Training and e-learning
Guidance and documents
Written guidance, files to download, and why some of them ask you to sign in or to subscribe.
On this page
Guidance is what City Council's service teams write: policies, templates, toolkits and advice, with the documents that go with them. News is the same machinery for things that are happening rather than things that are true.
Three levels of access
| Level | Who can read it |
|---|---|
| Public | Anybody, signed in or not. Findable by a search engine, deliberately. |
| Signed in | Anybody with an account here. |
| Reserved | Schools holding the subscription that includes it. |
Reserved does not mean hidden
Something reserved is still listed, with its title and its summary, to everybody. You can tell that it exists and what it is about; what you do not get is the body of it.
That is on purpose and it is commercial rather than technical: you cannot decide whether a subscription is worth having if you cannot find out what is in it. When you open one you are not entitled to, the page says which service includes it and links to that service, rather than only refusing.
Documents
Documents are served through the site rather than as a link to a file somewhere, which is what lets the same three levels apply to the bytes and not only to the page. A document you are not entitled to gives you the explanation and not the file — including if you have the direct address.
Each document shows its type and its size before you open it, so a 40MB handbook is not a surprise on a school broadband connection.
Where a document has been replaced
City Council withdraws a document rather than deleting it, and a withdrawn document stops being offered. If you have an old copy on a shared drive, the version on the site is the current one; that is the whole reason for serving them here.
Things that need doing by a date
Some guidance carries a date by which something has to be done. It is shown on the item and in the list, so a return with a deadline does not depend on somebody having read the email in July.
Searching
The box at the top of every page searches guidance and news along with everything else. See finding things.
This guide is not guidance
This guide describes the site. Guidance is written by City Council about subjects. The two are separate items in the menu for that reason.
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.