School Calendar Management for Busy Families

One calendar, shared

The most important decision is to have one calendar that everyone who does drop-offs and pick-ups can see. Separate calendars for each parent, each child or each school make clashes invisible.

In Google Calendar you can create a shared calendar, or use the Family calendar that comes with a Google family group, and share it with your partner. In Outlook you can share your calendar or create a shared one and invite others. On an iPhone or Android phone, both Google and Outlook calendars can be shown in the phone’s own calendar app alongside everything else.

Make it readable at a glance

• Give each child a colour, used consistently for their school, clubs and appointments.
• Start event names with the child’s name or initial: "Ava: swimming", "Leo: Year 5 trip".
• Put what to bring in the event title or description, so it is visible on a phone: "Ava: non-uniform, £1".
• Use all-day events for things without a time, such as non-uniform days, and timed events for things that need someone to be somewhere.

What to put in

A useful school calendar has three layers:

• The year: term dates, half terms, INSET days and early finishes for every child’s school, added in September.
• The routine: recurring PE days, clubs and lessons, set to repeat for the term.
• The one-offs: trips, performances, parents’ evenings, deadlines for forms and payments, and dress-up days, added as soon as you read about them.

Deadlines are worth adding as events in their own right, not just the event they relate to. "Trip consent due" on the Friday is more useful than remembering it from the trip entry three weeks later.

Reminders that help rather than nag

Too many reminders and you stop noticing them. A few rules of thumb:

• For things to bring or wear, a reminder the evening before.
• For deadlines, a reminder two days before.
• For events you need to attend, a reminder a week before, to arrange time off, and another on the day.
• For recurring PE and club days, no reminder at all once the routine is settled.

Keeping it current

A calendar is only useful if it is up to date. The hardest part is not the setting up but the constant small additions: the date in this week’s newsletter, the time change the club sent on Tuesday, the correction the school sent on Wednesday. A weekly fifteen-minute review on Sunday catches most of it, but it relies on someone having read every email.

When parents live apart

For separated parents, a shared calendar can make life calmer for children, as both households see the same school dates. Some families share one calendar for school events only, keeping their personal calendars separate. Others use a dedicated co-parenting app. Either way, it helps to agree who adds what, and to ask the school to send letters to both parents, which schools in England are generally expected to do for parents with parental responsibility.

Bringing children in

From around the end of primary school, children can start to use the family calendar themselves. Sharing a view of their own events, or printing the week each Sunday for the fridge, helps them plan their own kit and homework. At secondary school, many students keep their own calendar for homework and clubs, and a shared family calendar for the things that need a parent.

How Peakly helps

Peakly keeps the calendar current for you. It reads emails from your children’s schools and clubs and adds the dates to your Google or Outlook calendar automatically: trips, performances, deadlines, dress-up days and weekly clubs, each linked back to the original email. When a school sends a correction or a new time, the entry moves, and several emails about the same day become one entry rather than a stack.

Where Peakly has your schools’ term dates, the year’s half terms, INSET days and early finishes are added too. If you delete an entry from your calendar, Peakly removes it on its side as well, so it does not come back. Share the calendar with your partner the usual way, and they see everything Peakly adds.