Back to the home pageQuestions and answers
Everything Irish primary schools ask us before they sign up, plus honest answers to the questions school offices search for: what belongs in a school newsletter, what goes on the calendar for the year, and how to get a notice out through Aladdin.
It is 250 euro a year for the whole school, written on the invoice as €250. That is one licence covering every template, your saved crest and colours, the AI writing help, saved drafts and PDF export, with no per-document or per-teacher charge.
The licence runs for a year from the day you pay. If you cancel, you keep working until the end of the year you have paid for, and your saved drafts stay viewable and printable after that.
Yes. Every template has a free sample version you can use without an account, from the home page. You can type in your own wording, add your own crest and even your own contact details for the session, and download the result. Free samples carry a SAMPLE watermark across the page, and nothing is saved between visits.
One licence includes the main account, usually the secretary or principal, plus ten staff places. The main account invites staff by email, and each one signs in with their own password and keeps their own drafts.
Larger schools are welcome, just email hello@ournews.ie and we will sort a bigger licence.
No. They land straight into your school, with your crest, colours, address and contact details already in place, and everything they create carries them automatically. Staff cannot change the school details, the crest or the colours, and cannot invite or remove people. Only the main account can do that.
Your crest, colours, contact details, uploaded pictures and saved drafts are stored securely and are only visible to people signed in to your own school account. Nothing you write is published anywhere unless you choose to share a document as a webpage, and you can switch a shared page off at any time.
We do not hold information about individual children. That is deliberate: the templates are for communications to parents, not for pupil records, so please keep names, medical details and anything else sensitive out of them.
Your text is sent to the AI service to be rewritten or translated, and the result comes straight back to you. It is not used to train anything, and nothing is published. If you would rather not use it, every box can be typed and edited by hand: the AI is optional help, never a required step.
Yes, you can cancel at any time. Your licence stays live until the end of the year you have paid for. After that your saved drafts remain in My files where you can still read and print them, and you can start again whenever you like without losing anything.
They are templates. Every template opens with wording already written for that kind of document, a school newsletter template with headed sections, a notice template for closures and reminders, a school calendar template for September to June, policy templates, a Meet My Teacher card, a typical school day page and a clubs list.
Nothing is fixed. Every heading, paragraph and list in a template can be changed, dropped or reordered, and your crest and colours are already on it, so you are editing a finished page rather than building one from scratch in Word.
No, and that is the main point of it. You upload your crest, pick your school colours and enter your address, phone, email, website and roll number once, in School settings. Every notice, newsletter, calendar, policy and guide then carries them automatically, including the footer with your contact details.
Change a colour or upload a new crest and everything you make from then on picks it up. Documents you already saved are not rewritten behind your back.
OurNews.ie does not send messages to parents itself, on purpose: your school already has a way of reaching them. What we do is give you the finished document.
Save the document as a PDF, then attach that PDF to an Aladdin Connect message, a Seesaw post, a Google Classroom announcement or an ordinary email, exactly as you would with a Word file. If you would rather send a link than an attachment, use Share as webpage and paste the address into the message instead: parents can then read it on a phone without downloading anything.
Yes, two ways. You can upload the PDF to your website as you do now, or use Share as webpage, which publishes a read-only version of the document at its own address, laid out for phones. You then link to that address from your own site, with no code to copy in. The link stays live while your licence is live, and you can switch any link off from My files.
Deleting a picture in My pictures removes it everywhere, including from any webpage you have already shared and from drafts that used it, so those pages will show that space empty. Your school crest is protected and cannot be deleted this way, but other photos can, so only delete a picture once you are happy it is no longer needed.
If it happens, upload the picture again, open the document and choose it, then use Share as webpage once more. The same address updates with the picture back in place. Saved PDFs you have already downloaded are unaffected, because the picture is part of the file.
Yes. Everything is sized for A4 and saved as a PDF, so it prints the same from the office printer, the staffroom printer or a print shop. Use Save as PDF rather than your browser's own print button, because the browser adds its own headers and margins and squeezes the layout.
