marshharrier

Glennda - many thanks for the correction - that must have been very recent indeed as I only checked about 6 months ago. My understanding is that their employees are spread about all over the place and so I'd imagine that perhaps only some operate from Coventry? I don't know this for a fact but with a bit of luck they will confirm it for us

Don't be too hard on yourself irsprint84 - appearances really can be deceiving! ParentPay are not a very big company, with only about 20 or so employees and they don't even have a main office (most of their staff still operate from their own homes). In fact most of the time you actually speak to someone at ParentPay you are speaking to someone in their own home. I should point out that using a small company is not always a problem and in fact can be quite the opposite in a lot of situations (personal service, rapid response, local company etc). In my experience it's usually the transition between being a small company and then becoming a bigger company which causes quite a lot of pain and often requires financial investment, commitment and often different people in the business with big company skills! Anyway I hope I've been able to provide some useful information for the members of this thread.

I think before anyone jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire it's really worth doing your research on companies dealing with payments from parents! Here's my checklist FWIW; 1. Are they investing in their product (do they continually develop/improve it? This shows they have vision, commitment and a plan going forward, and it also shows they are making money i.e. are sustainable for the long term)! 2. Are they easily available on the telephone? 3. Do I know where their office is based and could I go and visit them if I wanted/needed to? 4. How many staff do they have? (Are they a garden shed company with only 3 or 4 employees?) 5. Have I seen their accounts for the last year or two? (Are they always late filing their accounts - trying to hide something?) Apologies if this seems like teaching you to suck eggs, but the reality is that it's easy for a company to create a big impression and very few schools carry out the proper due diligence before engaging suppliers (especially in such an important area as this one). I've even complained to our LA that they don't ask proper questions such as 'are they profitable' and 'have their accounts been examined i.e. do they have the capacity to handle 300 schools for example!) The company we use are superb & I looked into every one of the points above before engaging them. It turns out to have been a very good move! HM.

Not in my opinion. OK for occasional or low volume data entry task but that's it. There isn't enough performance (processing capability) for any serious applications plus the work involved in getting data on and off the things makes them unsuitable.

Totally agree Vikpaw ... lots of schools are persuaded into buying something because of fancy functionality which they then never end up using. 'Absence' is a key one i.e. if you're a Primary school with no real absence problem then don't buy something which majors on absence. One other area of caution ... DATA PROTECTION! Make sure that you have the right permission from parents before extracting their data from SIMS/MIS. Some of these systems run a daily/nightly sync with MIS and extract data (contact details). If parents have said 'no' then you need to ensure their data doesn't get pulled out. Similarly if you have new parents joining mid-term and you haven't yet got their permission they too need to be excluded from any auto extract. Some of the apparently less sophisticated systems are that way 'for a reason' so don't be hoodwinked by technology for it's own sake :-)

Saw ParentMail earlier this week to discuss 'ParentMail 2' which is out soon. Includes two-way texting, two-way email, and payments from parents. They're also adding an APP which lets parents do all the above from their mobile phones. (Yup you read it correctly ... parents will be able to build their own private groups and send their own messages too - independently from the school). Mobile Phone App To Help Parents Supervise With Their Children Announced « Gadgets and Technology News Looks very cool indeed, and as for pricing ... they're about the same as everyone else!

SIMS InTouch is expensive. There are other better and cheaper systems out there.

Complete rip off - trying to charges parents either £1 or 50p per alert message depending on how they pay! Outrageous and not endorsed by Kent CC as far as I can see.

You need to look on the BECTA website to find the recommendations.

Like it or not the Government (most Governments) already hold more information about each of us than anyone else! I don't like it particularly but it is a fact nonetheless. I'd rather this than massive private 'corporates' with other agendas gathering our data! @GeeHubb ... you clearly don't mind how many organisations gather data on you? I don't have a problem with the Government hiring out external companies to build the backbone (a la Capita/Serco) but I DO have a problem with those private companies then owning the backbone as is the case now! The Government could easily (right now) contract the building of an MIS backbone from any number of companies who could build it and transfer the ownership to the Gov't for substantially less than £10 million GBP! Sounds like good value to me ....

iThoughts gets my vote - I use it almost every day! Close second is Notebooks which has great personal wiki capability and also links nicely with dropbox

My idea ... that the government builds the backbone (after all it's them that want endless census data out of MIS) and then the private sector innovates and builds the components! It's then very much down to individual schools to choose the components they want to use and also NOT to be burdened with loads of things they never use (How much of SIMS does the average Primary school actually use .... 10%!) This way education can be flexible to suit individual schools, needs, environments etc. Difficult to disagree with this. The forum posts speak for themselves. I have had the presumption to criticise Capita on a few occasions and EVERY time I do, there is one person who can be guaranteed to jump down my throat. Seems a bit of a personal mission to me. On topic - Interoperability absolutely HAS to happen with MIS and the players should be forced (by law if necessary) to co-operate (although they might appear to be on-side with SIF, it is IMHO a bit of smoke and mirrors and not proper engagement on the part of some!)

If I can add to my last post, VLE's are already being rolled out on the whim of may Local Authorities! It has been decided that this should be done and it is being done! Schools are now in the situation of having to persuade parents of the benefits i.e. it's a done deal! Take a look at the link below and the first post which rather makes my point. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/65049-do-primary-school-pupils-need-online-storage-area-vle.html#post584377

Graham - I agree with you but I think you missed my point. My point being that the whole concept of VLE's being discussed with parents before the last Government set the whole ball rolling and before schools were instructed that having a VLE was mandatory'ish within defined timescales!! I'm not sure the guidance given to schools was "If you don't get a good reaction from parents, then you don't need to do it" or at least I've never seen such guidance. In the meantime a whole industry has been born (which taxpayers are paying for) and from my own experience, provides ZERO value! I realise some VLE's may be better than that used by my child's school, or that VLE's will be better used by some schools .... but there will be many (perhaps the majority) that will not!

IMHO I don't agree with the current drive to centralise everything. Of course there are benefits but those benefits are the only one's that are being pushed at the moment. Centralisation (because) of scale always leads to one thing - MASSIVE companies/organisations (because they are the only ones able to afford to build the infrastructure). So if you want EVERYTHING to be done/controlled by the world's biggest companies, centralisation is for you. It really is that simple (unless in my point above it is the government that provides the central piece!) To give a contra view, colleagues of mine up in Hull a few years back, had their school flooded (under 4ft of water). Their entire IT infrastructure was ruined including all the DATA on SIMS (I realise this would seem to support off-site centralisation ... but hear me out)! They were using one or two niche service providers that were hosted in the cloud whose services were unaffected by the chaos and which the school were able to continue to rely on. (In fact those services proved to be a lifeline). The point I'm making is that it is good to have data in more than one place in my opinion. A single point/location/service/provider which could fail (and they all do at some point) is NOT a good idea. Having your systems spread about builds resilience as long as it's easy to integrate those systems when necessary, and means none of those providers get too big for their boots and that they concentrate on making their products as good as they can be in the market. At the moment, all we're hearing is that "Everything in one place, or in one system, is a good thing" because it's an easy argument to present and it's easy for the school! I'd like to see more emphasis put on the benefits of multiple products, locations, services and providers. Where the school doesn't come to a grinding halt because one system is having problems, and NOT being held to ransom because the ONE system has become so big you cannot do without it.