What Is the Family Hub?
The Family Hub is a separate app from the Octavia teacher app. It's where parents and students log in to see what's happening with their lessons, respond to communications, view invoices, and watch performance recordings
Two Separate Apps
Octavia has two distinct apps with different login experiences:
- The teacher app — where you manage students, lessons, billing, and everything else
- The Family Hub — where parents and students access their own information
Families access the Hub at a separate URL and log in with their own account. A parent logging into the Hub cannot access your teacher view, and vice versa — access is strictly separated by role.
Parents and Students: Two Distinct Experiences
The Hub serves both parents and students, but they have different experiences once they're in.
Parents see a feed of updates for all their linked students, can respond to news items, view invoices and performances, and manage availability. Everything is organised around the students they're linked to.
Students have their own login and their own dashboard, with features designed for the student's perspective. In addition to seeing their lessons, news items, and performances, students can log their practice sessions directly in the Hub, earn achievement badges, and participate in the school's practice leaderboard. See The Student Hub for the full detail on what students can do.
The Hub Feed
The hub feed is the main entry point for families. It surfaces items that need attention or are worth knowing about, in the order they occurred. Items that require action — a response to a news item, a recording to upload, an invoice to pay — remain active in the feed until the action is taken.
The feed has two views:
Dashboard feed — the main view, showing recent and urgent items. Informational items (ones that don't need a response or action) can be dismissed from this view once you've read them. Dismissed items are hidden from the dashboard feed but remain accessible in the full history.
All Updates — a complete, chronological record of everything. This view includes dismissed items and serves as a permanent reference for anything that has come through.
Items show a "Due by" marker when there's a deadline — for example, a news item with a response date set, or a recording upload request with an expiry.
Read and Unread
Items in the feed are tracked as read or unread per family member. Clicking an item marks it as read. Read state is per-person — a parent marking something as read doesn't affect the student's read state.
What the Hub Is For
Depending on how you set it up, the Hub lets families:
- See their hub feed — a chronological stream of updates, action-required items, and notifications
- View lessons and upcoming schedule — including a full calendar view
- Respond to news items — RSVP, consent, dietary requirements, or acknowledgements
- View invoices and pay online — if billing access is enabled
- Update lesson availability — when you've sent a request asking them to confirm available times
- Watch performance recordings — for online performances you've shared
- Log practice sessions — students can start and stop a practice timer and build a practice diary (student login required)
- Earn achievement badges — students earn badges from their practice activity (student login required)
- View the practice leaderboard — if you've enabled it and the student has opted in (student login required)
Not everything is visible to all families. You decide on a per-student basis whether billing is accessible in the Hub, and you control whether a parent's access is active or revoked at any time.
School-Scoped Access
A parent or student can be linked to more than one music studio that uses Octavia. When they log in, they see a list of schools they're connected to and choose which one to enter. Their view inside the Hub is scoped entirely to that school — they see only the students, lessons, invoices, and communications that belong to your school.
Previewing the Hub from the Teacher App
You can see what a parent or student would see in their Hub feed without logging in as them. On the student detail page in the teacher app, the Family Hub tab shows a read-only preview of the hub feed for either the parent or the student view. You can toggle between the two. The preview uses the same grouping and rules as the real Hub but doesn't affect anything — clicking items in the preview does not mark them as read or dismissed for the real family.