Communications to Parents

[gpjt]

Just looking into how other schools relay their communications. What school apps etc do you use to get information out to Parents?

 

I've never found a school solution that has everything and trying to minimise parents need to go to 3 places to see a message, make a club booking, make a payment etc. We're tied into a couple of services at the moment and now our head want's us to buy a school app for a primary school and i'd be interested in what others are doing.

 

TIA

[jthompson]

EduLink One is worth looking at. https://www.edulinkone.com/#!/demo

 

As the name suggests, it tries to unify all those different aspects of school/parent comms in one app (parents' evenings, messaging, timetables, reports, homework, etc.). It does a good job of it. It's very modular and you can disable any modules that you're not currently wanting to use.

 

In terms of messaging, it supports SMS, email and in-app messaging (any email messages sent to parents will be available to them as in-app messages. That's a good thing because other people can be crap about knowing whether their email account is full, etc. but they can always get those messages in the app). You need to come armed with details of an SMS provider (such as ClickSend or Gov.uk Notify) and an email relay to use. Edulink themselves don't send out the messages, but rather integrate with the service provider details that you plumb in.