ADAM newsletter: July 2026
This month's work centres on accountability and control: a durable history of who changed your settings and staff groups, tighter rules for the files parents and staff can upload, and the first version of a tool for calculating university admission scores. Alongside those are a reversible safety switch for your integrations, a fix for a costly reporting-period trap, and a long list of report and stability improvements. Here's what's new.
A history of who changed your settings and staff groups
Until now, changes to your school's global settings and staff groups left almost no trace — there was no simple way to see who adjusted a setting or altered someone's permissions, or when. This month closes that gap with two new history views that give administrators a durable, accountable record of the changes that matter most.
Super-admins get a new site settings history page showing who changed which setting, when, and what it was changed from and to — with sensitive values such as passwords never recorded. Separately, a group change history report (available both as its own report and as a panel on each staff group) tracks when groups are created, renamed, enabled or disabled, and when staff are added to or removed from a group or their permissions change. And if someone quietly alters the email address that receives change alerts, ADAM now sends a warning to the previous address as well, so an attempt to cover tracks doesn't go unnoticed. Together they give you clear governance over the settings and permissions that keep your school secure.
File-type controls for parent and staff uploads
When you ask families to upload documents — a photograph, a past report, a birth certificate — ADAM can now make sure each slot only accepts the right kind of file. When you set up an upload request, you tick the file types each slot should accept, and parents see a clear note of what's allowed and a plain-English message if they pick the wrong type. Staff uploads are similarly protected by a school-wide list of accepted file types, giving you one consistent, safer set of rules across the family portal, online admissions and staff document areas.
A first look at Admission Point Scores (APS)
Working out the admission points a matriculant would earn at different universities is fiddly, manual work — converting each subject percentage into points, applying the university's own weightings, and totalling the best subjects. A new Admission Point Score (APS) feature (look for Admission Point Score (APS) in the menu) makes a start on doing this for you. It ships with ready-made calculations for a generic National Senior Certificate score and several flagship universities — the University of Pretoria, Wits, Stellenbosch and UCT among them — and you can preview a pupil's score for a chosen reporting period. Schools can also create their own variations, useful if you use an APS-style score for internal awards. This is an early version aimed at setting up and previewing scores; showing them on printed reports will follow in a later release. The built-in university calculations are protected against accidental changes and each carries a reminder to check it against the university's current prospectus, and a new set of permissions lets you decide which staff can use it.
Suspend an API token without deleting it
Schools that connect ADAM to other systems can now suspend an access token instead of deleting it. From the API access page, an administrator can immediately block a token — handy if you suspect it's been shared or you're simply pausing an integration — and reactivate it later to restore access, without having to delete and re-issue the token and reconfigure everything at the other end. It's a quick, reversible safety switch for the connections your school relies on.
Reporting periods now show the year (and warn when they don't match)
A subtle but costly mistake has been made harder to fall into. When you set up a new reporting period by copying an earlier one, the "Periods to Display" settings used to carry over the previous year's periods — and because the dropdowns only showed the day and month, there was no way to spot it, so marks would appear missing or wrong on the report. Those dropdowns now show the year alongside each period, and the Edit a Reporting Period page flags any slot pointing at a different year, updating the warning live as you make changes. It's a small label with a big payoff at reporting time.
Clear results after a bulk document upload
When you bulk-upload documents into pupils' or staff members' files, ADAM now takes you to a proper results page that lists exactly what happened to each file. Previously, uploading several files at once could leave you staring at an empty form with no confirmation — the files usually uploaded fine, but the summary never appeared. You now get a reliable, readable rundown of every file so you can see at a glance what matched and what needs a second look.
Smaller improvements and fixes
Reports and academics
- New report templates and refinements landed for many schools this month, including St John's College, Kingsmead, Lighthouse, Maris Stella, Uplands, St Dominic's, Oakhill, Clifton and others.
- Longer reports now break across pages more reliably, thanks to improved handling of tall tables and signature blocks.
- Fixed a crash in the Michaelhouse consolidated marksheet export, and a crash in medical-exam averaging when a reading wasn't a number.
- Capturing psychometric test results by class now works correctly again.
- Fixed reports that could crash when a pupil had no class teacher, and stopped a duplicated heading appearing on some reports.
Sign-in and uploads
- Signing in with a passkey via 1Password now works smoothly.
- Staff photo and document upload pages now show upload limits up front and give clearer, more consistent feedback when a file is rejected.
Roll Call, messaging and delivery
- Resolved several issues that could cause SMS batches to stall or falsely report "0 messages", so message batches now send reliably.
- The test-message pop-up now names the message type (SMS or email) so you know exactly what you're sending.
- Restored the attendance register's record-limit toggle.
Class and pupil management
- Fixed alumni handling so leavers are no longer accidentally stamped back into the current year, and pupil records roll over cleanly.
- Enrolment and de-registration now report how many pupils were actually affected, and saving subject registrations for a class is faster and safer.
- Clearer guidance when pupil-photo category permissions need attention.
Everyday polish and stability
- Multi-line confirmation messages now display properly instead of silently failing.
- A new context-aware back button makes it easier to return to where you were on the group history pages.
- Various behind-the-scenes reliability improvements to report generation and site upkeep, so things keep running smoothly when a new version of ADAM goes live.
We also fixed several security issues.