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“Instead of implementing it all at different times, we decided, why don’t we just launch an initiative so it looks like we’re actually targeting the parents?”
seem to be forgotten a little bit,” says Sales ICT manager Simon Rowlands. Things came to a head four years ago, when the school decided to take control of the spiralling parental communications situation by launching a four-pronged initiative it called ‘Engaging parents through ICT’. The four parts consisted of a web portal; cashless catering; a parental communication system; and a smartphone app. Rowlands explains: “Instead of implementing it all at different times, we decided, why don’t we just launch an initiative so it looks like we’re actually targeting the parents?” With all the information to hand, the idea was that parents should really have no reason to ask the school any more questions.
A FOUR-PRONGED APPROACH At the heart of the ‘Engaging Parents through ICT’ project is a web portal that gives parents access to their child’s assessment, attendance data, online reports, and home details – pretty much everything on the school’s information management system. On top of this is an array of web forums, blogs and surveys for the parents to peruse at their own leisure. The second part of the project was a move to cashless
catering. “We were one of the first schools in the country to decide to go 100% cashless,” says Rowlands. “To tell you the truth, it worked very well.” Parents pay for products and services online and those who don’t can make payments at local corner shops and petrol stations. This move included the introduction of biometric fingerprints in the canteen, to keep pupils on free school meals from feeling singled out (and thereby encourage take-up for the vital Pupil Premium). Part of the school’s motivation was indeed financial: there had been a fulltime staff member solely employed to take cash payments. Her unfortunate redundancy did mean around £15-16K of funding was freed up to use elsewhere. The third part was the parental communication system.
This is an email and text alert system that sits alongside the school’s website, where even individual school trips have a web page. “They can see all the trip information, all the payment information and then they can cross-reference that with [the online payment system],” says Rowlands.
The fourth and final part to the initiative is a smartphone
app, which had just over 1,000 downloads in the first week of launching it – making up the majority of the school’s 1,200 pupils. The app consolidates the school’s news feed with its Twitter page and calendars, using push notifications to keep parents in the know up to the very minute. It also links directly with the online payment system so parents can top up their account on the go.
POSITIVE RESULTS This four-point attack has transformed school communication at Sale. To put it in context, when the school surveyed the parents four years ago, satisfaction levels around communication were very low – 16-20%. A survey this year showed those levels to have skyrocketed to over 90%. Other benefits include a drop in truancy levels and a £2,000 annual reduction in administration costs associated with sending out paper reports – not to mention the amount saved in cashless catering. The initial administrative cost for setting up such a system can be high, Rowlands warns, but worth it. “The administrative load of organising it, cleaning data up and all the rest of it is quite high, but persevere and once it’s integrated into all your systems, it’s easier,” he says. But with so many options for communicating with parents,
how does the school choose what to use? “For official letters and stuff that require reply slips, we tend to use the school communications email system,” says Rowlands. But for other communications, the school gets creative. “We launched a little trial last year when we did exams,” he explains, “what we did is we actually text the parents – not the children, the parents – what their exam schedules were. We did that daily.” He adds: “You can text it to the kids and they’ll forget by three o’clock. Text it to the parents and they’ll make sure they’re at the exam.” Overall, the school has benefited enormously from the
change in culture – improving nearly all aspects of school life. This sits well with the research from NFER/OUP, which also found that it was better to use a whole school approach when dealing with parents, rather than one that’s more targeted. There’s certainly nothing more ‘whole school’ than this engaging programme at Sale.
www.edexec.co.uk / september2013
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