ADAM newsletter: August 2026
This month is about closing gaps — in mark deadlines and in the trail of who changed what. The headline is a date for your diary: two-factor authentication becomes compulsory for staff logins on 1 January 2027, and everything you need to prepare is available today.
Two-factor authentication becomes mandatory on 1 January 2027
Phishing has changed. Attackers now use AI to write messages that are fluent, correctly branded and personalised with details from your own school's website — the old advice about spotting bad grammar and odd greetings protects nobody any more. A password on its own is no longer an adequate defence.
From 1 January 2027, two-factor authentication will be required for all staff logins to ADAM. Everything you need is available now: click the Administration tab, then under Site Administration choose Edit site settings, open the Security tab and set Two Factor Authentication Forced For Staff to Yes. Signing in then needs a password plus a six-digit code from an app on the staff member's phone, so a stolen password alone gets an attacker nowhere. You choose whether staff are challenged at every login, once per computer, or once per computer per day — we suggest the last of those. Staff who enrol receive ten single-use recovery codes to print or save, so a lost phone no longer means waiting for an administrator, and they can sign out any computers remembered for them if a laptop goes missing. The setup screen is now two clear steps, ADAM reminds anyone who has not enrolled, and Administration → Security Administration → Manage Two-Factor Authentication for staff shows exactly who is set up and who is not. A step-by-step guide for people who have never used an authenticator app is on the help site.
A mark book editing window for heads of department
Schools have long wanted a two-stage close-off: all teaching staff lose mark entry on a fixed date, and heads of department keep editing rights briefly afterwards for final adjustments. Report marks have worked this way for years; the mark book has not. There is now a Markbook Editing time frame you can set alongside Markbook Entry, with two new permissions to go with it. The deadline applies everywhere a mark can change — on the mark sheets, and when importing results, copying from another period, rewriting comments in bulk or changing a weighting — and it appears on the dashboard.
See who changed a mark, and when
When a parent queries a mark, answering "who entered this, and did anyone change it?" used to be a research project. ADAM now records every mark and comment change on an assessment — old value, new value, who and when — including deletions. Subject heads and management get a mark history view written as plain readable sentences, and a new Mark change history by staff report under Assessment Analysis shows everything one staff member has altered. Both screens state how far back the record goes, so an empty result is never mistaken for proof that nothing happened.
Overview layouts you design once, for everybody
The Overview screen on pupil, family and staff profiles used to be either the site default or a private customisation only one person could see — and most people never touched it. It is now a catalogue of named layouts that an administrator designs, previews and assigns, under Overview Layouts. Staff who are permitted to can pick a different one, and a roster shows at a glance who is on which layout — including people quietly stuck on an old personal layout with no way out. Each screen is set independently, with its own permission.
Roll-call absences now reach parents
Roll-call attendance has always alerted staff — the form tutor, the marker, the subject teacher — but never the family. Roll Call is now an alert source in the periodic Family Alert email, configured independently of the other sources on the Family Alert Configuration page. That page also shows how many current pupils each alert setting actually affects, which makes the impact of a change much easier to judge. Parent alerts also stop repeating the previous day's absences.
Find the pupils you cannot reach
A new Communication Coverage report (Families tab → Family Administration) lists pupils with no email contact for a communication type the school expects to reach them, so you can find the gaps before a report or an emergency notice fails to arrive. Opt-outs recorded by families are honoured, and the parent portal and staff family-edit screen warn about the coverage that will be lost rather than overruling the choice.
Smaller improvements and fixes
Family portal and parents
- An optional birthday widget for the parent and pupil portals, with settings for whose birthdays appear.
Reports and academics
- New and revised templates for EcoCampus, EcoKids, EcoCollege, Steyn City, Kingsmead, St John's College, St Peter's Boys, St Alban's, Redhill, PEPPS, Hilton, Kyalami, King's School Robin Hills and Sacred Heart.
- Marks can be styled conditionally on a report — shading a result below a threshold, for instance — and the template manager now shows only the templates your school actually uses.
- Admission Point Scores gained a grade-wide list with an Excel export and can now be placed on report templates. A new Enrolment by Month report shows months against grades, also with an Excel export.
Admissions and staff
- Document slots on application forms now carry a three-state requirement — Optional, Requested or Mandatory — shown as a badge, with mandatory documents blocking submission and the upload step warning about it up front.
- Employment dates are no longer silently discarded by the add-staff form.
Around the system
- Audio files can be stored in the document repository, LURITS feedback can be uploaded as the ZIP file it arrives in, and SMS batches that have got stuck are now visible, with safe options to send them again or abandon them.
- Merging two families now keeps the history with the staying parent and moves document links across correctly.
- Tab sets gained a search box for long lists of tabs, and menu icons have been tidied for consistency.
- Fixed: averages failing where subject weightings were zero or a pupil had no grade, photographs turned the wrong way, SA-SAMS exporting a leaver with no class, and the pupil medical page failing on a school-added custom field.
We also fixed several security issues.