Teachers

Link a school or tuition teacher to one child, what they can see, and how it ends.

A teacher is linked to individual children, never to the family as a whole. They see the work of the children they have been given — readings and their recordings, spelling, handwriting and composition work with its photos, listening and Oral Practice, marks, and the books that child has worked on — and nothing else: not your other children, not the rest of your books, not your account.

Linking one

A Family Manager opens Teacher access for a child and uses Invite a teacher with their email address. The teacher needs their own Zen Reader account to accept, and an invitation waits 30 days.

It can also start at the other end: a teacher can Ask a family for access using the child's own Zen Reader email address, and the family manager is asked to approve. Nothing is revealed either way — the teacher is told only that the request has gone, whether or not the address belongs to anyone.

Where the teacher looks

A teacher's own menu gains My readers, listing the children they are linked to, with Open reports on each. It stays hidden until the account actually holds a link or an invitation, so an ordinary family never sees a dead menu item; a teacher waiting on their first approval reaches it from Settings → Account.

Each teacher can give a reader a private Caption — a class or student number, say — to tell two children with the same name apart. Only that teacher ever sees it.

What the states mean

On the family's side, each teacher shows one of:

• Can see this child's reports — live.
• Asked for access — waiting for you — approve or decline it.
• Invited — waiting for the teacher to accept.
• Paused — the link is still there, but the teacher's own Zen Reader subscription is not active, so they cannot open anything. It resumes by itself when theirs does.
• Declined, Access removed, Expired.

A teacher needs their own active Zen Reader subscription to read the reports they have been given. Being linked is not the same as being able to open them.

Ending it

The family can end a link at any time with Remove, and the teacher loses access straight away. Before a link is accepted, the teacher can also Decline an invitation or Withdraw a request they sent; once it is accepted, only the family can end it.

What a teacher can do

Read the child's reports and portfolios, write comments, and set tasks — work they set shows in that child's list marked set by (teacher). A teacher's private comments are private to them: a second teacher linked to the same child does not see them.

A child's Oral Practice conversations are listed on their Reading portfolio, under Oral Practice. A teacher can open one to read every line, hear the recordings and see the feedback, but cannot change a band, ask for new feedback, or move or delete a conversation — those stay with the family. The report says so: You are seeing this as a linked teacher. If the family gave Jas a video clip for an exam-practice conversation, the teacher can reach that clip — and only clips their own pupil practised with. A teacher can also set Oral Practice as a task.

A teacher can also give a child a book. It arrives as a copy in your family's Library, with a notification — "(Teacher) shared a book" — once it is there. The copy is your family's: you can edit or delete it, a later change on the teacher's side does not reach it, and it stays if the teacher's link ends. Sharing with two of your children makes two copies.

See Your family, roles and invites for how the roles compare, and Tasks for the work they can set.