AI Agent: Four children, three schools and one sheet of A4

If you have more than one child at school, you'll know the admin is a job in itself. I have four, spread across three different schools, and for this post they're going to be Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta. The pilots reading this will spot the phonetic alphabet; everyone else can rest assured those aren't their real names. 😂

Alpha and Bravo are in Year 10 and Year 8 at the same secondary school, Charlie is in Year 6 at the junior school, and Delta is at the infant school. Three schools means three ways of doing everything.

How hard could it be?

On paper it doesn't sound too bad. In reality it looked like this:

The secondary school sends a steady stream of emails through the school app, but the announcement emails only carry a title. If you want to know what's actually happening, you have to log in to the parent portal and go looking.
Dinner money is split across two payment systems. One covers the secondary and the infant school, a completely different one covers the junior school.
Every child has different PE days and different kit rules.
On top of that there are newsletters, events and early finishes, all arriving in their own way.

To make things more interesting, my personal email is with a privacy focused provider that has no integrations at all. Great for privacy, terrible for automation. None of this could be pulled together automatically, so it all lived in my head, and my head isn't a great system. PE kit, reply slip deadlines, low lunch balances and short notice changes were all very easy to miss.

Giving it its own inbox

At the start of October I decided to tackle it properly and set up an AI assistant to help. The first decision was about privacy. I created a dedicated Gmail account just for the assistant and forward the school emails there. My main inbox stays private and the assistant only ever sees what I choose to send it.

Deciding how I wanted to hear about things

Before building anything I thought about how I actually wanted to be told. I didn't want another stream of notifications, that's the problem I was trying to solve. So I settled on one daily digest in the morning, and only the genuinely urgent things, like same day changes and deadlines that are about to land, get flagged straight away. The urgent check runs every 30 minutes during the school day and stays completely silent when there's nothing to say.

Getting past the titles

Next I signed the assistant into the school app's parent portal. Now the digest includes the full text of each announcement rather than a title I'd have to go and chase. It's a small thing, but it removes a step every single time.

PE kit

Every Sunday to Thursday at 7pm I get a reminder about who needs PE kit the next day. For the older two it comes straight from their online timetables. For the younger two it comes from the infant school's PE timetable in its newsletter, plus the days I already know, along with what kit they need.

Dinner money

I signed the assistant into both payment systems too. Every morning it reads the lunch balance for all four children, and anything under £10, or any new payment request, goes right at the top of the digest. Importantly, it's read only. It never pays or tops anything up, that stays with me.

As a bonus, it used the payment history to work out what we actually spend. Over the first five weeks of term it's about £51.50 a week across all four for lunches and small items.

One sheet of A4

This is the bit that ties it all together. I connected our home printer, so the digest also prints as a one page A4 brief. It has sections for what needs attention today, today's plan, what's coming up, school news and balances, and a tick box to do list at the bottom. Regular readers will know how I feel about checklists, and this is essentially a morning checklist for the household.

I also added our family calendar with the school runs, clubs and tuition, so each day's plan sits right alongside the school information. It's perfect to consume with my morning coffee before picking up my phone.

Fine tuning

Then came a couple of tweaks. The older two get the school bus on their own, so the brief now only covers drop offs and pick ups for the younger two. On day two I moved the digest earlier, to 6:30am, so it's ready and printed before the school run starts.

So how is it going?

Honestly, it's a game changer, I'm only two days in. But one message and one printed page each morning now cover all four children across three schools.

It's already earned its keep. On day two a club was cancelled that morning and I knew about it within minutes.

It isn't perfect. The first morning's digest ran a few minutes late, and the payment sites log me out every so often because they don't have a 'remember me' option, so now and then I have to sign back in. I'm still refining it.

Conclusions

Start with the problem, not the technology. The real problem wasn't email, it was things slipping through the cracks.
Decide how you want to be interrupted before you build anything. One digest and a quiet urgent check beats a constant drip.
Keep the boundaries clear. A separate inbox and read only access meant I could hand over the reading without handing over control.

Next I'm planning to extend the brief beyond school. If you're juggling something similar I'd love to hear how you handle it.