Running a school
What a School Admin can do
The four roles, what separates them, and the two grants that are not roles at all.
A School Admin runs the school's side of this site. It is the role a School Business Manager, an office manager or a head usually holds, and there is no reason to have only one: two or three is sensible, because somebody is always away in the week something is due.
What it adds
- People and permissions: invite colleagues, close accounts, set what each person may do.
- Approvals: release an order that went over somebody's spending cap.
- Your school's details: address, telephone, finance email and the number on roll.
- Renewals: decide what continues into next year.
- Assigning e-learning and standing requirements.
- Staff roles: who the safeguarding lead is, who the fire marshals are.
- Reading the whole school's help conversations.
What it is not
It is a permission role, not a job. Being a School Admin says nothing about whether you are the Designated Safeguarding Lead, and being the DSL gives you no extra permission here. Those are staff roles and they are deliberately a separate list: conflating the two would mean choosing between giving a fire marshal the finance pages and leaving the compliance matrix unable to name them.
The four roles
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| School Staff | Uses the site. Can be given permission to book training, to spend, or both. |
| School Admin | Everything above, for this school. |
| Service Lead | Council. Runs one or more service areas. |
| System Admin | Council. Runs the whole platform. |
A School Admin can assign the two school roles and only those. Nobody at a school can make anybody a Service Lead or a System Admin, whatever they type.
The boundary with City Council
Three fields on your school's record belong to City Council: the URN, the DfE number and the finance customer code. The first two are somebody else's facts about your school and the third is a key into the council's ledger, where a wrong value sends money to the wrong place. Everything else about your school is yours. See your school's own record.
Getting the role
Another School Admin at your school sets it, on the people page. Where your school has none at all — the last one left without passing it on — a System Admin at City Council can set the first one. Ask in the help bubble.
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.