Getting started
Setting up a second factor
An authenticator app, the ten recovery codes that come with it, and what to do if the phone is gone.
On this page
A second factor is a six-digit code, from an app on your phone, asked for after your password. It matters because a password can be guessed, phished or reused from a site that has been breached, and a code that changes every thirty seconds cannot be any of those things.
Whether you have to
City Council decides which roles must enrol. If yours is one of them you will be sent to the enrolment form when you next sign in, and until you have finished it the only pages you can reach are that form, your security page and signing out. Anybody can enrol voluntarily, and if you have a School Admin account with spending permission it is worth doing.
Setting it up
- Go to your security page.
- Install an authenticator app if you have not got one. Any of them works: this uses the ordinary published standard rather than anything of its own.
- Scan the square code on screen, or type the letters underneath it if the camera will not cooperate.
- Type the six digits the app shows, to prove the app really has the secret. Until you do, the enrolment counts for nothing and guards nothing.
- Save the ten recovery codes. Print them, or put them in the password manager. Not in the same phone.
The recovery codes
Each of the ten works exactly once, in place of a six-digit code. They exist for the day the phone is lost, replaced or wiped, which is the day you will not be able to get one from the app.
You can reissue the whole set at any time from your security page without re-enrolling the authenticator. Reissuing cancels every old code, so anything written on a card in a drawer stops working.
Changing phones
Sign in first, on the old phone if you still have it or with a recovery code if you do not. Then remove the enrolment on your security page and set the new one up. Doing it in that order means you are never locked out in between.
If you are stuck outside
No app, no codes, no way in. A System Admin at City Council can clear the enrolment, which puts you back to a password and lets you set the second factor up again. Ask in the help bubble from any device you are still signed in on, or email services.to.schools@example.invalid.
Single sign-on does not ask
If your school signs in through its own tenant, this site does not ask for a code. Your school has already applied whatever it requires, and asking again would be this system overruling your own security policy with its own. See single sign-on.
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.