An ENT (digital workspace) is a web platform that brings together, behind a single sign-on, the communication and educational tracking tools of a school. eSchool, deployed in several French academies, structures this platform around three main modules: the liaison book, the grade report, and the internal messaging system.
Unified authentication via EduConnect: what changes for accessing eSchool
Since the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, several regions (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Normandy) are generalizing EduConnect as a single entry point to the ENT, the educational services, and sometimes Pronote. In practice, a parent or student uses a single username/password combination to access all the digital resources of the institution.
This centralization reduces the number of identifiers to remember, but it shifts the difficulty to the account activation step. When a family loses its EduConnect codes, access to the entire educational ecosystem is blocked, not just to messaging or the liaison book. The school’s administration remains the only point of reset, which generates a spike in requests at the beginning of the school year.
To better understand how the liaison book, grades, and messaging are structured within eSchool, an article published on the site www 1 Emploi details the functioning of each module.
Digital liaison book eSchool: replacing paper without losing traceability
The paper liaison book posed a simple problem: a note stuck in a notebook offered no guarantee of being read. The liaison book module of eSchool operates on a principle of electronic signature by parents. The teacher or administration publishes information, and each family validates it from their personal space.
Two characteristics distinguish this module from a simple message sending:
- The publication scheduling allows for drafting a note in advance and choosing the date and time of dissemination, which avoids sending information on a Friday evening when no one will read it before Monday.
- The signature tracking provides the teacher with a summary table showing which parents have read and validated, replacing the checked box of the paper book with a timestamped data.
- The school’s administration can send a message to all parents of the school, not just to one class, which centralizes administrative communications (internal regulations, class council dates, exceptional closures).
This operation assumes that families activate their accounts and regularly consult the ENT. Without this, dematerialization creates a blind spot for non-connected families, a point that the institution must anticipate from the start of the school year.
Grades module in eSchool: what families see and what teachers configure
The grade report in an ENT is not limited to displaying an average. In eSchool, the teacher enters evaluations with a coefficient and, depending on the academic configuration, can associate skills with each grade. The parent sees the result, the class average, and sometimes a positioning by skill.
Configuration from the teacher’s side
The teacher chooses whether an evaluation is summative or formative, whether it counts towards the quarterly average, and what coefficient to assign it. This fine configuration avoids a common flaw of paper books: the lack of clear weighting between a quick knowledge check and a two-hour monitored exam.
Reading from the parent’s side
The parent accesses the grades as soon as they are published, without waiting for the quarterly report. This immediacy presents an advantage (tracking progress in real-time) and a risk: an isolated grade does not hold the same value as a trend over several weeks. Some institutions choose to delay publication by a few days so that the teacher can contextualize a result during a class feedback.
eSchool internal messaging and right to disconnect: the new rules
The internal messaging system of eSchool allows teachers to contact families and vice versa, without using personal email addresses. The framework is closed: only members of the educational community of the institution can write to each other, which avoids external solicitations and guarantees a minimum of confidentiality.
A national framework announced for 2025 plans to limit notifications from the ENT in the evening, at night, and on weekends, with a generalization envisioned for the start of the 2026 school year. This measure responds to a shared observation by many teachers: receiving a parental message at 10 PM on a Sunday creates an implicit pressure for an immediate response.
In practice, this means that messages sent outside the authorized time frame will still be drafted and stored, but the notification (email, mobile push) will only be delivered when the next time frame opens. For teaching teams, this regulation clarifies a point that has remained unclear since the massive deployment of ENTs: a sent message does not equal a message received in real-time.
Protection of minor students’ data on an ENT
ENTs store sensitive personal data: grades, absences, family information. The CNIL strictly regulates their processing, and recent decisions remind that parents can request the deletion of certain data (school photos published on the ENT, for example), but not data necessary for educational tracking.
For eSchool, as for any ENT, the institution remains responsible for data processing. This implies that teachers should not use the ENT messaging system to transmit documents containing health data or information subject to medical confidentiality, even if the channel seems secure.
Ultimately, managing education via eSchool relies less on the technical mastery of each module than on clear organizational choices: defining who communicates what, when, and through which channel. A well-configured liaison book with respected notification windows makes the tool transparent for families, whereas a deployment without strategy multiplies unread messages and out-of-context solicitations.
