FEATURE FOCUS: SOFTWARE IN SCHOOLS
Top five considerations when re-evaluating parental engagement software
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n our final look at software in schools this month, we are delighted to hear from Rob Pointen, CEO, Weduc, who explains how parental engagement can help children’s learning outcomes, and offers some pointers on choosing the most appropriate software for the job.
Getting children engaged with the education process can be challenging enough, but developing parental engagement can be just as formidable a task. It’s a critical activity that every school has found its own way of carrying out, and it’s important because it has repeatedly been found to be one of the most effective measures for improving outcomes for students. There is a clear connection between a school’s ability to communicate with parents and the educational performance of the children. When parents take an active part in the learning process, the result is more confident and motivated children who demonstrate better classroom behaviour. From upcoming trips and parents’ evenings to after-school clubs and closures, schools want to make sure that every message reaches every parent, but in reality it’s often not the case. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Weduc found that just a fifth of schools can safely say that 90-100% of parents had received and read a message. For most schools, it typically ranges from between 50% and 75%.
What happens when communication fails? There are some significant consequences to the school for not engaging these hard-to- reach parents first time. To begin with, there
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is an additional burden on the school admin team, and often teaching staff, to trawl through all the possible variations of who has received the message versus whether they have responded or not. As a result of this, letters will need to be printed out and sent, which are not just a time waster but also another cost consideration, and a seemingly endless series of phone calls have to be set in motion. As a last resort, teachers might even have to chase parents down on the playground or at collection time. There are some important considerations here, chief among them is being able to measure engagement without too much overhead. If the aim is to improve engagement, then there needs to be a benchmark level to work from. And to improve the all-important figure of engaged parents, a quarter (25%) of schools surveyed said that the use of better school communications software would likely make a difference. But before schools consider making a switch from one platform to another to reach the community of parents, they need to assess the value they are getting from their current solution and look carefully at what any new solution can offer.
Does the software seamlessly June 2023
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