Parents advise each other about schools all the time: fees, uniforms, transport, exams, what to do about a teenager who has stopped talking. It happens in WhatsApp groups that nobody can search and that go quiet when the class moves on. The Clarvyn parent forum is that conversation in a place where it keeps.
Before anything else, the sentence this post exists to say: every live thread on the forum is readable on the open web, at clarvyn.ai/forums, by anyone, without signing in. Read the rest with that in mind.
What it is
One national board, not one room per school. The board is divided into categories, and a post is filed under one of them when it is written. Any parent on Clarvyn can read and post in any category, wherever their child goes to school, and so can a parent whose child is at no school on Clarvyn at all. A school-by-school forum would have had a few dozen parents in each room and died of quiet. A national one has enough people in it for a question to get an answer.
Who can post
Anyone signed in to the Clarvyn parent app. Signing in needs a phone number and a code by text, and nothing else. If no school has recorded your number, you are asked for a name and an account is created. That is enough to post.
Everyone posts under their real name. The composer says so, in one line above the fields: Everyone posts under their real name. There are no handles and no anonymous accounts. That costs the forum some candour, and it was chosen deliberately: nobody defames a school under their own name, and a board the schools can trust is a board that stays open.
Beside every name is a badge, and the badge states only what Clarvyn has checked. School verified means a school on Clarvyn records this person as a parent. Phone verified means the phone number was verified and no school has linked it yet. The two are labels, not ranks. A parent with no child at a school on Clarvyn is exactly the person the forum hopes to welcome.
What the badge never says is which school. A real name beside a school name publishes where that person's child spends every weekday, to every reader in the country, on every post they ever write. So the badge names a tier and never a school, in the app and on the web alike.
How a thread works
A post is a title, a body and a category. Anyone signed in can reply. Replies are flat, not threaded. Every post and reply can be voted up or down, the score is public, and it can go below zero. A reply that other parents have voted well below zero is folded up in the app, and on the web it is shown faded and labelled as downvoted. You cannot vote on your own post. You can edit or delete a post you started; a deleted one is shown as removed rather than vanishing, so a thread keeps its shape. You can report a post or a reply, and Clarvyn can remove one.
Writing is limited per person per hour. If you post a lot at once, the app asks you to try again shortly.
What is public, plainly
Everything that has not been deleted. The public site at clarvyn.ai/forums shows the same categories, the same threads and the same replies the app shows, under the same real names with the same badges, to anyone with the link and to search engines. A downvoted reply is still public. A removed one is not. There is no setting in the app that keeps a post inside the app, and there is no per-post choice to make. If you post it, it is on the web.
That is the reason for the real-name rule and the reason this post is blunt. The web page is what makes the forum useful to a parent who does not have the app yet: a search for a question about the school year should land on an answer from a real parent. It is also the reason to treat the forum as a public place rather than a group chat. Do not post anything you would not put your name to in front of your child's school, and never anything that identifies another person's child.
Reading on the web is all the web does. Posting, replying and voting happen only in the app, where the person acting is a signed-in parent with a badge behind their name.