ParentMail Reviews 444

There's definitely a gap in the market for someone to develop an app that is straightforward, user friendly and doesn't provide an infuriating experience.

How can any service in 2026 can take 6 clicks and 20 seconds to go the actual landing page? I was waiting for last 7 years for them to fix it. but no, same old.
what a really horrible experience and we have no choice. my kids primary school was using the parentmail. I was so looking forward for an end to it after they finished the primary. but to my surprise same service in secondary too. never so disappointed :D
they dont even have a complaints section. I was forced to come to trustpilot to raise this

Great app, used at our two children's primary and secondary school. Does everything it says it does simply.

Piece of junk app, hopeless if you have more than one child or a child who attends both a school and a club that use this godforsaken piece of junk. Clunky coding looks like a teenager’s bad GCSE project. Awful forms that wipe if you leave the app midway to check something. GDPR breaches.

Someone is on the take and schools have been mugged off when they were tricked into making use of it.

Terrible app and awful customer service to go alongside it. You have to jump through hoops to be able to speak to anyone and then they are rude and unhelpful. I would highly recommend no school ever using ParentMail, they have gone dramatically downhill since Iris took them over.

This app is absolutely garbage. It has the worst layout, and looks like it was designed by children? As like 'My First App'. I despise having to use this app. It must be cheap... and the only reason anyone uses it...

ParentMail is missing an absolutely essential and basic feature which is the ability to search emails.

Example: If I want to know what days PE is on, I would simply search 'PE' and I would then have the relevant information quickly. Instead I have to scroll through the hundreds of emails and forms and click through to read them to see if they mention the PE days.

This single omission makes ParentMail less useful than even the most basic email client for getting relevant information quickly.

The reason that ParentMail has such bad reviews on here is that it's the schools paying for and choosing the platform, not the parents. For this reason the functionality provided to the parents is the absolute minimum, with the exception of search which I would say IS a minimal requirement that is missing.

Worst piece of software I've ever used. Our school uses this and it makes booking for thibgs pike the Nativity play impossible. I had to refresh several times to get it to work and by the time it worked all the tickets were sold out. You ruined this for us. I wish we weren't held captive with this software because there is never any support when something goes wrong and it is trash

As a school who have used parentmail the service is shocking, they have no morals and try to rob people. They provide services which are unusable then refuse to let you cancel, even months before renewal. They are almost impossible to get hold of for help. The only team you can contact is the accounts team to pay them money. AVOID AT ALL COSTS

My children's primary school has adopted ParentMail. It took me until my first child was in year 5 to get registered with them. Roughly once per year, I would try, and roughly each time, it would fail. I think it failed because I wasn't 'enthused' to 'get onto' ParentMail, and I suspect the invitations silently expired. Since they don't offer end-user support, you never find out.

I would say that their services have been designed without the intervention of a User-Experience specialist. I get some forms via ParentMail. The message never says 'Fill in this form to get your child on the big school trip'. It always says 'You have a form to fill in'. Just that. Exactly that. No context. No purpose. If I don't act on it very soon, I get a terse little reminder something like 'You still haven't filled in the form'. I have a delicate little ego. When someone implies that I am mis-behaving by not jumping when they instruct, I learn to ignore them. I don't think I have opened a 'form to fill in' for some months [OK. Perhaps I have, but under protest]

They have taken a 'least viable product' approach to some of their design. If you receive a message asking you to adhere to an appointment, in my email client, I can convert this email to an appointment in my Diary. When I do this, the entire description within that message doesn't make it into the diary entry. This is because beautifully decorated emails are done in the web-tech, HTML. But the fundamental message mechanism of email is text-only. When ParentMail sends you a message, it _has_ the pretty HTML version, but it puts a trivial placeholder message into the fundamental text-only version. That's the one my mail client converts into an appointment, and it is valueless (to me).

ParentMail don't offer a helpline to end-users (parents). All helpline activity has to pass (in our case) through a school point-of-contact. I wrote ParentMail a bug report about my previous paragraph. My school point-of-contact passed it on. ParentMail sent her a reply which I would infer meant 'We don't have scope to act on this'.

So in summary; they didn't get me onboard in a timely way, they make a mess of what they attempt, and they don't want to improve.

My youngest is over 40, so please stop sending stuff to me. Bit of a security issue! I now know what school and the name of a child there.
Parents beware.. is your information being shared on the www ?

Charges you for meals your child never ate because they weren't even at school.

Absolutely zero way to contact their customer support.

What pile of junk this App is. As another has said it’s more obstructive than it is a facilitator.

Why on earth didn’t the moronic developers realise that a parent might have their child at more than one organisation that uses this dreadful app.

Awful, awful, awful.

Appalling. I used to use it a few years ago at my old school which was straightforward.
I have tried with this school and myself and school have been in contact with IRIS on numerous occasions. No improvement. Apparently, numerous parents have also complained about it and cannot access anything on it either. This has been since some system change/ update purported to make it better. So, I have finally deleted the app and make payments via cash.

Totally useless, been toppinv up my child's dinners and the school said nothing in it ,but my account has £70 in it.
Can't get hold of parent mail and they do not reply to emails

Parentmail is almost unique in that it insists on a 10-character password length, while the rest of the Internet
as used by 7 billion-odd people survives on 8 characters. It's virtually impossible to remember a non-standard password, which means going through the vexatious password reset process every time the school send out a letter. It's sorely tempting not to bother which means important comms might be missed.

Unable to add new bank card - it rejects every payment (card/bank account ok/app updated/cache etc cleared/ tried app on iPhone/pc etc). Staff won’t deal with parents saying “ticket” must be opened by school. No response. Bank state it’s a parentmail problem. No money on kids accounts for buying meals ! School turned off PayPal and won’t take cash. Problem after problem with this system and unhappy parents !

Suddenly stopped receiving emails. Everything was fine until late November when I stopped receiving emails into my inbox. They are there in the app but I didn’t know that, just realised after the Christmas holidays. I’ve missed parents evening and important information about exams. I’m now locked out as I have forgotten the password for the app and when I request a new password, that email doesn’t arrive in my inbox either! Yes, I’ve been into my emails and checked junk, blocked senders etc and listed parentmail as a contact but no joy. School are flummoxed, no way for parent to contact the software provider and now I’m completely locked out with no way to pay for anything or get any info. Really poor

Automatically takes a payment from stored card details. Does not give an option to change payment details before taking the money! How on earth do I change my payment card? Useless.

They have no aftercare. No telephone support. First chance i get i will we moving away from them. We are a school and chat support is so poor and frustrating.