Getting started
Asking for help
The bubble in the corner of every page, the conversation behind it, and who else can read it.
On this page
There is a bubble in the bottom corner of every page you are signed in on. Open it, type, and send. That is the whole of it.
One conversation, and it never closes
You have exactly one conversation with City Council, for ever. There is no ticket to raise, no subject line to invent and no list of old tickets to search before you can ask something. It is nearer to a message thread with a colleague than to a helpdesk.
City Council can mark it Resolved when a question is dealt with, which is how their end of it stays workable. That is safe precisely because it does not close: the moment you write again it goes back to Active, whatever it was marked, and nobody has to notice.
Who else can read it
The conversation belongs to your school, not to you. Any colleague with a School Admin account can read it, and when you leave, whoever replaces you can read all of it. That is on purpose — it is the same reason the site does not lose the thread when a School Business Manager moves on — and it is worth knowing before you type anything you would not want a colleague to see.
Council staff have no school, so a council colleague's conversation is theirs alone.
Sending a picture of the page
Nine times out of ten the useful thing is a picture of what you are looking at. There are three ways, and they all end in the same place:
- Attach a file. Choose a PNG, JPEG or WebP. This works everywhere and needs nothing special.
- Paste one. Take a screenshot however you normally do and press paste in the message box.
- Capture this page. If your browser offers it, a button appears that uses the browser's own picker. You choose what is shared and you see the picture before it is sent.
Screenshots are kept apart from the site's public pictures and are readable only by your school and by City Council.
What the council sees
The message, the picture if you sent one, your name, your school, and the address of the page you were on when you wrote. Not the query string, so a search for a colleague's name does not travel with it.
How quickly
A target is set against every message you send, and anything still unanswered past it is chased automatically each morning. Nobody has to remember. The current promise is on the support page, along with 08:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday, term time and school holidays and what happens outside them.
The full page
The help page is the same conversation with more room: the whole history, and, if you have a School Admin account, the rest of your school's conversations too.
Before you ask
Most questions about how something works are answered in this guide, and it is faster than waiting. Most questions about what to do next are answered on the screen itself, because a refusal here always says what would fix it. The bubble is for the rest, and there is no such thing as too small a question for it.
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.