Ask Ed is an assistant that answers parent questions about everyday school life — uniforms, term dates, menus, clubs, trips, attendance procedures, and similar topics. Parents send a question and get an instant reply drawn from documents the school has uploaded, so the answers reflect the school's actual policies and information.

Parents use the Ask Ed mobile app to send questions in their own language at any time of day. Ask Ed replies in seconds with a short, plain-language answer. Staff can also send broadcasts — newsletters, reminders, or urgent notices — through the same app, so parents have a single place to receive school communications.

Yes. Staff can send broadcasts to the whole school, a particular year group, or a single class — useful for newsletters, reminders, trip information, weather closures, or any other urgent or routine notice. Each broadcast is automatically translated into every parent's preferred language and delivered through the Ask Ed app, so parents are notified in the language they read most easily. Broadcasts can be sent immediately or scheduled for later, and replies parents send back are routed to the right place at the school.

Yes. When a broadcast or an answer from Ask Ed mentions something a parent needs to act on — PE kit on Monday, a school trip departure time, a parents' evening slot — the parent can save it as a reminder in the Ask Ed app with a single tap. Ask Ed picks the date and time out of the message automatically, so parents don't have to copy details across to a separate calendar to make sure they remember.

Yes. The Ask Ed app gives parents a school calendar and a weekly view, so they can see at a glance what is on, when it takes place, and where it is happening. Every event is linked back to the original school document it came from — the newsletter, trip letter, or class note — so parents can open the source and read every detail in context rather than rely on a one-line summary.

Yes. Teachers use a dedicated Ask Ed teacher app where they can compose broadcasts to their class, review queries Ask Ed could not confidently answer, manage child absences reported by parents, and handle alternate pickup requests. The teacher app keeps these everyday tasks on the teacher's phone, so the right person can respond quickly without needing to be at a desk.

Ask Ed currently supports English, Spanish, French, Polish, Punjabi, and Urdu. Parents can ask questions and read replies in their preferred language, even when the underlying school document is written in English. Broadcasts sent by staff are translated for each parent automatically. If another language would better serve your parent community, schools can request it and we will work with you to add it.

Ask Ed only answers from documents the school has uploaded — it does not invent information. If it cannot find a reliable answer in the school's content, it says so rather than guess. Staff can review the questions parents ask and see which ones were not answered well, which makes it straightforward to spot gaps in the school's documents.

Ask Ed is scoped to everyday school operations. It will not give medical, safeguarding, or pastoral advice; instead it directs parents to the appropriate staff contact at the school. Conversations are stored so designated staff can review anything that needs follow-up.

Most common formats work — PDFs, Word documents, images of paper letters, and plain text. Ask Ed automatically extracts titles, dates, and topics, and staff can tag documents by year group or class so answers can be personalised to the parent asking. Documents can also be given an expiry date so out-of-date information is no longer used in replies.

Each school has its own isolated deployment, with its own database. School documents and parent conversations are not used to train any third-party AI models. Data is held in the United Kingdom and is only accessible to authorised staff at the school and to the Ask Ed support team.

Yes. Ask Ed is built for UK schools, stores data in the United Kingdom, and supports the access, correction, and deletion rights parents are entitled to under UK GDPR. Full detail of the data Ask Ed processes is set out in the privacy and cookies notice, which is available from the sign-in page.

Most schools are up and running within about a week. The setup involves uploading a starter set of policies and key documents, configuring year groups and classes, and inviting parents. Ask Ed's team helps with each step, and schools can keep adding documents at their own pace after launch.