Addressing parent frustration on school communications

[ceilfors]

Hi all,

 

I am new here and not related to educational IT. My background is in building software products as a software engineer. Ever since my daughter started school, I have gained my first experience of educational software such as Parentmail and others.

 

As a parent, I have been frustrated by the experience I have had, and I have been interviewing many other parents and carers (I have been doing this for six months now). Most parents and carers seem to be experiencing the same problems as me. Consequently, I have started building a solution for them to use, and they really love it because I have built it with a parent-first approach in mind. I currently have 200 parents on-boarded all with positive feedback.

 

During my research, I also spoke to our PTA committees and learnt that school administrators are equally frustrated by parents who email them back and forth, which adds to their workload, even when the information has already been sent to the parents via email. Schools are now sending manual reminders for events and requirements, which further adds to their workload.

 

I am currently trying to collect more evidence before pitching the school to use it. However, given that I have not built any software for schools before, I don't really know what requirements schools normally have. Unfortunately, I don't have access to school admins or IT yet.

 

Does anyone share a similar problem from the school perspective? If so, I would be keen to chat and understand what schools typically need. I would be grateful for the opportunity to connect and discuss, and potentially trial it in your school.

 

P.S. Initially I thought of open-sourcing this, but after reading this thread (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/174627-opensource-educational-software-4.html), I'm still reevaluating if I want to open source this. Knowing the state of the budgets for the school, my objective is to make this as affordable as possible, or even free for the school to use (I can't find any info on how parentmail price their service). I've looked at edulinkone demo as well, tested it to few parents, all of them are overwhelmed by it (including me).

 

Regards,

 

Wisen

[elsiegee40]

First thought is Data Protection and Safeguarding. No product will get a foothold in any school unless it complies fully with GDPR and also the “Keeping Children Safe in Education” guidance (which changes pretty much annually)

 

Any mailing product needs to be able to be integrated with whatever Management Information System the school uses. SIMS used to be the market leader, but Bromcom, Arbor, etc are growing market share. Increasingly, the MIS database is no longer stored on local servers in the school. Cloud MIS is taking hold.

 

Doing a data download is all very well, but it means that the data is always out of date. The danger of that is that communication could go to the wrong person or not go at all. Going to the wrong person is potentially both a GDPR breach and a Safeguarding risk.

 

It really isn’t as simple as a list of kids who have adults who need to receive communication

Edited March 23, 2023 by elsiegee40

[DavR]

+1 for the MIS link. If you want to get school techs and admin onside, then you will want your product to populate contact details for the child directly from the MIS, with the minimum of faff for the school admin staff. As well as the obvious name and contact details, you'll be wanting to look at exporting whether the contact has parental responsibility for the child, and their priority. Some mailouts, schools want to go to Parent 1 only, some to all with parental responsibility.

 

If you don't want to look at working with the APIs of all the different MIS systems, using a data transfer mechanism like Wonde might be an idea.

 

To share some of our experience, the problem hasn't necessarily been the emailing tool we use, that's been OK. For us the barrier we face is that parents aren't responding well to the volume of email we send - we get complaints that it's too much, and know that some people just plain do not read bulk email any more. Email fatigue is a very real thing these days. We're considering changing the medium we use to contact parents to an app such as Parent Hub or Class Dojo, a single place specifically for school comms.

[ceilfors]

Thank you very much for your response. It is very helpful! I am curious to know if schools typically have a standard vendor risk assessment or process to evaluate a vendor. I am also interested in learning more about the security considerations that schools have.

 

It is useful to know that there are more MIS options available beyond SIMS. Apart from parents' phone numbers or email addresses, which the communication system will pull, what information do schools expect to see in the MIS that the communication system needs to push to MIS?

 

Regarding integration, is there a standard protocol for this (like GP2GP in the healthcare industry), or is this generally something that the vendor will have to support for each MIS?

[ceilfors]

Thanks so much for your input, Dave, I really appreciate it! At the moment, the app is designed to focus purely on parents and class information, so there's no need for me to have access to children's details.

 

I will definitely look into Wonde, thanks for the pointer!

 

Regarding the bulk email issue, that's exactly what I'm addressing in my solution. I've found that people tend to miss important information when it's sent via email, so I'm using WhatsApp instead, which people seem to be more responsive to. Additionally, I'm structuring information differently.

