Do I sign in for my child?

No. The sign-in is your child's school Microsoft account, so they have to do that part themselves. You can sit with them, but you can't use your own account.

Is there a cost to my family?

No. The service is paid for by the school. Your child doesn't pay anything and doesn't need a card.

What if the school hasn't enabled it?

There's a request-access page that drafts an email your child can send to their IT team — or that you can send. The IT team needs about 30 seconds to grant consent on their side.

Yes. The sign-in happens on Microsoft's own page; mydocs.school never sees the password. Files travel through the service to your child's browser without being stored. There's no AI training, no advertising, no third-party sharing.

For parents

Five minutes, then forward to your child.

Most parents don't know that their child's school Microsoft 365 account closes weeks after they leave — taking years of essays, OneNote notebooks and project work with it. Here's what's at stake and the easy way to help.

The short version

Your child's school account is borrowed, not owned. When the school closes it (within a few weeks of them leaving), the work inside it disappears with it.

What's in there

By the time a child finishes school, their Microsoft account usually holds five to seven years of work: essay drafts, exam revision, group projects, photos of whiteboards, art portfolio scans, every PowerPoint they ever made for a class talk, and — the one most-often missed — their OneNote class notebooks.

OneNote class notebooks are the work-by-work record of every subject, with the teacher's annotations alongside their own notes. Most students don't realise they're losing them until they need them in their first term at university or apprenticeship.

How to help

Talk to them about it. Just the conversation puts them ahead of most leavers. The single biggest reason work gets lost is “I didn't know I needed to save it.”
Sit down with them for five minutes. They open mydocs.school on a laptop, sign in with their school account, click Download my Docs. Files come down as a zip.
Save the zip in two places. A folder on the family laptop plus a personal Google Drive, or an external hard drive. One copy isn't a backup.
If your child's school hasn't enabled it, they (or you) can email the school IT team using the request-access form — it drafts the email for them.

How to send this to your child

Forward them the link to mydocs.school/for-students — it's the student-facing version of the same picture, with the steps they need to take.

What it isn't

It isn't a backup of the whole school. Only your child's own work — never another student's, never a teacher's pages.
It isn't something you can do for them. The sign-in is their school account, so they have to be the one who clicks. You can sit alongside.
It isn't a substitute for talking to the school. If something specific is missing, the school's IT team is usually willing to help — especially if asked while the account is still active.

Common questions

Do I sign in for my child?: No. The sign-in is your child's school Microsoft account, so they have to do that part themselves. You can sit with them, but you can't use your own account.
Is there a cost to my family?: No. The service is paid for by the school. Your child doesn't pay anything and doesn't need a card.
What if the school hasn't enabled it?: There's a request-access page that drafts an email your child can send to their IT team — or that you can send. The IT team needs about 30 seconds to grant consent on their side.
Is it safe?: Yes. The sign-in happens on Microsoft's own page; mydocs.school never sees the password. Files travel through the service to your child's browser without being stored. There's no AI training, no advertising, no third-party sharing.