Crown Hills Community College

Schoolcomms case study

What goals were you hoping to achieve when you decided that an engagement system would be a good fit for your school?

We were desperately trying to find a more effective way of reaching parents with various forms of exam information. We found sending things home with students meant that more than 50% of parents would not be receiving important documents, which was very frustrating. We especially wanted to increase the parental engagement in our school.

Why did you choose Schoolcomms over other solutions available on the market?

We found from our research that it was the best value for money product which synced so easily with SIMS. We also found the support was excellent and the trial really helped – we were even rewarded with free bundles of text messages for introducing other schools. Overall, we were impressed with the whole package, especially the fact that it synced to SIMS so seamlessly and we could send emails as well as text messages to parents.

What day-to-day challenges has using Schoolcomms helped you to overcome?

Firstly, it made us clean up our student/staff details and contact details on SIMS, which forced us to recognise and act on the fact that quite a lot of our contact details were wrong or missing. We can now be confident that all our contact details are correct.

Now parents are able to send us text messages for all sorts of reasons and make that initial contact without phoning into school, no matter what time of day they want to make contact – ideal for busy parents! Less printing – we do not send return reply slips anymore – which has revolutionised the way we work.

What has parent and staff reaction been to School Gateway?

Parents and staff have welcomed School Gateway. Parents are now able make contact really easily and have so much information about their child at their fingertips, while staff love having easy access to their timetables and the school website.

Parents and staff are now able to pay for lunches online, which means our school will soon be completely cashless. This is something we’ve been striving for.

We are also able to better engage with parents via all the extra modules we extended to. Since we’ve been using the Parents’ Evening Software, our parental attendance has increased from an average of 48% to 85%.