Do I need my school’s permission to set up on Classlist?

Classlist is created by parents for parents who opt in to join – and can be set up without any input from your school. 

In some schools a single class may be using Classlist as alternative to social media groups, and this may be set up a parent in the class with parents choosing to join.  Classlist is also led and operated in many schools by the PTA, which is often a separate legal entity to the school.  Classlist helps PTAs to communicate with their parent community more effectively, and therefore making fundraising and event management much easier. 

Building a vibrant community is a priority for many schools, however, so at most of the schools where Classlist has been set up the school itself does actively encourage parents to use the site. We find most schools prefer parents to use Classlist than social media.

Schools also see the practical advantages of Classlist for initiatives such as the Parent Map which helps parents arrange lift shares, or the Events feature which allows them to organise fundraising events. Often the Head or other senior staff member is happy to send a message directly to parents or to publicise Classlist in the school newsletter.

If your school prefers to be less involved you can still go ahead using the site purely as a parent-parent communication platform, but we still recommend you inform the school about what you are doing. Occasionally a school may have had a bad experience with social media, and you can reassure them Classlist is different!

In general schools are very supportive on specific issues, such as validation of parent details so that you can check if a parent applying to join really has a child on the school roll. We advise you to identify a suitable member of school staff who can help with setting up the school structure and validating parents, for instance a member of the administrative staff. 

We find that school support really helps - particularly with getting the invitation to join Classlist out to all parents at the school. However we have lots of invitation methods from a link to put on Facebook, WhatsApp invitations, QR codes you can give or send to parents, email uploaders to cover many scenarios, so there are several methods which don’t need school help.

It is possible for single classes or year groups to sign up to Classlist without the participation of the whole school.  In these cases, we often see other classes or year groups rapidly realising how useful Classlist is and adopting it themselves.

When a parent or PTAs sets up the school account on Classlist we automatically add ‘Parents’ to the end of the school name so that your Classlist is clearly a platform linking the parents of the school.