Short documents that only just spill onto a second page are gently reduced to fit one page. Longer ones, like newsletters and parent guides, flow onto extra pages and break between paragraphs and bullet points rather than through them.
Yes. Every template has a date box you can change, so a notice dated for next Monday reads for next Monday, and a document written in August can be dated for the first day of term.
These come up constantly, so here are proper answers rather than a sales pitch.
A newsletter parents actually read is short, dated and broken into headed sections. In an Irish primary school these are the sections that earn their place:
Dates coming up: the next few weeks only, with the day of the week written out, for example Friday 24 October. Closures, half days and inservice days first, because those are the ones parents plan around. What the children have been doing: one or two sentences per class or per project, ideally with a photograph. This is the part parents read first. Anything they need to do or send in: money, permission slips, tracksuits, library books, lunch changes. Put it in its own box so it cannot be missed. Health and safety notes: nut-free reminders, head lice, illness policy, anything time-sensitive. Keep it factual and short. Standing reminders: drop-off and collection times, absence procedure, uniform days, the office phone number. A sign-off from the principal, with a name rather than just the school.
Two practical things: keep it to one or two pages, because a four-page newsletter gets skimmed, and repeat the important date in the section that needs action rather than trusting people to look back at the dates list.
Irish primary schools work from the standardised school year set out by the Department of Education, so most of the calendar writes itself: the reopening day in late August or early September, the October midterm, Christmas holidays, the February midterm, St Patrick's Day, Easter, the May and June bank holidays and the last day in late June.
On top of that, parents need your own school's days: inservice and planning days, sacrament dates in second and sixth class, sports day, school tours, the school play, parent teacher meetings and any half days. Those are the ones families ring the office about.
Send it out at the start of the year, in one page per school year, and put it on the school website as well. Marking each type of day in its own colour, closures in one colour, midterms in another, saves a great many phone calls.
Put the point in the heading. "School closed on Friday 24 October" works. "Important information for parents and guardians" does not.
Then three short paragraphs at most: what is happening, when, and what the parent needs to do. If there is an action, give it its own box. Add the crest and a photograph if you have one, because a page with your crest on it reads as official and gets kept on the fridge.
Long lists of dates do not belong on a notice. They belong on a calendar or in a newsletter.
Short, numbered and signed. A one-page policy that parents read is worth more than six pages nobody opens. A workable shape is: a short purpose paragraph saying why the policy exists, then numbered statements, one point each, in plain words, then a review date, then a formal approved-by line with a name, a role and the date it was approved, and finally who to contact with a question.
For everyday policies, sun cream and sun safety, healthy lunches, birthday treats, mobile phones, photography and consent, attendance, uniform, that is genuinely all that is needed. Board of management level policies are a different job and usually follow a template your management body provides.
Most say four things: what is encouraged, what is not allowed and why, what happens if it comes in anyway, and a line about nuts.
The nut line matters most, and it should say precisely what your school means: whether you are a nut-free school, or a school with a nut-free classroom, and what parents should check for on labels. Second, be clear about fizzy drinks, sweets, chocolate bars and crisps, and whether a Friday treat is allowed, because that is where most confusion comes from.
If your school is part of the Hot School Meals programme, or has lunches provided, say so plainly and say what a child needs to bring in as well, if anything. Parents cannot guess this.
The practical things, and they ask them again every year: what time to arrive and where to stand, what a shortened day means for the first weeks and when it ends, what to put in the bag, whether a lunch is needed and what is allowed, how to label a uniform, what happens if a child cries at the door, when they will hear from the teacher, and who to ring with a question.
Very little of it is about the curriculum. Answering the practical list in writing before the first day saves the office a fortnight of phone calls, which is why the Parent Guides library starts there.
Nine templates, all working the same way: fill in the boxes on the left, watch the page take shape on the right, then Save as PDF. Every one of them has a free sample version you can try without an account.
If your question is not answered here, please contact our Customer Success team at hello@ournews.ie and we will come back to you.