Schoolcomms

All of our products can be accessed by parents via the app or on the web version and the school can control what is shown to parents on them. You're welcome to give us a call or drop us an email if you have any further questions.

A little info on how Schoolcomms handles reports from SIMS: You can attach both individual and profile reports from SIMS without the need to mail merge. Once the appropriate student(s), class or year group have been selected an email is sent to the imported contacts from SIMS and attaches the appropriate report.

The fixes today relates to online performance issues so schools won't need to do anything to receive those. The notice will remain on the support site for the time being as we're still monitoring performance in case further improvements are required. The attachment issue on the desktop version is currently being worked on and a new version of Schoolcomms desktop will be released to fully address this issue. That one will require schools to download and update to the new version when it is ready. Communications for this will be sent out accordingly.

There isn't a browser specific problem. We have experienced some performance issues with our system today. A fix has been released to improve this. If you want to email student timetables (from SIMS), reports from SIMS Assessment Manager or SIMS Profiles to parents, you can still do this as normal using the Schoolcomms desktop application. For all other types of attachments you should use Schoolcomms on the web. More details and some links to relevant user guides are available here.

Hi, I've spoken with out support team to see if we can help. They've run some tests to try to recreate the issue. When you send reports out via Schoolcomms, the XML reports are picked up from the SIMS Document Server and Schoolcomms does in fact convert them to PDFs on the fly. During our testing with various mobile and PC platforms, all devices received a PDF report as expected. You are welcome to get in touch with our support team over the phone. I think they'll be able to help you get to the bottom of this one as conversion to PDF should normally go ahead without issue.

Hi Yes Schoolcomms is in the same group as ParentPay. So the good news is that we can switch you to Schoolcomms without you paying for two licences – our policy is that schools only pay for one product… which seems fair. Please contact Antoinette in our Sales Team and she’ll sort this for you.

Hi David, There are several SMS options that you could turn to but we’ll discuss the advantages of the one that we know best – our own. Schoolcomms offers unlimited texts with our Unlimited Messaging but our upper limit is on a case by case basis. If you would like a specific quote then please feel free to call us on 0333 332 7147. Alternatively, our free School Gateway parent app offers free push notifications on our Premium messaging option. This would allow you to communicate directly to parents’ phones for free whilst preserving the impact of a SMS text. Schoolcomms functionality also allows you to contact certain parents – those with absent children, attendees of certain clubs or year groups etc. – allowing you to decide precisely who you want to contact and even how to contact them (SMS, email or via the app). It’s also integrated with SIMS and will therefore easily write back to SIMS and text parents whose children have been marked as absent. We’re going a little off topic now but it may still be relevant to you and your school – we’re just about to release a Primary Bundle that includes SMS messaging and a huge amount of further functionality, such as showing parents their dinner money balance, notifiying parents of achievements and enabling parents to book and pay for clubs within the School Gateway app. This may not be for you but if you’re hoping to increase your functionality in the future it’s worth keeping it in mind. Let us know if you would like any further information! We’d be happy to talk on the phone (call us on 0333 332 7147) or you can drop us an email at [email protected].

We’re demonstrating our SIMS integrated parent app capability this term – including new customisable links features, dinner/menu bookings. Edugeeks are invited to join us for the two hour session (9-11am), so let us know and we’ll book you on. They’re free sessions: 18 May London / 23 May Birmingham / 24 May Manchester / 25 May Bristol. We’ll cover how to cut text costs by moving to app messaging; how to reduce payment transaction charges; instant publication of reports and timetables from SIMS; achievement and behaviour reporting; cashless caterer and SIMS SM integration; feedback from parents and how to maximise parent take up. If you can’t make the sessions give us a shout and we can set you up as a parent so you can download the app and have a play.

Just to clarify, Schoolcomms charges are:- Instant Bank Transfer = 16p per transaction flat charge (60% of transactions are now made via this... there is no additional Gateway charge) Debit Card = 22p per transaction + 10p Gateway transaction charge (around 30% of payments are made via this) Credit Card = 1.5% of transaction amount (Premium and Standard cards flat rate) + 10p Gateway transaction charge (around 10% of payments) Give us a call if you want to have a look at the system and quiz us on the pro's and con's - or speak to a school near you who uses Schoolcomms Payments. Hope that helps.

