How to sign a permission slip on your phone

It’s 9pm, the trip is Friday, and the slip has been at the bottom of a backpack since Tuesday. You don’t own a printer, or you do and it’s out of cyan. This is the most repeated signing moment in family life, so it’s worth solving once.

The right answer depends on how the slip reached you. Start here.

First, check what the school actually wants back

Before any of this: schools set their own rules, and some still want the physical slip with a pen signature in the teacher’s tray. Two minutes of checking beats redoing it.

The email or portal says “reply with the signed form” → a signed PDF is what they want. Read on.
The slip came home as paper with no instructions → a quick message to the teacher (“can I email this back signed?”) almost always gets a yes these days, and saves you a trip.
It’s a Google Form or portal checkbox with a “type your full name” field → there’s nothing to sign. Typing your name is the consent they asked for. Close the tab and go to bed.

A signature on a school consent form is an agreement between you and the school, and the school decides what format it accepts — that’s the whole test here.

If the slip arrived as a PDF (email or school portal)

This is the easy case, and you don’t need to install anything.

The free route — iOS Markup:

Open the email and tap the PDF attachment.
Tap the pencil (Markup) icon.
Tap + → Signature, draw one with your finger, and drag it onto the line.
Add the date with + → Text if the form asks for one.
Tap Done and reply with the signed copy attached.

That’s genuinely enough for a one-off. Where it starts to grate is that finger-drawn signature — it takes a few goes to get one you’d put your name to, and Markup doesn’t remember it well between documents. The full walkthrough, including Gmail and Outlook (which make you detour through Files), is in our guide on signing a PDF from an email on iPhone.

If the slip is a piece of paper

You don’t need a scanner. Your phone is one.

Open Notes, tap the camera icon → Scan Documents, and hold the phone over the slip. iOS flattens the page and crops the edges — the result looks far more like a scan than a photo does.
Share that scan as a PDF.
Sign it using Markup, or with an app (below), then email it back.

Two things that make the difference between “clearly a scan” and “clearly a photo of a table”: lay the slip on a plain surface with even light (no shadow from your own head), and check the crop before you save. We go deeper on this in how to sign a scanned document on iPhone.

The repeat-signer route

Permission slips are not a one-time problem. Field trips, swimming, photo consent, the school disco, the medical form at the start of every year — over a school career it’s dozens of them, and each one is the same six fields.

That’s the case for creating your signature once, properly, and reusing it. In Signed you draw it (with your finger or a stylus), type your name in a real handwriting style, or let AI generate one from your name. Then every slip after that is: import the PDF or photo → tap your saved signature → tap the date, which fills in today automatically → export → send.

The first one takes two minutes. Every one after that takes about twenty seconds.

There’s also a reason to think about privacy on this particular document type. A permission slip carries your child’s full name, their school, a date and time they’ll be away from it, and often a medical note or an emergency contact number. That is not information to hand to a free “upload your PDF and we’ll sign it” website. Signed is local-first — the document never leaves your phone, because there’s no server for it to go to.

Quick answers to the panicked-at-9pm questions

Can I just type my name instead of signing? If the form has a typed-name field, yes — that’s what it’s for. If it has a signature line, put a signature on the line.
Can I sign for my partner? No. Sign your own name; if the form needs both parents, send it on to them.
Does it have to be blue or black ink? No rule, but dark ink reads as a signature and anything else reads as a doodle.
The school wants the original back. Then sign the paper. Some schools also accept an emailed copy now and the paper on Monday — worth asking if you’re up against the deadline.
I don’t have a printer at all. You never needed one — see signing a document without a printer or scanner.