Multi-academy trusts
Acting on behalf of a member school
Switching into a school, what is recorded while you are there, and how to switch back out.
On this page
A trust can do a member school's administration for it: place an order, set a renewal, invite somebody, correct a roll. It is done by switching into the school rather than by having a special screen.
Switching in
From your trust page, choose a school. From then on the site behaves as though you were at that school: their contracts, their basket, their people, their compliance.
A banner sits across the top of every page saying whose school you are in. It is deliberately hard to miss, because the one failure mode worth designing against is renewing the wrong school's agreement.
Switching back
The banner carries the way out. Do it when you have finished rather than leaving it: the next person at the trust to use that browser inherits where you were.
What is recorded
Everything you do is recorded as done by you, at the trust, on behalf of the school. Not as the school having done it, and not anonymously.
It appears that way in the school's own activity log, which its staff can read. A trust ordering on a school's behalf is a normal thing to do and a school finding out about it from an invoice is not.
This is not impersonation
You are never signed in as another person, and you never see anything as though you were them. There is no impersonation anywhere in this system, for anybody, including City Council. What a trust has is authority over its own schools, exercised in its own name.
What you cannot do
- Read somebody's help conversation as though you were them. Conversations belong to the school they were written at.
- Change the three fields that stay with City Council: the URN, the DfE number and the finance customer code. See your school's own record.
- Reach a school that is not a member of your trust.
Working well with the school
Two habits worth having. Tell the school what you have done, rather than relying on them reading the log. And leave the school's own School Admins in place with real permissions: a trust that becomes the only route to everything is a trust whose schools stop being able to work in August.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.