Schools Portal
Admin Handbook

The Fairtrade India Schools Portal is the platform Fairtrade India uses to run the Fairtrade Schools Programme: registering schools, tracking their progress through three stages, issuing certificates, running two related programmes (CSM Campaigns for individuals and organisations, and the Youth Programme for teenage ambassadors), and editing the public website.

Stages and steps

All three steps of a stage are required — there is no optional step.

Recorded is not the same as submitted

A school can record work against a step and keep editing it. Only when it submits the step is it complete and locked. Every percentage, badge and count in this portal counts submitted steps. Recorded-but-unsubmitted work reads as 0%; a school that has done nothing at all for a stage shows a blank cell — deliberately different, so "hasn't started" and "started but hasn't finished" never look alike.

Three programmes share one sign-in page — the Schools Programme (this handbook), Youth Ambassadors and CSM Campaigns. Click a coloured panel to open that programme's own sign-in form beside it.

Roles and what they see

Every staff account has one role. The role decides which menu items appear and, within each screen, whether you can add, edit or delete.

Signing out

Click your name in the top-right corner of any admin screen, then Logout. This ends the session immediately; anything unsaved on the page you were on is lost.

Forgot password

1. Click Forgot Password? on the sign-in page.
2. Enter your registered email and follow the reset link that is sent to it.
3. No access to that mailbox? Ask a Super Admin to update the email or re-issue your credentials from Manage User.

The Dashboard is the school listing — every school you can see, with registration status, login activity, stage progress and certificate status. It is the screen you land on after signing in and where most day-to-day work starts.

Activity cards

A school sits in exactly one of the first four buckets. Renewal Due is different — a flag based on certificate dates, so a "Pro Active" school can also be due for renewal. Click a card to filter the table; click again to clear.

Columns and actions

CSM Campaigns is a separate programme from the Schools Programme — for individuals and organisations who register to take part in campaigns such as "Sustainable Fashion Consumption". This screen lists everyone who has registered.

Activate a registration

1. Open the Waiting to be activated tab and select the registration.
2. Check the name, organisation, address and email.
3. Click Activate. A username and one-time password are generated.
4. They are emailed automatically — or shown on screen if outbound email is switched off (page 30).

Campaign content is authored in four nested levels: Campaign › Sub Campaign › Activity › Questions.

Add questions to an activity

1. Drill down: Campaign › Sub Campaigns › Activities › Questions.
2. To start from a template, click Apply Standard Form — it adds the usual date, description, participant-count and evidence questions, ready to edit.
3. To add a question by hand, choose its type, write the wording, and set mandatory, display order and active.
4. For choice questions, add the selectable options.
5. To show a question only after a particular answer, set Show when to that question and answer.

Question types

Four ready-made views under one set of tabs: School Report (full contact details, searchable), Schools By Location, Schools By Curriculum and Schools By Stage, plus saved Custom Templates. Use Excel / PDF to export a table; Save Chart PDF / Image exports just the chart.

Reads back a school's responses to the Learner Audit questionnaire (page 20). Choose a School, tick the audit questions to include, then Submit.

A sortable, exportable school list narrowed by State, District and Status — the same status codes as the Dashboard cards, so the two screens can never disagree.

One school's entire submitted record — every step, every activity, with full descriptions, attendance figures, social-media links and evidence photographs — arranged by step and coloured to match its stage. Opened from Detail School Report › Work Done, or from a school's dashboard activity window via View full report; both open a new tab.

What the report is for

This is the authoritative view of what a school has actually submitted. When a Dashboard percentage looks surprising, or before a certificate is generated, open this report and read the entries behind the number.

Teaching material made available to schools, kept in four parallel lists under one menu:

The forum schools use to talk to one another about the programme. This screen is a read view: browse current and archived discussions and open any thread to read it.

Individual people at each school you may need to write to.

1. Click Add Contact.
2. Enter the School, Member Type, Name, Category, Email and the contact's role in the programme.
3. Save.

Named lists for writing to many schools or contacts at once.

1. Click Add Group and name it.
2. Use Link School and Link Contact to populate it.

1. Click Compose.
2. Choose recipients — individual schools, a saved group, or contacts.
3. Write a Subject and message; attach files if needed.
4. Click Send, or Draft to finish later.

Add a user

1. Click to add a new user.
2. Enter the Email (this is the username), choose a Role, and enter First / Middle / Last Name and Contact.
3. Click Save. A password is generated and emailed to that address.
4. For a Group Admin or Coordinator, click Assign School on the saved user and tick their schools.

