The Contact Type feature allows you to differentiate and filter contacts depending on their relationship to the student. This is achieved by bringing through a larger set of contact data from your MIS (no longer restricted to just those contacts with Parental Responsibility) and presenting them as contact options on your New Publication page. This is being rolled out to SIMS schools, with iSAMS schools to follow soon.


Fig. 1 - this new feature can be seen on your New Publication Page i.e when you create a new communication.

How does it work?

Like all of SchoolPost, these new contact types work purely based on SIMS data. A school is required to update their SchoolPost reports to bring new data into the site. The new contact types feature is split into Relationship types and Fees types. They can be seen as an extension to Priorities, in such a way that they are essentially ways of defining the intended contacts you wish to send a message to. Like SchoolPost today, where at least one Priority must be selected, with the contact types feature, at least one Priority and one Contact Type must be selected. 

Understanding the logic

Priorities and Contact Types intersect, therefore a recipient must have both the selected priority and contact type ticked in the MIS to be added to the recipient list. Selecting additional contact types will add further recipients into your recipient list, rather than reducing it. This is the same as a user adding more Priorities, so it’s the same behaviour.


Fig. 2 Shows the columns that each parent now has in SchoolPost. A link must be selected from both fields

How do I use it?

  1. Create your new publication in SchoolPost as per normal. For further support on the basics of creating a new publication. Please refer to our help centre documentation. 

  2. Once you have selected your groups or filters, the priority and contact type selections will appear. 

  3. Select your intended Priorities. The most common selection for schools would be Parental Responsibility contacts, currently achieved by ticking Priority 1 and 2 and 3, with no further filtering required. 

  4. With the new Contact Type feature enabled, you need to then have ‘Parental Responsibility’ and ‘Lives with Pupil’ selected in the Contact Types. This tends to be set as default as the pre-ticked boxes for convenience.

  5. Continue your publication as normal and send