Understanding The School Structure: Choose a structure to suit your classes and year groups

This article covers:

Understanding the school structure

How the school structure works

A standard structure - classes nested under year groups

School structure using year groups but no classes

A mixed/split age structure with years and classes reversed

My school doesn't fit a standard structure (links to another article)

Why am I seeing duplicate pupils?

how to customise your structure (links to another article)

Understanding the School Structure

The Classlist School Structure page reflects how your school is physically organised in real life. It displays the different year groups and class groups to which children (and therefore parents) at your school can belong. The phrase 'school groups' refers to years and classes collectively: classes usually nest within years.

Classlist also has the option to create parent interest groups in addition to the school structure groups discussed here. Find out more about school groups vs parent interest groups.

When a parent registers to join your site they are asked to specify their child's year and class, and the system automatically allocates them into the corresponding school groups on your Classlist site. This allows members to communicate within their groups; for instance Reception intake parents might discuss topics such as starting school, uniform and getting to know each other, while Year 6 parents might be separately discussing secondary school applications and screen time. If your Classlist site doesn't have the correct year groups and classes, parents cannot specify which groups their child belongs to when they register, and they cannot communicate within their peer groups properly. 

If a parent registers with more than one child, they can specify a different year and class group for each child. Therefore parents can belong to multiple school groups, however each child can only belong to one year/class group.

Each parent member will see only their own groups displayed when they log in, but the Ambassador can view and edit all the school groups to create the underlying structure into which parents place their children when they register.

How the School Structure works

Year groups are the top tier of the structure and the Classes are nested underneath as a second tier. Within each Year you can add as many Classes as you need, and you can edit the names of Years and Classes to match your own school. Children belong to both a class group and the wider year group which their class is nested under.

In small schools with a single form intake there may not be separate classes within each year level: in these cases you would set up just the year without adding classes and children would be added directly to their year group. 

Parent members can post and interact with other parents from the individual class their child is in, or with the whole year group. All the Year groups also fall into the overarching 'Whole School' group, which parents may be able to communicate through if their Classlist admins have chosen to enable whole school posts. 

A standard school structure - classes nested under year groups

Most schools will fall into this category, where there are at least two classes within each year. The example below is based on a four-form intake school.

Year: Reception Class: Miss Honey's Class

Year: Reception Class: Miss Turner's Class

Year: Reception Class: Miss Walker's Class

Year: Reception Class: Miss Baggins' Class

Groups within groups: in this example four Class groups are nested under the Year group named 'Reception'. 

This is what the same arrangement would look like in the Classlist School Structure. The Year 'Reception' is highlighted yellow because the user is viewing the year level only. The four classes are listed in the middle column - notice the number of children in each class is displayed in brackets after the class name. The third column lists all the children in the year 'Reception'.

Now the user has clicked on 'Miss Honey' in the Class level, so only the eight children in that class are displayed in the right hand column. Note the yellow highlight now covers the selected class as well as the selected year.

NB: We have used made up names for the purposes of these screen shots. Please ignore the face symbols they only show on the admin side and will be removed in due course.

School structure using year groups but no classes

There are a few of reasons why some schools may want to set up the school structure without using classes. Each school is different and sometimes similar schools may choose to set up their structure differently. Here are some examples of when a school may prefer to connect the parents with just their year group rather than adding classes.

• Small Schools that only have one class per year group eg a single form intake.
• Secondary schools with small tutor groups where pupils are in different sets for different lessons.
• Schools who shuffle pupils between classes regularly and where the PTA rather than the school does the move up.

This structure can be set up from the start - simply add year groups and put the children straight into the year group, ignore the class column. Or you could change to a year group only structure during move up. We don't recommend changing mid year as ongoing conversations would be affected.

There are no classes in this small school, so pupils are listed directly under the year level.

Mixed age structure with years and classes reversed

You can reverse the year and class tiers so that the year group is nested under the class. In the example below 'Mr Robinson' teaches a mixed age group class of Year 1 & 2 children. The class tier then becomes the age group of the children in that class. For example this allows parents with children in Year 1 to communicate just amongst themselves, or they can communicate with the whole class including the year 2 parents. 

My school doesn't fit a standard structure 

There is huge variation in the way schools are structured and we hope this two-tier system will enable you to reflect your school's unique structure. CIasslist is very flexible and we have some other ideas to help you if your school doesn't fit a standard structure. 

How to build your school structure

Please take a look at our help article on customising your school structure to get started.

Why am I seeing duplicate pupils?

Originally, when Classlist was first created, each parent registered separately and added their child(ren). This meant that if more than one parent added the same child(ren) they would show on the school structure twice in the admin side - this is normal.

On the parent side of Classlist pupils aren't listed in this way.  Parents are listed as members, with the pupil showing within each parent record - therefore the pupils don't look like duplicates.   i.e. Christopher Brown and Susan Brown would both be listed with pupil Emily Brown on their record.

We have been working on linking parents around pupils and so sometimes if parents have added and invited a family contact you may see the two accounts linked on the admin side. In other cases parents may have joined independently of each other or chosen not to be linked. This work is ongoing so most parents will not show as linked.

For schools who have integrated their data with Classlist pupils will not be duplicated.

NB: Parents join Classlist as separate members and do not share accounts. 

Schools where both parents join Classlist report better parent engagement - and as a school or PTA you are doubling the number of parents that you can reach with communications or ask to help out if both parents join.  So we encourage you to invite all parents to join Classlist!