The questionnaires schools use to survey their own learners; answers come back through the Dynamic Learner Audit Report (page 12).

1. Create a template with a Template Name, a Banner Image and a Body Image.
2. Add questions and order them with the up/down controls.
3. Mark a question as dependent where it should appear only after a specific earlier answer.
4. Add translations if the template is used in more than one language. An existing template can be copied as a starting point.

The list of Flocert-certified customers in India. Search it, or add and edit a customer. A customer can hold several product types across several categories — both are multi-select.

Define a course, add modules to it, then fill in only the components each module is ticked for. Deleting a course hides it rather than removing it — modules, sessions, files and learner answers hang off it.

A separate menu system from the admin sidebar, two levels deep. The screen enforces three rules: an item with sub-items cannot also be a link; a sub-item cannot have sub-items; at least one item must stay active. Reorder with Move Up / Move Down.

Answer Review

A queue of answers ambassadors have submitted. Open one, read it and write a facilitator remark back. The answer text itself cannot be edited — it is locked on submission, so a remark always describes exactly what was sent.

Forum Moderation

Posts held back pending approval. Approve publishes; Reject hides. A rejected post is a soft delete — marked hidden, never destroyed, because these are minors' posts and the record is kept.

Youth Management — applications

1. Open an application and review it.
2. Click Approve to generate the ambassador's username and password (emailed, or shown on screen if email is off), or Reject to decline.
3. Use Re-issue Credentials if an ambassador needs a new password.
4. Export downloads the applicant list.

This menu lists issued certificates, where you can view, edit or delete one. New certificates are issued from a school's own record, not from this list.

Once issued, the button changes to View. An expired certificate can still be viewed but no longer downloaded.

Sets how many entries each step requires before a school is allowed to submit it — for example, the minimum number of assemblies for Step 1.

The CMS menu edits the public website at fairtradeindia.org, not the admin portal. Every screen follows the same pattern: open it, edit the text or images in the editor, click Save — the change is live immediately.

1. Open the menu item for the page you want to change.
2. Edit the text in the rich-text editor; replace an image by uploading a new file over the existing one.
3. Click Save.

FAQ

1. Open FAQ.
2. Click Add for a new question-and-answer pair, or to edit an existing one.
3. Save.

Headers, Contact Us, Terms, Privacy, Footer

Open the item, edit its content, Save.

1 · Onboard a new school

1. The school registers itself on the public site and appears under Registration Approval Pending.
2. Click on its row and review the details.
3. Click Approve.
4. If a Group Admin or Coordinator should look after it, assign the school on the staff account under Manage User › Assign School.

2 · Check a school's real progress

1. Open the Dashboard and set the correct financial year.
2. Read the I / II / III columns — submitted-step percentages, not "has done something".
3. Click a percentage, or open the School Work Report, for the entries behind the number.
4. Only then treat the stage as complete or generate a certificate.

3 · Issue a certificate correctly

1. Do workflow 2 first — do not trust the eligibility list alone.
2. From the Dashboard, click the school's stage percentage.
3. Click Generate on the stage.
4. If warned the stage is not fully submitted, stop and investigate.
5. Choose the start date and confirm.

4 · Run a CSM Campaign from scratch

1. Create the campaign — name, palette colour, icon or image.
2. Add Sub Campaigns, then Activities inside each.
3. Give every activity a questionnaire (Apply Standard Form or custom) before publicising it.
4. Review members' answers under each activity's Responses.
5. At season end, Retire the campaign rather than deleting it.

5 · Process a CSM or Youth Ambassador application

CSM under Registrations (page 8), Youth under Youth Management (page 22) — identical pattern:

1. Open the waiting / applications tab.
2. Review the applicant's details.
3. Approve (credentials generated and emailed, or shown on screen if email is off) or Reject (kept, not deleted).
4. A lost password later? Re-issue Credentials rather than re-registering.

6 · Write to a group of schools

1. Build the recipient list first: Contacts and/or a Group under Communication.
2. Go to FT Email › Compose.
3. Choose the group or contacts, write the message, Send — or Draft to finish later.

7 · Grant a new staff member the right access

1. Create the account under Manage User with the correct Role.
2. For Group Admin or Coordinator, use Assign School — those roles are defined by their school assignments.
3. If the role itself needs different menu access, change it once under Role Rights — this affects every user with that role.
4. Tell them a permission change can take up to 15 minutes to appear if they were already signed in.