Why is the School Structure important?

This article covers:

• Laying good foundations: why the structure is important
• How the structure works
• Examples
  • A standard structure with at least two classes per year group
  • A small school with a single form intake
  • A mixed/split age structure with years and classes reversed

Instructions on how to customise your structure are here.

NB: We recommend use a computer or tablet to customise your School Structure: most mobile phone screens are too small to show the full width of the school structure and so you may struggle to view all the information. 

Laying good foundations

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

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. 

Classlist parent members may belong to multiple school groups on the site, mirroring which groups their children belong to in school. If a parent registers with more than one child, they can specify a different year and class group for each child. 

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 it works

The Year is the top tier of the school groups, and the Class tier comes 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 the Year level appears as a stand-alone tier and children only belong to a year group. 'Year' and 'Class' may not suitable terms for your school, but they simply define the two-tier system. 

Parent members can post and interact with other parents within 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. 

Examples

A standard school structure with classes nested under year groups

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

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 a Classlist School Structure page: 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: The children (with their fake names!) in these examples all have a yellow icon because their gender was unspecified when the 'parents' registered. Pupils in real Classlist communities can have a green, lilac or yellow smiley face, according to whether or not the parent opted to specify the gender of their child when they registered. A symbol like a daisy flower indicates that the registration is pending, ie the parent has not yet been approved. 

Small school with single form intake

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. 

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. For more ideas of how to arrange your structure if it doesn't fit into one of the examples above, please click here. 

To find help on building your structure click here.

Why am I seeing duplicate pupils?

On the Admin side School Structure page, the list view is of all pupils which have been added, and so if both parents have registered a pupil will show here twice here, with each parent's name underneath.  It can appear as if they are duplicates.

However, 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.

When parents register they can add another family contact if they wish, which links the two accounts on their profile page.  

In other cases the 2 parents of a pupil do not wish to be linked on the system or displayed on each other's profile as a family contact, and their profiles remain completely separate.

But in both cases where both parents join Classlist they are separate members of Classlist and not duplicates.

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 both a pupil's parents to join Classlist!