Parents Evening booking/scheduling solutions

[danwolvesfan]

I'm looking at trying to streamline our process of scheduling parents evening. Currently we are receiving requests from parents then creating a schedule to distribute that can accomodate everyone and give as optimal evening as possible. Needless to say, although it has its benefits, there is a lot of time that has to be invested in a single evening and in a growing school (1000+ students in our Upper school) this isn't going to improve.

 

I know a number of schools have been using online solutions allowing parents to directly book appointments themselves. It would be great to know what solutions schools have been using and could recommend (including feedback from parents and staff) but also how any pit-falls have been addressed. My main concerns would be the difficulties parents have to book appointments if they are one of the last to do so and also where teachers only have a few appointments how to prevent them from being spread out across the duration of the event.