How can the school improve parent-guardian communication? ...

[genesis]

Hi

 

I have been asked to join the SLT meeting to discuss how the school can better communicate with parent and carers.

On a IT point of perceptive could you let me know the things i need to be aware of or the things i need to raise in the meeting.

 

Thanks and any help much appreciated.

Edited September 10, 2024 by 6Foot2

[TechMonkey]

That's kind of a very broad topic without knowing the issues your org currently has communicating with parents and what systems you use.

 

Your only worry will be if the meeting is pretence for pushing a specific system that someone has already chosen.

 

There are options out there like My School Portal, Frog, FireFly, School Post and many more, that to varying degrees of success give a one stop shop for parents. They log communication (if you use their system for comms) so parents can check back on anything they missed, give links, hold reports and bills, be a payment gateway and can use SSO so parents don't have to remember many logins across differing systems.

 

Usual diligence is required, do they do what you want, is the company a pain once you sign on the line, do they have the features you want, does the school know how it is going to use them and who is in charge both overall and for each section.

[Tefters]

Security, ease of use, integration, to name a few.

 

Sounds like a system you yourself will have little to no dealings with outside of MIS integration (probably through Wonde) and Office365 SSO if you use Office365.

 

I can think of about 10 platforms off the top of my head but how good they are etc... not a clue as it's not something I personally use.

 

Let them choose one (which they probably have already) and just integrate it.

 

I love these sorts of meetings, I just sit there staring into space until I need to say "who's the integrating middle man, Wonde or GroupCall" and "do you want sso with your school logon".

Half the time the school / departments just buy a software and then setup logons manually and just ask me to do the sync, I usually sit and laugh for a few days as people non-stop forget passwords and eventually the academic person managing it gets annoyed and calls me to setup SSO [emoji23]

 

P.S. by software I mean online web portal, everything is Azure web based nowadays.

Edited September 10, 2024 by Tefters

[pete]

• What problem are they trying to solve?
  
• What communication types does SLT think they should improve? Is this "your kid's not at school, are they ill?", "hey, we have a French trip?", "remember to pick your GCSE options?", "Look at the cool thing your kid did?"
  
• Has the school sought feedback from parents on what works/doesn't work for the parents?
  
• Of the communication methods used, what does the school office think is most effective (rate of response/return)?
  

 

More generally:

 

• Don't spam parents, be succinct and sparing in your general (not pupil-specific) communications. Limit who can send messages to groups of parents beyond size X. If there's a PE trip, nature walk and Bulgarian nosewhistling on offer to the same year group the same week, send it in one message.
  
• Honour unsubscribe requests for things not directly relating to their child/child's education.
  
• Fix broken parental emails in your MIS. Including any early September "let's duplicate existing parents when importing Y7" problems
  
• Your headteacher (or whoever they delegate it to) will grumble about having to write things for it, but a termly school newsletter can bundle up a lot of comms if planned in advance with an eye to the school calendar. Send it out via website/email/ and link to it on social media.
  
• Work out how many deny lists (public or otherwise) your MIS' preferred SMS/email provider is on.
  
• DPIA, SSO, SMS pricing. Can they use the free text bundles from the government?
  
• And as noted above, if they can't use Wonde to populate the data into whatever third-party comms platform you're considering - knock it off the list. You do not want to be wondering if the school office updated a third party platform via CSV on the morning of a snow day.
  

 

Our schools use a mix of InTouch (bit pants, typically blocked by Yahoo and/or Hotmail for portions of the year), ePraise (works well at one of our schools), teachers2parents (primary, no real data other than I don't hear grumbles about it) and ParentMail (primary, generally well regarded by the school using it).

 

In short, to solve/recommend the IT parts of this problem/solution, you need data from SLT and your current brief is vague.

Edited September 10, 2024 by pete

[genesis]

We use ParentMail and we have new staff taken over and not sure if they know the ParentMail and if it is being used effectively?

[pete]

So initially an audit of current provision (ParentMail) to see if you're making the most of what it can offer?

[dhicks]

On a IT point of perceptive could you let me know the things i need to be aware of or the things i need to raise in the meeting.

 

As previous comments have said, try and make sure you don't spam / overwhelm the parents. You might want to separate out actually-important notices from marketing stuff, so if a parent wants to unsubscribe from your marketing emails (or just marks them as spam) they can do that separately from unsubscribing / blocking stuff from ParentMail or similar. We find Mailchimp works nicely for handling a marketing email list, and you can have that sync with data from your MIS easily enough.

[jthompson]

It can be really hard to get a feel for how much comms parents are getting from a school. It's going to vary depending on how many children they have at the school, which year groups they're in, what subjects/clubs they're involved in, what their attendance/behaviour is like, etc.

 

If you're going to allow staff more generally to bulk message parents, try to get SLT to lay down some rules in pursuit of a consistency in style, formatting, frequency, etc.

 

If you can, monitor email delivery failures, as that can be a good way to pro-actively iron out wonky parental contact details.

 

This year, I'm actually on the receiving end of this as I'm now a parent of a school-going 5-year old. Their school uses both WisePay and ParentPay, confusingly, sends out direct emails and also uses ClassDojo. ClassDojo is my new pet hate: very low signal to noise ratio from a parent perspective, doesn't send in-app messages as emails (so we can't search across all the messaging in one place) and is always on the up-sell (what parent is going to want to pay a monthly sub for some premium features?).

[msi_school]

As previous comments have said, try and make sure you don't spam / overwhelm the parents. You might want to separate out actually-important notices from marketing stuff, so if a parent wants to unsubscribe from your marketing emails (or just marks them as spam) they can do that separately from unsubscribing / blocking stuff from ParentMail or similar. We find Mailchimp works nicely for handling a marketing email list, and you can have that sync with data from your MIS easily enough.

 

Keep good records of parents requests to be removed from the mailing list, as they will invariably complain about missed messages once they are off the list.

[Fazza]

We use Edulink to communicate with parents, everything from newsletteres to what homework their child has! All in one app to make it easy for them.