What is a Network Hub?

A Network Hub (also called a Management Hub) is a central Educa site that lets head office staff share information and communicate across multiple sites from one place. It’s designed for “hub-level actions” (posting/sharing), while still protecting each site’s private data.

Important privacy note: Hub permissions ≠ local site access

Hub users can be given permission to perform remote actions for selected sites (hub actions).
However, to access and view a site’s local content, the user still needs to be invited as a teacher on that specific site.

This separation helps protect site-level privacy and aligns with GDPR-style privacy expectations.

How the Hub is set up

Educa Support creates the Hub site. After that:

A Hub Admin is invited.
Hub Admins link member sites using Centres → Link Centre.
Once centres are linked, Hub Admins can organise them into networks using Manage Networks.
Networks let you organise centres by region, service type, or any structure that suits your organisation. This makes it easier to target shared content at the right level (organisation-wide, network-level, or centre-specific).
Hub Admins can invite additional staff and manage their Hub access.

How shared content is distributed

Hub content can be distributed at three levels:

Organisation wide – all sites connected to the Hub see it
Network-level – only specific groups see it
Centre-specific – only selected centres sees it

Important: Content created via the Hub appears as read-only on member sites and can’t be edited or deleted from the individual sites. If changes are needed, they must be made from the Hub.

Roles: Hub Admins vs Hub Users

Hub Admins (recommended for now)

At the moment, we recommend adding head office staff as Hub Admins, as Hub Admin access provides the smoothest experience.

Hub Admins:

Automatically see all linked sites (including newly added sites).
Can perform Hub communication and sharing actions across the network.
Can link additional sites to the Hub (as long as they have admin login access to those sites) and manage networks.
Can manage hub users (invite, remove, change access).

Local site access: Hub Admins still need to be added as a teacher on each site if they need to enter/view that site’s local data.

Hub Users (limited functionality at present)

Hub Users exist for situations where you want to restrict access, however Hub User functionality is currently limited.

Hub Users:

View the Hub (based on the sites they’re assigned)
Add (only) new Policies and Resources for distribution (see below)

Summary of Hub Actions

Hub-created content can’t be edited or deleted from individual sites (Policies, Resources, and Message Board posts).

Teacher messages

Send messages to all teachers or to teachers at selected sites.

Reply visibility depends on the Hub’s Comment Settings:

Multi-Center Comments (on by default) – comments are shared with all centres. All comments also appear on the individual school sites, and show which teacher (and which school) the comment is from.
Single Center Comments – the Hub view shows all comments across centres, but when viewing the thread on an individual school site, staff will only see comments from that same school.
Comments Disabled – commenting is turned off for Hub teacher messages.

The “Viewed by” is currently only based on Hub-level views.

On the Centres overview, you’ll see a summary list of linked centres and quick actions (e.g. Message Teacher), which opens Teacher Messages with that centre pre-selected.

Message Board Posts

Send announcements to families at all sites or selected sites. Because of privacy complexity across sites, these posts are announce-only (no replies/comments). Message Board posts created via the Hub can’t be edited or deleted from the individual sites, and “Viewed by” is site-level (not Hub-level).

Policies (Libary)

Use Policies to distribute consistent guidance across your network.

This is a unique link shared by all sites. It can not overwrite anything already on a site.

Notes

No comments on shared policies.
One attachment per policy.
View tracking isn’t shown in the Hub for policies.

Resources (Library)

Use Resources to share documents/files across your network.

Resources created via the Hub can’t be edited or deleted from the individual sites.

Shared items won’t overwrite resources that already exist on a site.