Parent portal
/parent. Needs portal.parent.
Parents sign in and see each of their linked children.
What a parent sees
Section titled “What a parent sees”Per child:
| Devices | Assigned to them |
| Loans | Currently out |
| Repairs | And their status |
| Purchases | With dates and amounts |
| Assistance requests | And their status |
| Total repair costs | Only if the school chooses to show costs |
| Charges | Approved and later damage charges |
Costs are optional
Section titled “Costs are optional”Whether costs are visible at all is a configuration choice, and schools go both ways deliberately.
Showing them works where families are expected to contribute and transparency avoids arguments.
Hiding them works where repairs are covered centrally and a number on a screen would prompt questions with no useful answer.
Charges are different from costs. A charge is what a family is actually being asked to pay, and only approved and later charges are ever shown. A proposal is an internal opinion, not a bill. See damage charges.
Signing in
Section titled “Signing in”Single sign-on is the right answer in production. See SSO, where the parent audience is a separate switch.
A sign-in link. A parent asks for a link and one is emailed to them. The
parent.login message carries it and cannot be switched
off, because it is the mechanism.
Username entry proves nothing on its own, so it is refused by default in
production. It exists as an opt-in convenience for demonstrations, controlled by
PORTAL_USERNAME_ENTRY.
Where the parent-child link comes from
Section titled “Where the parent-child link comes from”Your student information system. Plugboard does not maintain family relationships; it reads them.
Which means a parent seeing the wrong children, or none, is a data problem in the SIS rather than a configuration problem here. That is worth knowing before spending an afternoon in the wrong system.
Telling parents it exists
Section titled “Telling parents it exists”Most schools mention it in the start-of-year ICT letter, and again when a repair is lodged.
It reduces “what has happened to my child’s laptop” traffic, which at a school with a device programme is a genuine volume of email.
What parents cannot do
Section titled “What parents cannot do”Everything here is read-only. A parent cannot lodge a repair, cancel one, or change anything.
If a parent lodges a repair for a device they cannot hand over, somebody has to chase it.