Understanding Groups - The 2 types: School Groups vs Parent Interest Groups

The Groups system allows parents on Classlist to communicate with a different audience for each message, comment or invitation they want to share. There are two types of groups:

• automatically-populated school groups (year/class/reps)
• bespoke parent interest groups.

Whenever you post any content (or send an announcement or create a community event etc) you can select which group your message is addressed to.

Find out about joining, creating and managing groups. 

School Groups

School Groups are automatically generated by Classlist and reflect your school's individual structure of Years and Classes (as defined on the School Structure page). Each member is placed into their personal Year and Class groups based on which classes their children are in. Parents with multiple children will be in multiple School Groups.

To add, edit or delete the groups associated with years and classes, simply add, edit or delete the years and classes on your School Structure, and the groups will automatically be updated. 

If you have an Admin status on Classlist you will also be automatically included in the 'Ambassadors and Reps' group too, to make it easy for admins to communicate.

NB: If you need to change the name/membership of a school group you need to be in the School Structure page in admin mode.

Interest Groups

These Groups are created by users on the parent side rather than automatically generated. Staff Admins can also do this on the admin side if they are setting up a group for someone else, however they must appoint a parent as the group owner.

They can be either 'open', ie anyone can join, or 'closed', ie parents wanting to join have to be approved by the group's owner. The group owner can change the status of a group from open to closed or vice versa if they need to.

Parents can create groups themselves and add individual parents or classes. This allows parents to communicate around a shared interest even if their children are in different School Groups. 

Parent Interest Groups may be created for all sorts of purposes, eg music clubs, sports teams, social groups, book clubs, pub quiz teams or school trips.

Group owners, Ambassadors and Staff Admin Plus users can add, approve or remove members or delete the group. Click here for more information on managing groups.

The names of all parent groups can be seen by any parent, whether they are open or closed groups.  This is because they are for community building as such the title should not need to be secret!

Your Groups 

The 'my groups' page on the parent side will show you a list of your groups. You will see a different set of groups to other members, because the list is personalised according to which ones you belong to. Groups are listed in order of latest activity.

You will only see the class/year school groups which your children belong to as well as any parent interest groups that you have been added to or signed up to.

All Admin members are automatically placed in the Ambassadors and Reps Group: if you do not have an admin account you will not see this group.  If you were an admin but no longer have admin status you will automatically be removed from the Ambassadors and Reps group.

Sharing a group

You can share a link to a group to promote it and get people to join, or you can add members manually.

Desktop - To share a link, take the url from the parent side on desktop. You can get to it by opening the group and clicking the 3 dots menu at the top right and selecting 'group info'. The url should be in the format https://app.classlist.com/parent/#/groups/view/??? with a list of numbers at the end. This can be pasted into a post so parents can easily see it and join.

Mobile - we will be adding a share button - coming soon.