🔒 Parent documents are available on our Premium and Professional packages. You can read more about our packages and pricing here
What Can Parent Documents Be Used For?
The Parent documents section is designed to send and store two types of documents:
Documents that require acknowledgment by parents, such as policies and important updates like cost increases.
Documents that do not require acknowledgment but remain available for parents to refer back to whenever they wish, such as newsletters, flyers, and summaries of meetings.
☝️ If you use Parent documents to store documents containing personal data, you are responsible for ensuring that they are only shared with the appropriate recipients. To prevent accidental data breaches, we recommend always double-checking that documents are shared with the correct individuals. Mistakingly sharing a document with the wrong parent or guardian could result in unauthorised access to another child’s or parent’s information.
Where to View Documents for Parents
Manage parent documents
To get an overview of all parent documents:
Head to the Home icon in your sidebar
From here, click on Documents
Next, select the Parent documents tab at the top of the page
From here, you can see all the parent documents you've added. At first glance, you'll see details like the title of the document, when it was created, recipients of each document and the status - whether a document has been acknowledged or is pending acknowledgement.
Organising your parent documents
At the moment, you won't be able to create folders for your parent documents in the same way you can for staff documents. However, we recommend creating a naming convention so you can ensure your parent documents stay grouped and organised in your list.
For example, you could start each document name with a title followed by a date: Policies 2024, Policies 2025, and Policies 2026. Or, if you send specific types of meeting updates to each individual child’s parents, it could always start with the type of document followed by the child’s name. For example, Parent-Teacher Meeting ‘25_Alison Bell.
Deleting parent documents
You can also delete parent documents (even ones that have already been shared) by clicking on the bin icon in the Actions column.
Please note that you cannot remove individual children from a recipient list once a parent document has been sent. If you need to amend the recipient list for a parent document, you'll need to delete the document and re-upload it, only adding the relevant children as recipients.
💡 You'll be asked to confirm before deleting a parent document as once it's been deleted, you won't be able to recover it
See more details of a parent document
You can click on each parent document to expand it, monitor responses and see more details. In this view, you'll be able to see who the parent document has been sent to, whether those parents have acknowledged it, and any attached files.
How to Add a Document for Parents
Enter information for a parent document
To add a new parent document:
Head to the Home icon in your sidebar
From here, click on Documents
Next, select the Parent documents tab at the top of the page
Click on Add document
In the New document form, enter:
A Document name
Recipients who this document should be shared with
A Description
Choose whether this document Requires acknowledgement from parents
Finally, Attach a file
Once you're ready, click on Add document to upload your document
Set up a document to automatically send to new children
When you share a document with a room, a whole site or a tag, it will send the document automatically to any new children that join. This will continue until the document is deleted.
How Parents View New Documents
Parents receive a notification when a document is added
When a document is sent to a parent, they will receive a notification to view or acknowledge the document. Parents can tap on the notification from the notification bell in their Famly app.
Parents can acknowledge and download their documents
Once a parent is in their child's Documents tab, they can click on the new document to expand the details, read the description and click on Acknowledge (or choose I'll do it later to postpone acknowledgement).
By tapping on the attached file, parents can choose to download it straight to their device.
Parents can access their documents on their child's profile
Alternatively, parents can get an overview of all their documents by heading to their child's profile, tapping on the About tab, and scrolling down to Documents.
Keep Track of Acknowledged Documents
If you have uploaded a document that required acknowledgement, you can see the status of acknowledgments in 3 ways:
Head to Documents in your sidebar → select Documents for parents:
On the list of documents, there is a column called Status. This will show the number of parents that still have documents pending acknowledgement
Head to Documents in your sidebar → select Documents for parents:
By clicking on a document in the list, you will see a more detailed view open. You'll see two lists of children with acknowledged documents and children with documents pending acknowledgement. On the acknowledged list, it will show which parent acknowledged the document as well as the date and time they did.
Lastly, head to a child's profile → click on their About tab → scroll down to Documents:
Here you can see each individual child's documents that have been shared with their parents. You can also see the status of each document, whether it's pending acknowledgement or has been acknowledged.
Legal Considerations and Effectiveness of Parent Documents
The effectiveness of the Acknowledgement toggle depends on the document’s content and description you provide. For example, if you need parents to confirm they have read an important policy, you can enable this toggle to request their acknowledgement and write in the description “please acknowledge that you have read this policy”.
☝️ You are responsible for the content of the document uploaded, the description provided and for ensuring the acknowledgement feature is used in a way that makes the acknowledgement legally valid.
Important considerations regarding parent document acknowledgement:
The Acknowledgement toggle is not a legally valid electronic signature. Do not use this feature for documents requiring legal signatures.
The Acknowledgement toggle is not an explicit consent feature. If a document requires explicit consent from the parents, use the Permission feature instead.