It does not:

• reach a child at a school that does not use My School Portal, or a sibling at nursery. Where two schools both use it the app switches between the children, which is not the same as one combined view;
• share what you see with a partner or grandparent unless the school has set them up as a portal user too;
• read the emails the school sends outside the portal, which at most schools is still the majority of them;
• put the calendar and the emails together.

So for a family with one child at one school that uses the portal well, it is the place to look. For a family with children at more than one school, or one school that uses it for fees and email for everything else, it is one of several sources, and the work of keeping the dates in one shared place is still yours. That is the gap Cyril is built for: forward the portal notification, the school email or a photo of a letter, and it lands in one plan per child that the whole household can see.