Signing in

Everything except the public catalogue needs an account. Accounts belong to people rather than to jobs, so a shared office address used by four people is the one arrangement to avoid: the activity log would then say the office did everything, which tells nobody anything.

Signing in

Go to Sign in and give your email address and password. If your school uses its own single sign-on there is a button for it on the same page, and you will not be asked for a password here at all. See single sign-on.

You may then be asked for a six-digit code from an authenticator app. That is the second factor, covered on setting up a second factor. Two things about it are worth knowing now:

• Nothing is signed in until the code is right. A correct password on its own creates no session at all, so if you close the tab between the two steps, nothing has happened.
• Not everybody is asked. City Council decides which roles must enrol. Being asked to set one up before you can use the site is the policy for your role rather than a fault on your account.

What a session is

Signing in creates a session, which is what keeps you signed in as you move around. It belongs to the browser you used, so signing in on a laptop does not sign you in on a phone.

You can see every session you have open, on every device, at your security page, with the browser and the approximate place each was started from. If one is not yours, there is a button there to end every session except the one you are using. Change your password at the same time.

Signing out

Sign out from the link at the top right of any page. On a shared computer in a staff room, do it: closing the tab is not the same thing.

Being asked to sign in when you already are

Two ordinary reasons, neither of them a fault:

• The session expired. Sign in again and you will land back where you were.
• You followed a link to something reserved. Some guidance and some documents need an account, or need your school to hold a particular subscription. The page says which, and says what to do about it, rather than only refusing.

Signing in as somebody else

You cannot, and neither can City Council. There is no impersonation in this system. The nearest thing is a multi-academy trust acting for one of its own schools, and every action taken that way is recorded as the trust's rather than the school's.

Where somebody at City Council needs to set something up for you, they propose it and you accept it. The order is always yours. See what happens after you order.

Next: if you cannot get in