Managing School Life with Multiple Children

Why it is harder than it sounds

The work does not just double. Every email has to be read twice: once to find out what it says, and again to work out who it applies to. A whole-school email about a Year 2 trip matters to one child and not the other. A newsletter mentions the Year 5 residential deposit in the middle of a paragraph about something else.

Different schools add different calendars. Siblings at a primary and a secondary school, or at an infant and a junior school, often have different INSET days and even different half terms, which is how a parent ends up arranging childcare for one child and not the other.

Clubs, lessons and fixtures sit on top of all of that, each with its own way of communicating.

A familiar Wednesday

Imagine three emails on one Wednesday. The primary school announces a non-uniform day on Friday for Years 1 to 6, so your Reception child is in uniform as usual. The secondary school asks Year 8 parents to book parents’ evening slots by Monday. The swimming club moves your youngest’s lesson to Saturday morning, the same time as your eldest’s football match.

Each needs a different decision, for a different child, by a different day. None of them is hard. The difficulty is noticing all three, and realising that the swimming change clashes with football before Saturday morning, not during it.

What helps

1. One calendar for the family, not one per child and certainly not one per school. Everyone who does drop-offs and pick-ups should be able to see it.
2. A colour for each child, so a glance at the week shows who has what.
3. Both schools’ term dates in that calendar for the whole year, so INSET days and half terms that do not line up are visible months ahead.
4. A fifteen-minute plan on Sunday: who needs what on which day, PE kits, instruments, packed lunches, money, and who is collecting whom.
5. A simple rule for forms and payments: they are done the day they are read, by whoever reads them.
6. A list of every school and club address that emails you, so nothing arrives from a sender you did not expect.

A Sunday plan that takes fifteen minutes

A short weekly plan does more than any app. Sit down on Sunday evening with the family calendar and go through the week a day at a time. For each day, ask four questions:

• Who is going where, and who is taking and collecting them?
• What does each child need to take: PE kit, a swimming bag, an instrument, a reading book, a packed lunch?
• Is anything due: a form, a payment, homework, a costume?
• Is anything different from usual: an early finish, a club cancelled, a trip that returns late?

Write the answers somewhere everyone can see, such as a note on the fridge or a shared note on your phones. The point is not the format. It is that one person has looked at the whole week for every child before Monday morning.

Sharing the load

In many families one parent ends up as the person who reads every school email, simply because the school has their address. That makes them the single point of failure. Ask each school to add a second contact, so both parents or carers receive the emails, and agree who is responsible for which school or which child.

Shared calendars help here too: when an event is in a calendar both of you can see, it no longer depends on one person having read one email.

Keeping children involved

Older children can own some of this themselves. A child in Year 5 or 6 can check the family calendar for their own PE days and clubs, and a secondary school student can keep track of their own homework and kit. It takes practice, and reminders, but it is a skill that will matter at secondary school and beyond.

Younger children like to see the week ahead too. A simple picture chart of which days are PE, library and swimming makes Monday mornings calmer for everyone.

When one child needs more of your attention

There will be terms when one child takes most of the energy: a new school, exams, a difficult friendship, an assessment for additional needs. In those weeks the routine matters more, not less, because it is what stops the other children’s trips and forms slipping while your attention is elsewhere.

This is where writing things down pays off. If every date is already in the calendar and the Sunday plan is done, a hard week for one child does not have to become a missed week for the others.

How Peakly helps

Peakly knows each of your children: their school and their year group. When an email arrives from one of their schools or clubs, it works out which child it is about, and only tells you about what applies. A whole-school email about a Year 2 trip reaches the Year 2 parent, not the Year 5 one. Letters to "children who were in Year 1 last year" are understood too.

Each child’s events go into your Google or Outlook calendar. Where Peakly has a school’s term dates, its half terms and closures are added for the year too, so differing INSET days are there before they catch you out. You get one WhatsApp message for each email that has something in it for you, and an evening summary at 8pm of what is on tomorrow, for everyone.

Plans are counted by the number of school and club addresses Peakly watches, not by children, so a family with three children at one school is on the same plan as a family with one.

When the schools are different

• Put both schools’ term dates side by side before each half term and note any day only one child is off.
• Ask each school which address its letters come from; secondary schools often email from several.
• Secondary schools tend to rely on apps and portals as well as email. Check which one each school uses for homework, payments and detentions.
• Agree with your partner who is the named contact for which school, so replies do not get missed or sent twice.