It's not quite as simple as that. School communications providers such as us do not typically submit messages direct to the mobile operator of the recipient. We hand messages to Bulk SMS providers who handle the distribution of messages out into the networks, and this is not a straightforward level playing field type set up as per IP traffic, it is complex web of proprietary billing and handling arrangements between many organisations operating at different levels. Therefore the slow delivery to EE may not be down to EE but down to the Bulk SMS provider chosen by your school communications provider and the web of relationships they have in place to deliver messages to various network operators.

Firstly as always, thanks for the kind words about Schoolcomms. There are no plans to aggressively integrate the two businesses, or stop providing any of the services that either Schoolcomms or Parent Pay offer (to cover off the specific question above, that includes Schoolcomms’ SIMS writeback capability). It also includes our payments product, which will continue to be available and supported. Indeed we have some new features coming over the next few months… watch this space. Schoolcomms Payments and ParentPay are quite different products with different capabilities, suited to different needs, and I’d really recommend you have a look at them both and pick the one that is right for you.

If you give our support team a call and they can connect you with some schools who have been through the process. It's worth giving them a call anyway to let them know your plans. We will liaise directly with NRS so you don't need to do so much piggy in the middle. It is a pretty painless process so long as you involve both parties early so that everything can be done in the right order. This is really important if you are migrating from one cashless system to another, if it's planned right it's fine, but there are some pitfalls which can result in some unnecessary unpicking. Definitely a stitch in time to save nine scenario for both you and us! We don't charge for integration with cashless caterers, but some cashless caterers do. Worth checking before you sign on the line - some schools have had some success with some cashless providers in negotiating these integration fees out...

Schoolcomms can deliver both SIMS Assessment Manager Individual Reports, (provided that the reports have been uploaded to the document management server) and SIMS Profile reports as email attachments. If you would like me to arrange an on line demo please let me know. We’re also just about to release new functionality to display selected SIMS reports within the School Gateway On Line Reporting portal (app and web). This will be out after half-term. You can also display attendance and behaviour via School Gateway parent portal too.

You may have seen some hype in the national media on the impact of texting parents about missed homework, attendance and test results. We were the delivery partners for this project and we learnt a lot about the realities of how simple technology can help schools achieve their ultimate objective – improving outcomes for students. I expect most of you already have systems in your schools to send messages to parents – we send literally millions every month. We did quite a lot of analysis before the project and the vast majority of what goes through our system is “don’t forget your wellies for the school trip”, “the buses are late” and other administrative type messages. So it was great being part of the project that proved cheap technology interventions can actually raise standards when used for more than just admin. But we also discovered why schools don't normally do this. Generic "send a text" functionality was just too labour intensive for these bespoke messages, so we built a whole load of new functionality that meant all teachers had to do was record missing homework or results in SIMS and we'd automatically send out the relevant messages, so teachers didn't need to do anything extra. This made a massive difference to the takeup and was a real lesson for us on minimising "friction" in user experience. If any of you are getting asked by SLT on whether you can do this, or want to bring something to them on why technology is a good investment, we're running some webinars on the detail behind the headlines and how to actually implement this successfully. It's aimed at Schoolcomms customers really, but PM me if you aren't and want to come along.

Hi @Seb1780 - thanks for choosing Schoolcomms. If you’ve imported all SIMS contacts (with contact priority 1 to 5), then when a contact logs into School Gateway, they’ll see a list of the students they’ve been linked to in SIMS. If the contact doesn’t have parental responsibility for a student, they’ll only see minimal information (including name, year, reg group). If the contact has parental responsibility, they’ll have access to more details (depending on what the school has chosen to make available). It might be appropriate to choose the import option Priority 1 contacts and contacts with parental responsibility (up to P5). There's quite a bit of flexibility and different options. Probably best to DM me with some contact details so we can contact you and ensure we properly understand what you want to achieve and advise accordingly.