VIEWS & OPINION
How to refresh your school’s internal communications
Comment by GRAHAM COOPER, Chief Marketing Officer at Juniper Education
One of the biggest problems any organisation faces is how to keep the right people informed, in the right way and at the right time. Get it wrong and you risk leaving someone out of the loop, while others are swamped with calls, emails and meeting requests. Good communication took on a
whole new importance during the pandemic with schools needing to keep staff informed of health matters and changing guidelines. As we look ahead to the new academic year and what we hope will be
more settled times, now could be the right moment to refresh your communications strategy. We’ve been asking some busy headteachers for their advice:
• Conduct a straw poll It’s important to consider staff preferences when it comes to communications platforms. You can’t please all the people all the time, but it’s a good idea to ask everyone how they prefer to be contacted. Draw up a quick questionnaire to ask staff the best way to contact them about something urgent, and how they would like to hear about information, event announcements and news. Give everyone a range of options such as phone calls, email or text message. You can suggest other platforms your school uses, or might like to use, such as Slack, WhatsApp or the school’s own app. When you have your answers, select the best communications channels for your urgent and non-urgent messaging and ask everyone to stick with them if possible. This will keep your communications simple and ensure nothing important gets missed.
• Design a flow chart If you mark every email ‘urgent’ your staff will soon switch off and the genuinely urgent messages could get lost in the background noise. A flow chart will help your team get into the habit of triaging to sort
the urgent from the important, and the informative from the nice to know. It also ensures everyone receives the right information in the correct order. Different procedures will work for different schools, but there are
some key factors to think about. Why a message is being communicated, who needs to see what and in which order, and does it need to be escalated to the SLT, head or governors. Having considered all these points, you are ready to create a flow chart for in-school communications as a guide for staff to use.
• Monitor, keep or change When you have chosen your internal communications tools and created a flow chart, you will need to keep track of how well these are working. Review your communications strategy two or three times a year in your SLT or staff meetings so the temptation to add more layers is kept in check. Consider the pros and cons of each communication platform, debate
which technologies are good for urgent and non-urgent messages, and discuss the etiquette for out-of-hours communications. Be open to changes if someone finds a communications channel which
is better or easier to use. Starting the academic year with a fresh communications strategy will help to tackle inbox overload and make it easier for everyone to focus on the business of teaching and learning.
For more ideas on how to save time, visit
https://junipereducation.org/10dayproject/ for a set of free resources from Juniper Education aimed at primary school leaders.
Why teaching touch typing could be one of the best activities for #CatchUp
Comment by Sal McKeown, editor and freelance journalist
The two big themes of the last twelve months have been digital learning and learning loss. Schools are keen to see children make progress as fast as possible and the key areas of concern have been speech and language, especially in early years, literacy, spelling and maths. But if there is one thing we have learnt from the move to online remote learning is that touch typing is long overdue in the UK
I was delighted to receive this testimonial from Simon Luxford- Moore, eLearning Coordinator at ESMS in Edinburgh. He tried it with one learner who was struggling to write: 'The publicity claims that you’ll notice a difference after 15 minutes. They are right. After just a few minutes she looked up at me with a big smile on her face. She learned to touch type very quickly, so we started using it more extensively.'
Many schools are concerned about handwriting as they still expect candidates to write exam answers by hand but Amanda McLeod, Consultant of Scholastic's Handwriting series, says: 'Research shows that handwriting improves recall and gives learners a deeper understanding of content, but if you have any form of SEND, handwriting is too slow. You need touch typing to compensate for memory issues and slower processing.' Once students can type without looking at the keys they are no longer working at word and letter level and write more fluently.
Touch typing is ideal for neurodiverse learners. It uses a kinaesthetic approach, so children remember patterns on the keyboard and develop a sense of what feels right. There is a SEND/Dyslexia edition with advice and guidance from the British Dyslexia Research Trust. It caters for neurological differences such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, ASD and Tourette's, among others.
It helps all those students are now using technology in exams, especially young people with dyslexia, and it is important that they are trained to type properly and move away from 'hunt and peck.' Research shows that touch typing improves spelling because it gives children an alternative to 'look- cover- write and check' which does not work well as a strategy for children with dyslexia who may struggle with working memory.
This is why some schools are using Catch Up funding for touch typing and choosing the KAZ course which teaches children the basics in just 90 minutes. They can also enter for the City and Guilds digital badge which some children like as it validates their learning. It is also a simple solution for schools as children are learning online and can work independently.
Kathryn Stowell, Head of Outreach and AAC at Charlton Park Academy describes the advantages: 'Kaz teaches touch typing fast so students are not taking much time out from other subjects to learn the keyboard. Best of all, we have one portal at the school and can see from the student logins how they are getting on. With students right across London, this saves us time when we are checking on progress.'
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www.education-today.co.uk July/August 2021
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