Guardians

A guardian follows a learner’s progress without being enrolled themselves. Depending on your context that’s a parent of a school student, the family of a dependent learner, or a sponsor funding someone’s training. A guardian gets a read-only dashboard scoped to the learners they’re linked to and to the exact categories of data an administrator granted — nothing more.

This article covers the guardian’s own experience and how links are created, narrowed, and ended. The approval queue has its own article: Guardianship requests.

What this does

Guardianship is a link between one guardian and one learner, scoped to a single organization. The link records a relationship type, a status, and the list of data categories the guardian may see. A link that isn’t verified shows the guardian nothing.

Guardian and student are the default words Lurno uses. Your organization can rename either, so your screens may read differently — see Terminology.

What a guardian sees

Guardians land on a family overview headed My children (or whatever your organization calls them) — “How they’re doing. You can see this — you can’t change it.” Each linked learner gets a card with their name, a progress ring, a “X of Y complete” count across their enrollments, and a status of On track, Needs attention, Progress not measured, or No data yet.

Every number on the card says what it counts:

The ring is captioned on screen. It is how far through the coursework the learner is — a different measure from the “0 of 3 complete” line beneath it, which counts finished courses.
The activity sentence leads with its window and names what it counted: “Last 30 days: 0.3h of learning across 2 active days, and 66 activities finished.”
The all-time tile is captioned Activities completed / All time, so it reads separately from the 30-day figure beside it.

Cards lead with a plain sentence — “3h of learning and 4 things finished, across 5 days”, or “No activity in the last 7 days” — and carry signals where something warrants a look: 2 overdue, 1 closing soon, 1 not passed, Quiet for 9 days. Where a course genuinely has no measurable progress the card says Progress not measured and shows a count of what’s finished, rather than a percentage. A link still awaiting approval gets a plainer card in the same list — name only, a Pending verification badge, no progress ring or category data. Below the cards sits a progress section drawn from the same governed reporting numbers staff see, scoped server-side to that guardian’s learners only.

Opening a card gives the learner’s detail view, with a privacy strip across the top reminding the guardian the view is read-only and who granted it. Tabs appear only for what the link actually grants:

Academic progress unlocks Overview (enrolled programs and their state), Competencies (mastery against the competency framework), Activity (the learner’s activity record), Credentials (certificates the learner has earned), and Results (marks that have been released, with the marker’s comment).
Schedule unlocks Schedule (upcoming scheduled items, with start and end dates), including due and overdue work.

Where a guardian follows more than one learner, a child switcher on the detail page moves between them without going back to the overview.

A category that wasn’t granted means its tabs are absent, not present-but-empty. If neither category was granted, the guardian sees the learner’s name and nothing else.

A guardian cannot open course content as the learner, submit work, message on their behalf, change enrollment, or see anyone they aren’t linked to.

Released marks only. The Results tab shows work that has actually been released to the learner — never a draft grade, and never the private comment thread between a learner and their markers, which no guardian sees at any point.

Ask about a learner

A guardian can ask questions about the learner they follow, from an Ask about {name} panel:

Answers come from {name}’s learning record. Nothing here changes anything.

There are common questions as chips — How is she doing? · What is due soon? · Is anything missing or overdue? · What has she finished recently? · Which skills has she mastered? · Does she have any certificates? · Which courses is she taking? — and a box for asking in their own words.

It is bound to one learner and read-only. A guardian asking about somebody they aren’t linked to is refused, and the panel can’t change anything. Answers come from the same records the tabs show, so the two always agree.

When a scope wasn’t granted

A guardian link grants categories — academic progress, schedule, communications. Where a category wasn’t granted, the child’s card and tabs withhold that information and say so, under the heading “Your school’s decision”.

Every tab distinguishes three states:

State	Meaning
Your school’s decision	Not shared with you. Nothing is wrong
Couldn’t check right now	A genuine failure. Try again
Pending	Still loading

An all-clear is only shown when the data actually arrived and was genuinely clear.

Community

Where your organization runs Community, a guardian gets a Community entry of their own carrying:

Announcements addressed to them — including anything sent to their child’s audience with “also their guardians” ticked.
Messages with staff, where the messaging policy allows it. A guardian starting a conversation is asked which child it’s about.
Read-only sight of staff↔child conversations, but only where the policy is set to guardian-visible — and everybody in that conversation is told so inside it.

