Answering family messages from the portal
Messages families send through the parent portal arrive in your mailbox's Family support folder and are answered in the portal.
Updated 18 October 2026
Why this exists
Parents often message from the portal rather than email, and those messages are easy to miss if they live somewhere else. They land in your mailbox beside your email, so you answer families in one place. When a child is on a conversation, their parents are on it too, which protects you as well as the child.
When a parent writes to you from Messages in their portal, the message is a portal conversation, not an email. It shows in the Family support folder of your Mail.
Reply to a family message
- Open Family support.
- Open the conversation.
- Write your reply in the box at the bottom and send.
Your reply appears in the parent's Messages in their portal. It is not emailed, so the email composer is not used for these conversations.
Parents are always included
When a conversation includes a student and a member of staff, the student's parents are added to it automatically, even if nobody picked them. This keeps every written conversation with a child open to their family. Your centre's compliance staff and owner can read a family's correspondence with staff when they need to.
Good to know
- AI drafting and Summarise are not offered on family support conversations.
- To write to a parent by email instead, start a new message from the mailbox.