Schools Buddy

[mikeyw]

Hi,

 

We are currently looking at Schools Buddy as a way to manage extra curricular activities.

 

Has anyone used Schools Buddy or have any other recommendations on a solution on managing extra curricular activities?

 

Thanks in advance,

[TechMonkey]

We have also been looking, so as a warning we haven't used any of these in anger, just seen demos or had hands on. We looked at SchoolsBuddy, CHQ and SOCS.

 

CHQ looks to be a brilliant system but we feel has a massive flaw in that children in a family are kept separate so there is no overview for a parent to see where they are meant to be at what time. They have to flick between a couple of screens. That isn't a deal breaker as the rest of the system does look fantastic and could outweigh that. The workflow and how the modules integrated and worked was really good.

 

SOCS is a little basic and its flaw is that parents aren't users, the pupils are and if you want parents to look or be involved you are expected to give the parents the pupils account details. This means it also suffers from a more severe version of the flaw above, a parent can't see all their children on one screen.

 

SchoolsBuddy seems really well thought out. The only minor issue we found was it was a bit less all encompassing than CHQ. So for example, in CHQ when a transport method is used for a fixture, trip or club an outward and return register is generated so you always know who is on the bus. So worse case scenario we know who was involved and who to contact. I think in SchoolsBuddy this was a manual process or that the way to do it was a bit of a bodge. But we really did love their integrated calendar and the way the processes ran.

[Meldrew]

I've been asked to look at Absolute Education. Not sure if it's quite the same thing as schools buddy, however.