A guardian cannot message their own child through the platform. That is not a setting; it does not exist.

The weekly digest

Guardians can receive one weekly email per learner summarising how they’re doing. It’s switched on and off in their own notification preferences — “Get a weekly email about how each of your children is doing. Turn it off here and nothing is sent.” An empty week isn’t sent twice in a row.

Alongside it, guardians choose which signals they want to hear about at all:

Work is overdue
A deadline is close
Work is missing after the deadline
A result was not passed
They have gone quiet

Where guardians find it

A person whose only role is guardian gets a minimal sidebar containing just their guardian home — none of the staff navigation applies to them. Someone who holds a staff role and is a guardian keeps their full staff sidebar and gets an extra My children entry, which appears as soon as they have a link that hasn’t been ended, including one still waiting for approval.

That entry sits under My space, with your own learning and wellbeing, not under People with the work directory. Its label follows your organization’s vocabulary.

Create a link

Links are created by administrators, not requested from a learner’s directory record.

From the queue. Open Guardianship requests and use Link guardian.
From a person’s record in Enrollment. Open Enrollment → People, open the person, and use Add guardian on their record. It opens the same dialog with the learner pre-filled.

The dialog has two modes:

Existing member — pick someone already in the organization. This mode offers Mark as verified immediately (skip pending review); tick it and the link is live at once, leave it and the link lands pending.
Invite by email — Lurno emails an invitation. This mode has no immediate-verify option: the link always stays pending until the invited person accepts and an administrator verifies it in the queue.

Both modes let you set the relationship type and tick the data categories up front. Only categories that have a working guardian view today are offered, so you can’t accidentally grant something that does nothing. See Guardianship requests for the approval flow.

There is no Add guardian control on a person’s record in People — that screen edits categories on links that already exist.

Narrow or end a link

Change what a guardian can see. Open People, open the learner’s record, and use the guardian access section. It appears only once that learner has at least one verified guardian, and lists each of them with its own category checklist. Tick or untick and save; the change applies immediately. Clearing every category leaves the link in place but closes every data view.
Reject a pending link. Done from the guardianship queue. Rejection is terminal — a rejected link can never be verified later.
End a verified link. The guardian ends it themselves with End relationship on their own dashboard, which cuts access at once and doesn’t notify the learner. A learner who granted access to someone themselves withdraws it from their own account page. There is no administrator button that revokes an already-verified link today — narrow the categories to nothing instead, or ask the guardian to end it.

Ending a link only removes access in the organization it belongs to. A guardian linked to the same learner in a sibling organization keeps that link.

Reference

Field	What it does
Relationship type	An administrator picks Parent, Legal guardian, Sibling, Spouse, or Other. Links a learner creates for themselves are labelled Granted by user.
Status	Pending (not approved yet, shows nothing), Verified (active), Revoked (terminal).
Data categories	Academic progress and Schedule are the two that have guardian views today. Each maps to a set of tabs on the guardian’s view.
Access	Always read-only, always scoped to linked learners, always scoped to one organization.
End relationship	The guardian’s own control for dropping a link.

Troubleshooting

The guardian says they see no learners. The link is probably still pending approval, or the guardian is signed in to a different organization than the one the link belongs to. Check the guardianship queue.

They see the learner’s name but every tab is missing. The link was approved with no data categories ticked, or they’ve since been cleared. Open the learner in People and re-tick the categories on that guardian’s row.

I ticked “verified immediately” but the link is still pending. That option only exists when you link an existing member. An invited guardian always goes through the queue after they accept.

A guardian is linked to the wrong learner. If the link is still pending, reject it in the queue and create the correct one. If it’s already verified, clear all its categories, then create the correct link — administrators cannot revoke a verified link from the interface.

The guardian can’t sign in. They may not have accepted the emailed invitation, or they’re using a different address than the one invited. See Signing in.

A guardian asks for their data or the link erased entirely. Handle it like any other data request — see Offboarding & data requests.

Direct messages
Assignments overview — what “missing work” means
Guardianship requests
Inviting people
Roles & permissions
Offboarding & data requests
Terminology