 

If you don't mind, I'd love to get your feedback on what I've developed so far. Would it be okay for me to PM you? I want to validate my idea before I spend too much time on this! Thanks again for your help!

Edited March 23, 2023 by ceilfors

[jthompson]

Definitely take a look at building your app to make use of Wonde - https://www.wonde.com/app/developers/

I think Wonde themselves will even take care of onboarding the customer school on your behalf, to get their MIS data flowing in.

That would provide you with a single API to build your app around, regardless of the MIS your customer schools are using. Even if a school switched MIS, their data would be available via Wonde in exactly the same way.

Edited March 23, 2023 by jthompson

[DavR]

Thank you very much for your response. It is very helpful! I am curious to know if schools typically have a standard vendor risk assessment or process to evaluate a vendor. I am also interested in learning more about the security considerations that schools have.

 

I can't speak for other schools, but our process for adopting a new technology is all based around a Data Protection Impact Assessment of the new technology. This should be completed before any data is shared. Each school will do their own, but they will all be based around what data is shared, where it is stored and what security protections the vendor has in place. All schools should be doing a DPIA before any new data processing activity.

 

It is useful to know that there are more MIS options available beyond SIMS. Apart from parents' phone numbers or email addresses, which the communication system will pull, what information do schools expect to see in the MIS that the communication system needs to push to MIS?

 

From my experience, most comms tools are pull only, they don't write anything back to the MIS. Certainly with some MIS (eg RM Integris), write back isn't actually possible.

[psydii]

Don't forget the old adage GIGO. It won't matter how slick the system is if it has the wrong data.

[DavR]

Regarding the bulk email issue, that's exactly what I'm addressing in my solution. I've found that people tend to miss important information when it's sent via email, so I'm using WhatsApp instead, which people seem to be more responsive to. Additionally, I'm structuring information differently.

 

If you don't mind, I'd love to get your feedback on what I've developed so far. Would it be okay for me to PM you? I want to validate my idea before I spend too much time on this! Thanks again for your help!

 

Yeah, we've got WhatsApp groups that are semi-official for parents of each class. It's not something we're looking at taking further, though. We can see WhatsApp fatigue becoming a thing in the next few years, and we have had incidents where these groups, being somewhat out of our control, have backfired.

 

I'm sure you've looked around at the competition, but there are a number of different home-school comms apps out there already. I wouldn't say there was one particular market leader, though, from schools we've spoken to.

 

I'm open to PMs, time permitting, as this is something that's been discussed here fairly recently.

[jthompson]

One issue surrounding parents comms that I notice at our school is that it's difficult for us as an organisation to get a sense of what our comms look like on the whole, and how effectively we're using it. That is, how many messages are parents typically receiving? How regular do they feel to the recepient? Are they consistently presented (style, length, tone, etc.)? Does the school come across as a single, cohesive organisation, or does it feel like departments are operating in isolation (e.g. "English Newsletter" every month, but nothing equivalent from elsewhere)?

 

I imagine most schools are like us in that they don't have a public relations office to strategise and coordinate all of that. We use EduLink, and consider it to be a solid product, but where parent messaging is concerned it's just a free-for-all where all of the staff have the ability to bulk email parents.

 

I think there's a disjoint between what the school might think it's sending out and how well those comms come across to parents. If there was some way for schools to have some top-down reporting of types and volumes of messages (e.g. detention notification emails averaging X amount per day, volume of promotional messages over the last term broken down by subject area, etc.) that would go a long way to optimising things for all concerned.

 

It's also important to consider email delivery failures and to flag where there might be an issue with the contact details in the MIS. We diligently log non-delivery reports and follow up with parents to get contact details corrected, or to advise them that we've been unable to deliver messages because their inbox is full, etc.

[TechMonkey]

I'd be interested in what you see as the main frustrations with communication from your Daughter's school?

 

I think part of the problem is that a lot of School communication is seen as needing to be formal and long form. That will not translate to WhatsApp and you will just get the same problem of messages being ignored as they are hard to read. Also you will have the issue of excluding the parents that refuse to use WhatsApp for a variety of reasons. One of the issues you point out is parents going back to the school to ask for information that has already been sent. This isn't on the school, this is parents either not being organised or being lazy. How will this help?

