If your school uses Parentmail, you're probably familiar with the routine: an email arrives (or a notification pings), you open it, spot a date — sports day, a parents' evening, non-uniform day — and think "I'll add that to the calendar later." Later never comes. The date gets buried. You remember it the night before, or worse, the morning of.
Parentmail is excellent at delivering school information. The problem isn't the delivery — it's what happens after. Dates mentioned in emails and attached PDFs don't magically appear on your Google Calendar or iPhone. You're expected to manually transfer every single one.
Here's how to fix that.
What Parentmail Actually Sends to Your Inbox
Parentmail works differently depending on how your school has configured it. Most parents receive some combination of:
Direct emails with newsletters, event announcements, and reminders (from info@parentmail.co.uk or messages@parentmail.co.uk)
PDF attachments — term date lists, event schedules, weekly newsletters as downloadable documents
Notification pings — "You have a new message" alerts that require logging into the Parentmail app to read
The emails and PDFs are where the useful date information lives. A typical term dates PDF might list 30+ events. A weekly newsletter email might mention three or four upcoming dates buried in paragraphs of text.
The Problem: Dates Buried in Text and PDFs
Even when your school sends full emails or PDFs, the information isn't calendar-ready. There's no "Add to Calendar" button. You get:
"Year 4 swimming starts on Tuesday 9th September and runs every Tuesday until half term. Please ensure your child has their swimming kit including a towel and goggles."
Or a PDF term planner with a dense table of dates spanning three pages.
You have two options: manually type every date into your calendar (nobody does this reliably), or accept that you'll miss things.
How Nuet Solves This
Nuet connects to your email inbox and automatically scans incoming messages — including PDF attachments — for dates, events, and deadlines. When your school sends a newsletter via Parentmail that mentions sports day on 19th June, or attaches a term dates PDF listing every event for the half term, Nuet extracts those dates and adds them to your calendar.
What Nuet reads:
Email body text (event names, dates, times mentioned in newsletters and announcements)
PDF attachments (term date lists, weekly planners, event schedules)
Calendar invites (.ics files) if your school sends them
What appears on your calendar:
Named events with correct dates and times
Reminders days in advance — not the night before
Synced to Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar
No manual entry. No "I'll do it later." No missing costume day because the email got buried under fifty others.
Does It Work With Every School?
Nuet works with any school that sends emails to your personal inbox. This includes:
Schools using Parentmail that send email notifications or newsletters to your Gmail/Outlook
Schools using other platforms (Arbor, ClassDojo, Weduc, SchoolComms) — if those platforms send emails to your address
Schools that email directly from the office (admin@school.sch.uk) — newsletters, reminders, ad-hoc messages
Schools that attach PDFs — term planners, event calendars, weekly digests
The key is whether the information reaches your email inbox. If it does — whether as body text or a PDF attachment — Nuet can read it.
What About App-Only Notifications?
Some schools configure Parentmail (or Arbor, ClassDojo) to send only notification pings by email — "You have a new message, log in to view." These don't contain useful date information for Nuet to extract.
If your school works this way, you have two options:
Check if you can switch to full email delivery — in your Parentmail notification settings, choose "Instant Email" rather than app-only notifications
Forward specific messages — when you see an important date in the Parentmail app, forward it to the email address connected to Nuet
Most UK schools still send substantive content by email — particularly newsletters, term date documents, and event announcements. The "log in to view" pattern is more common for forms, payments, and consent requests (which don't contain calendar events anyway).
Setting It Up
Download Nuet from the App Store (iOS)
Connect your email account (the one your school emails arrive in)
Nuet scans existing and incoming school emails automatically
Events appear on your calendar within minutes
That's it. No configuration per school. No telling Nuet which emails are from school. It recognises date information regardless of the sender.
What About the Term Dates PDF?
This is where Nuet is particularly useful. Many schools send a single PDF at the start of term listing every important date for the half term or full year. That PDF might contain 20–40 events.
Without Nuet, you'd need to open the PDF, read through it, and manually add each event to your calendar. With Nuet, those events are extracted automatically the moment the email arrives in your inbox.
This works for:
Term start/end dates
INSET days and teacher training days
Parents' evenings
School plays and concerts
Sports days and fixtures
Non-uniform days and themed dress-up days
Application deadlines and form due dates
School trip dates and payment deadlines
Can Both Parents Get the Same Events?
Yes. If both parents have Nuet connected to the email where school messages arrive, both get events on their calendars. Alternatively, Nuet syncs to Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar — share that calendar with your co-parent and both households stay informed without manual forwarding.
This solves the common problem where one parent is the "school contact" and the other relies on being told about events. Both parents see every date, automatically.
How Is This Different From Google Calendar's Built-In Detection?
Google Calendar can detect some events from Gmail — mainly flights, hotels, and restaurant reservations. It does NOT detect:
School events mentioned in newsletter text
Dates in PDF attachments
Multiple events in a single email
UK-format dates in informal text
Nuet is purpose-built for the type of information schools send: natural language dates, multi-event emails, and PDF term planners. Google Calendar's auto-detection simply doesn't work for school communications.
Is Nuet Safe to Connect to My Email?
Nuet uses read-only access to scan for dates and events. It cannot send emails, delete messages, or modify your inbox in any way. Your email content is processed for date extraction only and is not shared or stored beyond what's needed for the calendar.
Nuet is built for parents and designed around UK school communications specifically. Read more about how it works.
What Schools Use Parentmail in the UK?
Parentmail (by IRIS) is used by over 4,000 schools across the UK — primarily primary schools but increasingly secondary schools and nurseries too. If you're not sure whether your school uses it, check for emails from info@parentmail.co.uk or messages@parentmail.co.uk in your inbox, or look for the Parentmail branding in the school's communication policy.
Other common platforms include Arbor (used by 10,000+ schools), ClassDojo (primarily primaries), Weduc, and MCAS. Nuet works with emails from all of these.
How Do I Know If Parentmail Is Sending Full Emails or Just Notifications?
Check your inbox for emails from parentmail.co.uk:
If you can read the full message content (newsletter text, event details, dates) directly in the email — Nuet can scan it
If the email only says "You have a new message" with a link to log in — the useful content is in the app only
You can change your notification preferences in your Parentmail account settings. Select "Instant Email" to receive full communications by email rather than app-only notifications.
What Does Parentmail Cost Parents?
Nothing. Parentmail is a B2B product — schools pay for it. Parents download the app and create an account for free. There's no cost to receive school communications through Parentmail.
Nuet is a separate app with its own subscription (7-day free trial, then subscription). It reads the emails Parentmail sends to your inbox and extracts the calendar events from them.
