Sentral for Parents 4+

So much potential, but so hard to use.

I find this app, when it works, fine. And I can see how it helps the schools. But it’s got so many quirks that it just in aggregate becomes so hard to use.

1. What’s the URL for the parent portal to access from the web? Nobody can tell you this. It’s a secret but the school will send instructions assuming you know it.
2. More than one kid? It just gets so confused. Now I have two logins, one for each school, and I’m constantly swapping back and forth.
3. The spinning ball of doom. Logged in? Now wait 30 seconds for the ball of doom and nothing happens. Reports were issued yesterday and still I cannot get the app to open a single screen. Even redownloaded it.
4. Absences. Why oh why when it’s listed an absence and asks you to provide a justification… I have to back out of that, go separately to add a new absence, then manually link it to the notification by date. Could have been so much easier.
5. Oops we’ve logged you out again, go select school again, oops you can’t do that because of the spinning ball of doom.

So I can see what it’s trying to achieve,,, and that’s fine… but this is a classic case of providing the school a benefit by making the parents jump through so many hoops. If they spent some time on the usability of the parent app and ensured that it was less buggy I think we would have a better time

Thank you

Developer Response ,

We apologize for the inconvenience. To help us investigate further, can you please send to us following information at parentapp@sentral.com.au?

1. Parent name.
2. Parent app login email.
3. School Names

Not efficient

The app looks great and could work well but I find that it takes so long for pages to load. Often an error message comes up and says it has failed to load and you have to try again. Very frustrating when you’re trying to do anything in a hurry or just get through the messages on the Newsfeed.
And like another user said, constantly having to log in again with the schools details or do a complete log in with my email address and password.

How is it even possible to make an app so bad

I’m a student and when I enter, I have to sign in THREE different times. Two times with my SSO and once with my email. There’s a “keep me signed in” button that appears multiple times bet never works. If you exit the app for one second and try to re-enter you have to restart the process again. Also it says for me to get the Sentral app… on the Sentral app. If you press to get the app in the app then I have to sign in a again of course. There’s a “home” button but if I press that the screen will load forever and I have to leave the app and restart the sign in process again. Sometimes when I do everything correctly it just doesn’t sign in. No school should use an app to horrible.