 

What really needs to happen is schools need to get better at communicating. Stop making everything a formal word letter that needs to be attached, stop waffling for multiple paragraphs before getting to the meat of the comms. Plan communications so that parents aren't bombarded on one day with information that could have waited.

 

Sorry, not wanting to be a downer, it is great you are trying to do something. But there is a fundemental shift that needs to happen in a lot of schools around communication and there has already been a shift in a lot of parents expectations.

[ceilfors]

I'd be interested in what you see as the main frustrations with communication from your Daughter's school?

 

I think part of the problem is that a lot of School communication is seen as needing to be formal and long form. That will not translate to WhatsApp and you will just get the same problem of messages being ignored as they are hard to read. Also you will have the issue of excluding the parents that refuse to use WhatsApp for a variety of reasons. One of the issues you point out is parents going back to the school to ask for information that has already been sent. This isn't on the school, this is parents either not being organised or being lazy. How will this help?

 

What really needs to happen is schools need to get better at communicating. Stop making everything a formal word letter that needs to be attached, stop waffling for multiple paragraphs before getting to the meat of the comms. Plan communications so that parents aren't bombarded on one day with information that could have waited.

 

Sorry, not wanting to be a downer, it is great you are trying to do something. But there is a fundemental shift that needs to happen in a lot of schools around communication and there has already been a shift in a lot of parents expectations.

 

You're right on point about the need for school communications to be formal and lengthy. This has been one of our main frustrations. The frustration comes in many facets, but adding to yours, I would say the top ones are timeliness (some tasks were sent five weeks ago), accuracy (sometimes people write Thurs 24 Mar instead of Fri 24 Mar), relevance (receiving information that's not for me), quantity (as you mentioned, some days there is a spike in messages), among others.

 

Regarding laziness, believe it or not, some people are still struggling to receive emails from Parentmail. At first, I thought that was nonsense, and that the school should have reached out to Parentmail support. But after searching through the edugeek forum, I discovered the level of support people receive. Apart from technical issues, some information is buried in an email that was sent four months ago. Parents/carers could have organized the information, but I've spoken to parents who are really struggling with time (two job shifts, etc.). The app I'm building essentially organizes this information for them.

 

As for how this is being translated to WhatsApp, it's a bit hard to describe, but essentially, I'm trying to change the model and structure of school communication. I do support other communication channels such as email!

 

I agree that schools need to get better at communicating, and I think it comes in two folds: skills and technologies. I'm hoping that a tech solution can help reduce the learning curve.

 

I actually appreciate the criticism. I need feedback to know if this is something that's worth spending my time on, so thank you!

[ceilfors]

One issue surrounding parents comms that I notice at our school is that it's difficult for us as an organisation to get a sense of what our comms look like on the whole, and how effectively we're using it. That is, how many messages are parents typically receiving? How regular do they feel to the recepient? Are they consistently presented (style, length, tone, etc.)? Does the school come across as a single, cohesive organisation, or does it feel like departments are operating in isolation (e.g. "English Newsletter" every month, but nothing equivalent from elsewhere)?

 

I imagine most schools are like us in that they don't have a public relations office to strategise and coordinate all of that. We use EduLink, and consider it to be a solid product, but where parent messaging is concerned it's just a free-for-all where all of the staff have the ability to bulk email parents.

 

I think there's a disjoint between what the school might think it's sending out and how well those comms come across to parents. If there was some way for schools to have some top-down reporting of types and volumes of messages (e.g. detention notification emails averaging X amount per day, volume of promotional messages over the last term broken down by subject area, etc.) that would go a long way to optimising things for all concerned.

 

It's also important to consider email delivery failures and to flag where there might be an issue with the contact details in the MIS. We diligently log non-delivery reports and follow up with parents to get contact details corrected, or to advise them that we've been unable to deliver messages because their inbox is full, etc.

Great shout on email bounce and complaints, thank you. It's interesting to hear that EduLink is having this free-for-all without structure.

 

That's a good idea on consistency. One of our PTA members is quite frustrated that she's currently proposing an email template for the school to use. It feels like the emails come from different people with different styles - some send a Word doc, some send a PDF, and some put the info in the email body.

 

I'll make sure to include the idea of reporting and planning. I agree that it'll be useful for the school to be able to see how many messages they're adding within that week, for example.

