Family & School

How it works

The mechanics of this kit, plainly — what runs and when, where the data lands, and what you look at.

• School sweep runs weekdays · 7am and keeps the Family Board dashboard fresh. Weekday mornings — reads the school's email, files every date and every ask, ticks what the evidence shows is handled.
• Sunday look-ahead runs sundays · 6pm. Sunday evening — the week ahead, day by day, per child: what is on, what is due, what goes in the bag.
• What is captured lands in the School register record, which lives at Data/School Register in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Activities record, which lives at Data/Activities in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Term dates record, which lives at Data/Term Dates in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• The Family Board dashboard reads from the record and shows, at a glance: this week · outstanding · days to half-term · days to the end of term · clubs & activities · recently handled · the children · the school register · how this board works.

The wiring, in one breath: Rosemary holds School capture · School capture writes to School register · Letter reading writes to School register · School register shown by Family Board · Family Board kept fresh by School sweep · School sweep fills Term dates · School capture keeps Activities · Rosemary holds Letter reading · Rosemary runs Sunday look-ahead.

Getting the most from it

A kit earns its place when it changes what you look at and what you say, not when it is installed. This is the rhythm that makes it pay.

• Let the weekday sweep do the reading; your job is the glance. Open Family Board with your coffee and read Outstanding before anything else — it is the honest signal of what still needs your hand, soonest first, with the child and the date on every line.
• Say it in passing and it is filed: "Alex needs a costume for Friday", "I've paid the trip", "Sam's football is Wednesdays now". School capture writes the row, ticks the one you handled, and with two children asks which — it never guesses.
• Photograph the letter from the book bag and hand it to Rosemary with a line saying whose it is. Letter reading files the slip, the money and the day exactly as printed, and leaves blank a date the letter never gave.
• Read the Sunday look-ahead on Sunday evening, not Monday morning: it lays the week out day by day per child — the deadlines, the clubs and what to bring, what is already on the family calendar — and it is drawn only from the records, so a gap on the card is a gap in the register.
• Confirm the senders once and keep them true. The sweep reads only the addresses you named; when the school moves to a new platform or a club starts emailing, tell Rosemary and it is added by name — nothing is ever read on a guess.
• Keep the two kits apart on purpose. What the school asks of you lives here; what a school report says about your child lives with Wren in Children & Milestones, kept whole. Rosemary will hand a report across and never summarise it.

Make it yours

Nothing here is fixed. The pieces are ordinary agents, routines, records and dashboards, so anything you know about shaping those applies. Retire whatever earns nothing.

Things people usually change first

Say any of these in chat, or edit them on the kit’s page in the app.

• Which addresses count as the school — each confirmed or struck by name, and a new one added the day the school changes platform.
• How much warning you want before a deadline, and which parent handles payments — said once, remembered by the sweep.
• What never to file: the newsletter you skim, the fundraising round you have opted out of, a sender that is not really the school.
• When the sweep and the Sunday look-ahead run, or pausing either and keeping just the board.
• The registers themselves are yours to edit: a club that moved, a term date the school corrected, an item you have decided is not needed.

Your first run

Installing starts a short setup conversation — not a form. Answer roughly, correct later.

1. Adding the Kit offers the first sweep right away: connect your email and calendar on the same screen, start it with one tap, and watch it read back through this term's school messages — the trip letters, the forms, the payment requests, the dress-up days, the term dates — finding the school's own senders itself and filing every ask and every date against the child it names. The calendar is only read, to spot a clash. Prefer not to connect? Tell Rosemary about the children, the term and what is on the fridge instead, and the registers build by hand.
2. When that first sweep finishes, Rosemary leaves a short note in your 1Presence inbox saying what it filed — how many items, for how many children — and invites two minutes together to confirm which senders are the school and which child is which. That conversation is where the children go on the shared register, by name, school and year group only; the sweep never adds one on its own.
3. From then on the sweep runs every weekday morning, reads only the senders you confirmed and only what is new, ticks what the evidence shows is handled, and raises a card only when something is due soon, a message could not be matched to a child, or a date clashes. On Sunday evening the look-ahead sends the week ahead; it stands down until the register has something on it.
4. Nothing here replies to a school, writes to your calendar, or says a word about how a child is doing — and the records are yours alone; sharing them with another parent or carer is not available yet.

Watch the first pass, then tell it what you would have done differently — that correction teaches it more than any setup could.

The essentials

Learning, preferences and run costs work the same in every kit — so they are covered once, in the Kits guide.

Living with a Kit — the Kits guide →

← All kits