Announcements and maintenance
Who this is for: everyone — teachers, directors, pupils and parents.
The strip at the top of the screen
From time to time a coloured strip appears above your normal page. It is how we tell you something about the platform itself: planned work, a problem we are fixing, or a new feature worth knowing about.
The colour tells you how much it matters:
| Colour | What it means |
|---|---|
| Grey | Minor. Nothing you need to do. |
| Indigo | Ordinary news, usually a new feature. |
| Amber | Important — most often planned work with a date. |
| Red | Urgent. Something is wrong right now, or the platform is about to close. |
Close it with the ✕ on the right, and it will not come back. Dismissing is remembered against your account rather than your browser, so a notice you close on the staff-room computer will not reappear on your phone or on the classroom machine.
A small number of urgent notices have no ✕. That is deliberate and rare — it is reserved for things you genuinely must see, such as the platform closing within the hour. It disappears on its own once the event has passed.
Some notices are sent to one group only. A message about marking might go to teachers, one about payments to parents. If a colleague mentions a strip you did not get, that is usually why.
When the platform is closed for maintenance
Occasionally we take the platform offline on purpose — to upgrade the hardware it runs on, or to make a change that cannot be made safely while people are using it.
While that is happening, opening EduRol shows a single full-screen message instead of your usual pages. There is no menu, because nothing behind it would work.
The screen tells you when we expect to be back, whenever we know. We normally publish an amber strip a day or two beforehand, so the closure is not a surprise.
Anything already saved is saved. Marks, homework, plans and messages are all untouched by maintenance — the platform is simply not answering for a while.
It does not refresh itself. When the time given has passed, reload the page.
Rules and limits
- Strips appear on every page of the platform, for every role.
- Closing one is permanent for your account. There is no list of dismissed notices to read again.
- A strip may be limited to one role, so not everyone sees every message.
- During maintenance nobody can use the platform, including directors. It is not a per-school setting.
Troubleshooting
"A strip came back after I closed it." It is a different notice that looks similar, or you closed it while offline and the dismissal never reached us. Close it again.
"A colleague sees a strip and I do not." It was probably sent to their role only. It may also have an end time that has already passed for you if your device clock is wrong.
"I get the maintenance screen but a colleague can still work." That should not happen — maintenance closes the platform for everybody. If you see it and others do not, you are most likely looking at a cached page. Reload with the page-refresh button rather than going back.
"The maintenance screen says a time that has passed." The work has run over. Reload every few minutes; the page cannot update itself.