[fiza]

I imagine most schools are like us in that they don't have a public relations office to strategise and coordinate all of that. We use EduLink, and consider it to be a solid product, but where parent messaging is concerned it's just a free-for-all where all of the staff have the ability to bulk email parents..

 

Edulink does have settings that limit who can bulk email parents under the communicator tab

[Rob_D]

Am I right in thinking this is a bulk communications app like parentmail or schoolcomms?

Apart from parents' phone numbers or email addresses, which the communication system will pull, what information do schools expect to see in the MIS that the communication system needs to push to MIS?

To pull from the MIS into the coms app, the main things would be the parental responsibility, Priority 1,2,etc flags and access related court orders.

To use BBC's Happy Valley as an example. Grandmother and aunt have parental responsibility, with Granny as P1 Aunt as P2, Aunt's partner is a registered contact without parental responsibility (maybe P3 or P4), and Father is forbidden contact. And different schools will have different requirements as to who can and can't get messages relating to the child.

 

As to writeback into the MIS: An option to have communications be added to the students "communications log" in the MIS would be cool, but it would have to be able to be set for just specific messages (so the log doesn't fill up with newsletters and reminders).

 

The other thing that comes to mind that I haven't seen mentioned is making sure whatever platform you're using to send the messages can handle the volume of coms (especially larger) schools can send out and do it without getting them flagged/blocked as spam. For example we're a 1500 student school and we average about 12,000 emails a week through our coms platform, with peaks of over 20,000. Multiply that by half a dozen schools and that's a not-insignificant amount of traffic.

 

We/our coms company seem to spend a lot of time dealing with parents who aren't getting emails. So I'd be looking for rock solid delivery (on top all the DP/GDPR stuff others have mentioned).

[dhicks]

To pull from the MIS into the coms app, the main things would be the parental responsibility, Priority 1,2,etc flags and access related court orders.

 

A communications application wouldn't neccesarily need the exact details as held in the MIS, it would want a list of children, their group memberships (yeargroup, classes, after-school clubs, maths sets, etc) and a set of contacts for each child with appropriate priority levels given ("This is a P1 contact, they should receive all comms", "This is a P5 contact, they should just get newsletters", etc). Ideally, something like Wonde would be able to provide that data, taking the data from the MIS and removing anything un-needed before handing it over to the application. You probably shouldn't even need parent names or addresses, just their email address (or WhatsApp address / phone number, if that's what you're using).

 

As to writeback into the MIS: An option to have communications be added to the students "communications log" in the MIS would be cool, but it would have to be able to be set for just specific messages (so the log doesn't fill up with newsletters and reminders).

 

I'd guess there wouldn't be a need to write back to the MIS, just read - communications logs could be kept in the application itself, it should simplify what access the application needs to the MIS (giving something write access is different from read-only access).

 

We/our coms company seem to spend a lot of time dealing with parents who aren't getting emails.

 

I think this is why the original poster is thinking of using WhatsApp, although I think there would need to be fallback to email / SMS.

 

The original post mentioned looking at this as an open source application. As Rob_D has pointed out, emails can be difficult to get delivered, so a paid-for email solution is probably going to be a requirement, and I understand there's a cost to using the WhatsApp API. The software itself might well be open source (and I think that's a good way of running a company), but there would have to be a paid-for service of some kind that could take care of running the software for a school, this isn't the kind of thing most schools are going ot be able to handle themselves.

 

For anyone logging in to your system - teachers to send a communication, admins to see what's been sent or set user permissions - please handle Google / Microsoft / Apple logins. Pretty much most schools will be using one of those already for logins, and quite possibly have 2FA set up for teacher / admin accounts, teachers and other staff don't want another separate set of login details to remember. What would sell this kind of system to school network administrators would be if it could sync teacher account names from the MIS as well (which should be easy enough if you're already getting pupil details), then staff can just log in and automatically be recognised as teachers or admins, no need for the IT department to have to get involved and start re-creating the school's admin structure in yet another application.

[Rob_D]

A communications application wouldn't neccesarily need the exact details as held in the MIS, it would want a list of children, their group memberships (yeargroup, classes, after-school clubs, maths sets, etc) and a set of contacts for each child with appropriate priority levels given ("This is a P1 contact, they should receive all comms", "This is a P5 contact, they should just get newsletters", etc). Ideally, something like Wonde would be able to provide that data, taking the data from the MIS and removing anything un-needed before handing it over to the application. You probably shouldn't even need parent names or addresses, just their email address (or WhatsApp address / phone number, if that's what you're using).

