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Help  ·  Troubleshoot

Troubleshooting.

The handful of things that occasionally go wrong, and how to fix each one in a minute.

The widget isn’t appearing on your site

Open your portal and check the Install page. It shows when, and on which domain, your widget last loaded.

  1. Open your site in a fresh browser tab and hard-refresh (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+R).
  2. Right-click → View page source. Search for schoolassistant.co.uk/widget.js. If it’s not in the rendered HTML, the snippet isn’t actually installed - revisit the install guide for your platform.
  3. If the snippet is there but no icon appears, email us the page URL - we can see from our side whether the widget is reaching us.

The widget loads but won’t open

Open your browser’s developer console (F12 → Console tab) and reload. If you see a JavaScript error mentioning widget.js, send us the message and the URL of the page you’re testing on.

Common causes:

  • An aggressive cookie banner intercepting the click. Allow non-essential scripts, or move the banner’s overlay so it doesn’t cover the bottom-right corner.
  • A third-party tracking blocker on your test browser. Try in an incognito window.
  • A conflicting chat widget (Tawk, Intercom, etc.) already mounted on the page.

A page on your website wasn’t picked up by the scrape

The most common causes: the page isn’t in your sitemap, it blocks crawlers, or its PDFs were deferred to keep within your scan budget (deferred PDFs are listed on the Knowledge page).

If a page should be included but the scraper missed it, add it to Pinned URLs. Pinned URLs are fetched every refresh regardless of crawl depth, so use this for anything important that lives off the main navigation - admissions forms, policy PDFs hosted on a subdomain, term-date pages on a separate calendar app.

A document was uploaded but isn’t appearing in answers

Three things to check, in order:

  1. Indexing status. Under Knowledge → Documents each upload shows pending, processing or active. Most documents finish in under a minute; very large PDFs can take up to ten.
  2. Is it an image-only PDF? Some scanned policies are PDFs with no text layer - just images. Our OCR picks these up but the result is noisier. Re-export from Word as a text PDF if you can.
  3. Was it held for review? Documents that look like they contain pupil personal data are held for your review instead of being indexed - look for a flagged row on the Knowledge page, then remove it or confirm it should be included.

“We’ve paused your scans this month”

Each school has a monthly budget for website ingestion. Daily refreshes are tiny; the budget mostly exists so a runaway crawl can’t cost you money. If you hit the cap, the widget keeps answering from what’s already indexed and we’re alerted automatically - where it’s a one-off (a site redesign, say) we’ll raise the cap for you. Your monthly budget resets on the 1st.

Embed conflicts with the rest of your site

If your school site uses a strict Content Security Policy, you may need to allow our domain. Add to your CSP:

script-src 'self' https://schoolassistant.co.uk;
connect-src 'self' https://schoolassistant.co.uk;
frame-src https://schoolassistant.co.uk;

If your site builder renders pages inside an iframe (some legacy CMSs), the embed needs to go in the parent template rather than a page editor. Email us with your site URL and we’ll tell you which file to edit.

A citation links to the wrong page

If a source pill on an answer takes a parent somewhere unhelpful, remove the stale document on the Knowledge page, then run “Check for updates” on the From Website tab - the re-scan picks up the new canonical URL.

If the wrong URL keeps coming back, pin the correct URL and remove the old source.

Term dates / calendar feed isn’t updating

School-website CMSs vary a lot. Roughly a third expose a public ICS feed for term dates and events; the rest don’t. If your CMS doesn’t expose ICS, you have two options:

  • Paste term dates into a single PDF or document and upload it - the assistant answers term-date questions from that.
  • If you use Google Calendar or Outlook for your school events, paste the public ICS URL into Sources → Calendar feeds.

Still stuck?

Email info@schoolassistant.co.uk with a link to the page or document in question. We’ll usually reply within a working day; faster during term time.

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