Home-School Communication

[mridgway]

Hello,

 

Our headteacher would like to introduce an electronic method of communicating between home and school. This will be for two way communication messages (text only) between class staff and the child's parents. Messages are likely to be individual and not necessarily to whole class or whole school. It is basically to replace individual physical diaries that each child has that class staff and parents write messages in. The head has mentioned ClassDojo as she is aware of another school that uses it, and it is free, but I want to see what else is around to see if this is really the best solution for us.

 

My questions are:

 

• Does anyone use ClassDojo, and if so, what do you think of it? I am also interested in the setup/administration and security side of things here.
• Does anyone use any alternative products for this that they would recommend?
• I am aware that you can get parental engagement tools from MIS Providers and Website Providers, and we are likely to be reviewing these in the near future. Does anyone use anything that comes as part of these that will do what we want it to do?

 

Many Thanks

 

Regards
Mark Ridgway
The Orchard School

[Norphy]

I've not used ClassDojo professionally but speaking as a parent, it works well. We use it to communicate with the school and that works effectively. It's nice to see what they're up to inside of school and lessons without having to rely on public social networking platforms.

Edited December 12, 2025 by Norphy

[TheHyperTechie]

Same as @Norphy we do use it here, but not for communication between staff and parents - only for the points system. For external communications we use our MIS (Bromcom). 

[Babynoush]

We have introduced a school whatsapp channel  - its working well and of course is FREE. You can restrict rights from parents so they cannot respond.

In terms of other apps we just use school ping but its expensive. 

[jthompson]

Used ClassDojo as a parent. It can be a bit of a pain in that it pesters parent users to upgrade to premium, and you can't opt to have messages generate email notifications. Personally, I prefer to have the various channels of comms from the school all arriving via email is some way, to help with searching/referencing of previous messages.

 

The school leans heavily into giving out Dojo points, so there's a lot of noise on my phone about that, but being able to DM the teacher is useful, provided they themselves are active and responsive on the app (one teacher is, another isn't).

[flipthebit]

You could use Seesaw for that kind of thing, even if you don't use it with pupils.

[DrBeaker]

The other side of this is in the UK, we've had bad snow in some areas and some schools despite investment and purchase of such parental communication systems.... simply haven't bothered to use them to communicate to parents about closures.

 

Mass text messages not sent because it costs a few pence/comes out of the allowance.

Wasted time, money and effort for all involved. Especially IT teams.

 

Something to consider.

 

 

[psydii]

Has anyone got any info / anecdotes on using WhatsApp to message parents like @Babynoush?  How does this work? How do you managed contact details and groups? How do you control who can reply? 

[paulkerton]

29 minutes ago, psydii said:

Has anyone got any info / anecdotes on using WhatsApp to message parents like @Babynoush?  How does this work? How do you managed contact details and groups? How do you control who can reply? 

The only way to do this is to use WhatsApp for Business. You really cannot be using every day WhatsApp, it's a complete GDPR nightmare.

• Those parents did not give you permission to take their number an upload their details to WhatsApp servers. Instant breach.
• If school business is discussed on a personal WhatsApp account they're disclosable under SARs and FOIA requests.
• There are no eDiscovery solutions available for business use.
• If a staff member deletes a message that should've been audited and be in a trail, that's a breach of duty to maintain the records.
• A WhatsApp group exposes everyone's number to everyone else - That's a direct data breach
• Meta acts as the data controller, not a data processor.
• The ICO has ruled before now that if school business is conducted on WhatsApp, the messages must be produced for an FOI and not having access to it is not a valid legal excuse.

 

It is not GDPR complaint for school use. 

Edited January 27 by paulkerton

[DavR]

29 minutes ago, psydii said:

Has anyone got any info / anecdotes on using WhatsApp to message parents like @Babynoush?  How does this work? How do you managed contact details and groups? How do you control who can reply? 

 

We use WhatsApp to parents for one small group. It runs from a dedicated school mobile, and parents "consent" to being part of the scheme by adding the school contact first. 

 

I doubt it would work at scale, and I'm keen to be rid of it for all the reasons @paulkerton outlines above. But it was signed off by our DPO. 

[DrCheese]

^ Yup - All of what @paulkerton has said is what I've pushed back on when asked about Whatsapp here. 

 

What's annoying about Whatsapp business tho, is it's not something you can pull into Meta business suite and use from there.

[DavR]

We use Parent Hub for our main Home-School comms, it allows broadcasting Teacher -> All class parents, as well as Teacher/Office -> Individual children.

 

There is a two way chat feature between Teacher and Parents which the PTA would like us to turn on, but there's a lot of push back to this idea because of the amount of extra workload that's likely to generate. As I'd imagine there would be in any school that open up this route.

 

It's been good for us on the whole, although to do everything we want, it's not free. I'd be surprised if you found something that does this that's genuinely free, they all seem to be freemium somewhere along the way, and the bit you need is always in the paid version.