All the coms app's I've used have had the select which parents get what done within the app so I assumed they'd have to read that data from the MIS, but if Wonde could do that for you it would be way neater and safer (other extractors are available).

I'd argue you might want parent names/titles and maybe even student names so that coms can be addressed. Like "Hello [ParentName], Please be aware [studentName] has detention today."

[dhicks]

I'd argue you might want parent names/titles and maybe even student names so that coms can be addressed. Like "Hello [ParentName], Please be aware [studentName] has detention today."

 

Yes, good point.

 

(other extractors are available)

 

Another good point. SalamanderSoft might be the people to talk to about this, their MIS connection software runs locally on a school's own servers, so no data needs to go off anywhere else. A service built on top of theirs might better meet privacy requirements.

[steveg]

I'm not sure how much demand there would be now for a new communication app? When we moved from SIMS to a cloud MIS we ditched all other comms apps, that was one of the draws of a new cloud based MIS.

 

Edulink does well at the moment because it does a lot of things very well that SIMS doesn't do, or does poorly. It would be harder to justify buying Edulink if you have an MIS capable of doing most of the things it does already.

 

Even if the app was slightly better than what we used now and free, there is still a cost of having another app - training, maintaining, data etc that would most likely mean it wouldn't be considered.

[DavR]

That's a good idea on consistency. One of our PTA members is quite frustrated that she's currently proposing an email template for the school to use. It feels like the emails come from different people with different styles - some send a Word doc, some send a PDF, and some put the info in the email body.

 

We've had a lot of complaints over the years about sending comms as email attachments, as a lot of people will be reading this on their phones. We try to put the message in the body of the email, with PDF attachments only when it's unavoidable. Word docs are a definite no-no.

 

We've had conversations about having a standardised style in email, including structured subject lines, etc. Tbh I don't think that's the biggest problem with school comms, and I don't think enforcing style rules is going to happen unless you've got someone senior who really cares about making that the case.

Edited March 24, 2023 by DavR

[nicholab]

Head teacher controlling communication can’t seem to right in bullet points key information. They have to put lots of waffle in any letter.

 

Also parents don’t seem to understand that they can’t put the same e-mail and phone number for both parents. Also the admin team don’t understand this either.

 

Are school still sends letter even though they have Primary 365. I hoping that second school will be better but the centralised IT system in NI schools is run by Capita. So most schools don’t even use cloud MIS and are stuck with useless SIMS.

[jthompson]

Edulink does have settings that limit who can bulk email parents under the communicator tab

 

Yes. The free-for-all I described is a choice that we have made. Mainly becausethere is no public relations office and not desire to lump an existing member of staff with that role.

[ceilfors]

Thanks all for your responses and feedback, this community is awesome. Hopefully I haven't missed anything, but I have summarised all of the requirements listed in this thread so far here: https://ceilfors.notion.site/Requirements-for-a-school-communication-app-ab32da49fbca4ad794ae7e85e1cf5f9d.

 

We've had a lot of complaints over the years about sending comms as email attachments, as a lot of people will be reading this on their phones. We try to put the message in the body of the email, with PDF attachments only when it's unavoidable. Word docs are a definite no-no.

 

PDF and mobile is differently one of the theme I've been getting in my research too.

Also parents don’t seem to understand that they can’t put the same e-mail and phone number for both parents. Also the admin team don’t understand this either.

What are the risks or concerns of parents sharing the same e-mail? (I can see issues with phone numbers for emergencies).

[pete]

What are the risks or concerns of parents sharing the same e-mail? (I can see issues with phone numbers for emergencies).

 

I mean:

 

• Only one parent can use a given email address to sign up for a service.
  
• Mr Bloggs and Mrs Bloggs usually need to use unique accounts (no shared logins used to access pupil data, regardless of who's doing it), so even if email isn't used for signup it becomes a problem for password resets.
  
• Divorce / separation / restraining order. We don't know who has access to [email protected]
  

Edited March 27, 2023 by pete

[Rob_D]

What are the risks or concerns of parents sharing the same e-mail? (I can see issues with phone numbers for emergencies).

 

Not so much a risk, but getting 2 copies of each message would be an annoyance.