City Council Services to Schools

All 60 guide pages

Administering the system

What a System Admin can reach

The whole platform, and the handful of things even this role deliberately does not decide.

A System Admin runs the platform. Administration, Finance and Reports are the three areas this role adds, on top of everything a Service Lead can reach.

What it adds

ScreenFor
OrganisationsEvery school, trust and council department, with the fields only the council sets.
UsersEverybody, across every school. Finding one person, and setting a first School Admin.
SettingsNine groups, from branding to retention.
Single sign-onA tenant per school that wants one.
JobsWhat runs overnight, when each last ran, and running one now.
AuditThe whole chain, and proving it is intact.
EmailEverything sent, with its body, and a test send.
ErasureCompleting the requests schools raise.
FinanceThe run, the batches, the formats and the returns.
ReportsSeven built-in, plus the ones you build.

What even this role does not do

  • Sign in as somebody. There is no impersonation anywhere in this system. Where a school needs something set up, it is proposed and the school accepts.
  • Place an order for a school. Same reason. The order is always the school's.
  • Edit the audit log. Entries are chained and the database refuses an update or a delete outright.
  • See anybody's password or their authenticator secret. The first is hashed and the second is never displayed. What you can do is clear an enrolment so somebody can set it up again.
  • Edit this guide. It ships with the software and upgrades with it. Add your own material as published pages instead: see news, guidance, documents and pages.

How many

At least two, and preferably not more than a handful. One is a single point of failure in August; ten is a permission that has stopped meaning anything.

The first one

The first System Admin is created on the server itself, from the command line, rather than shipped in the software. No credential for any real person appears anywhere in this system.

Checking the system is healthy

Reports, scheduled jobs and the audit log.

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.

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