ADAM newsletter: September 2026
Two themes run through this month. The first is signing in: the login pages have been rebuilt, and a failed sign-in now tells an administrator exactly why it failed. The second is quieter but matters more — a sweep through the places where ADAM did something, quietly failed, and reported success anyway. Alongside those, applicants can be messaged with the full filter, a staff detail-update request can be taken back, and a serious fault that made pupils vanish from grade lists has been found and fixed.
The login pages have been rebuilt
Every ADAM login page — staff, family and pupil — used to stack the sign-in options one above the other in a single column, so the page ran long down the left with the right of the screen empty, and each new way of signing in made it worse. The pages are now laid out as cards: the method you used last time takes a full panel on the left and the others sit as cards beside it, so nobody scrolls past three options to reach the one they want. ADAM remembers the last method used in that browser, separately for each login type, so on a shared family computer a parent's choice does not overwrite a pupil's.
The detail is tidier too. Google and Microsoft sign-in carry their proper brand marks, the passkey button no longer draws blue-on-blue, and two faults that pushed the login panel and the search box off the edge of a narrow phone screen are corrected.
Login Records now tells you why a sign-in failed
If your school signs staff in against Active Directory, a failed login appeared in Login Records as nothing more than "failed" — you could not tell "wrong password" from "must change password at next logon" or "account disabled" without asking us to read the server logs. The precise reason is now shown there in plain words.
Message applicants using the full filter
The Messaging Centre could reach applicants only through a fixed selection of entering year, entering grades and registration status. Anything more specific — a particular feeder school, a sibling already enrolled, an application that arrived in a given window — could be filtered on the Pupils side but never reached from Admissions. There is now an admissions-by-filter audience running that same flexible filter over applicants, with its own entry on the Admissions tab. It stays behind the existing separate permission for messaging applicants, so it does not widen who can reach them.
A staff detail-update request can now be withdrawn
When you ask staff to check their own details, the only thing that closed the request was the staff member answering it. Flag the wrong person — or the whole school by mistake — and there was no way back, and no screen even showed who had an open request. There is now a staff detail-update report, the counterpart of View online detail update report on the families side, listing every unanswered request with who it went to and when. Each row has a withdraw action, with a withdraw all behind a confirmation for the whole-school case. It also flags staff who lack permission to edit their own details — they were being prompted at every login and then refused by the form, so those are the requests most worth withdrawing.
The daily roll-call grid shows every period
The Daily Subject Roll Call Report gave each subject one column per day. Where a class was taught twice in a day and only the first period had been registered, the later untaken roll call won the column and the report announced "not taken" for every pupil — contradicting each pupil's own roll-call record and hiding absences that had been marked. Each roll call now gets its own column, headed with the subject and the period time, so every period keeps its mark.
Photographs keep their quality, and stop breaking
Uploading a photograph re-compressed it even when it was already the right way up, so quality was lost on every pass and compounded; an upright picture now comes through untouched. Separately, resized photographs were occasionally stored as empty files and then held by the browser for a month — which is why a pupil photo would sometimes show as a broken icon that an ordinary refresh would not clear. Images are now written completely before they are served.
Smaller improvements and fixes
Pupils, grades and enrolment
- A pupil whose registration status had no effective date was disappearing from grade lists, grade report printing, enrolment counts and learning-support reporting, while still appearing on their class lists — one school's Grade R showed 24 pupils on two class registers and 1 on the grade list. Grade lists and enrolment counts are correct again.
- Interventions Lists by Grade and Interventions Lists by Subject had returned an empty report at every school since the feature shipped in March, reading as "no interventions recorded" rather than as a fault. Both now work.
- An imported application is no longer dated after the enrolment it precedes.
Reports and academics
- Report generation was failing for every pupil at every school on the older report templates. Fixed.
- New and revised templates for Michaelhouse, The King's School Port Alfred, The King's School Amanzimtoti, Girls' College Bulawayo and Maris Stella.
- Every previous report had vanished from a pupil's Academic Records; the full history is back.
- The Grade Assessment report was hiding categories with no marks, and results now export as just the mark rather than "mark / total", which is far easier to work with in Excel.
- The combined summary took its pupil list from a single period, so a class that had changed shape appeared empty.
- Reports with Hebrew or Arabic text no longer fail, a report that cannot be produced says so rather than returning a blank page, and the template manager separates enabled templates from the rest.
When something goes wrong, ADAM now says so
A large sweep found places where a failure was reported as a success — the most misleading kind of fault there is. An agreement copy that could not be sent, for example, was recorded as emailed. All now fail loudly. Several hundred places where a missing record would have crashed a page mid-screen now show a message instead.
Around the system
- Safari users were being refused by every button that opens a list in a new window — well over a hundred of them, across Assessments, Reporting, scratch lists, Photos and Medical. Fixed.
- The reporting-period drop-down on a class Assessments tab did nothing, and the Remove button on psychometric results never removed anything. Both work.
- A family tag's link through to a scratch list has always led to "page not found"; it now opens the list.
- Alumni records gained the email address fields the bulk-mail toggle on the form had always implied.
- For schools we host, documents and photographs can now be kept in cloud storage rather than on the server's own disk. Nothing changes inside ADAM, but it lifts the disk-space ceiling and speeds up backups of large document libraries. Each school can also now be closed for maintenance on its own, rather than every school on a server going down at once.
- Also fixed: academic points were awarded from the most generous band rather than the correct one, and the roll call "last updated" time showed the hour where the day should have been.
We also fixed several security issues.