With teachers planning lessons, students settling into new classrooms, and parents navigating new routines, the beginning of a new school year can be a chaotic period of time. Despite this chaos, staying organised is a vital strategy to ensuring a successful and stress-free start to the academic year.
Breaking Through Barriers
While Schoolcomms is designed to streamline school communication, some schools may face challenges if they are not fully aware of its capabilities, or if parent uptake is low. These barriers can hinder the system’s effectiveness and lead to inefficiencies. The best way to ensure you’re getting the most out of your parent engagement system is to ensure that staff and parents fully utilise its functionality.
Key Functionalities for a Smooth Start
One of the most valuable features of Schoolcomms is its ability to organise and automate messaging. By scheduling messages ahead of time, schools can ensure that parents are informed about important dates, events, and updates without the need for manual intervention. This can significantly reduce the workload for school staff and improve communication efficiency.
Additionally, Schoolcomms is an effective tool for ensuring contact data for parents and carers is kept up to date, streamlining parental communications, and making school payments easy. All this helps reduce administrative burden and improve financial management, making the start of the year far less stressful.
Your September Readiness Checklist
To ensure a smooth transition into the new academic year, make sure you check our full ‘September Readiness’ Checklist, which includes some key actions you should undertake at the start of the new school year, for example:
- Entering new parent/staff details
- Address any data issues
- Manage Schoolcomms user accounts
- Remove school leavers
- Add/amend bank details
Visit our Knowledge Base to see the full checklist, and ensure you’ve completed any essential tasks.
Overcoming Obstacles with Schoolcomms
Our resources are designed to help schools overcome these challenges and build stronger parent-school partnerships. By utilising our resources effectively, your school can reduce inefficiencies, improve communication, and build stronger partnerships.
Struggling to get parents on board? Our School Gateway Success Guide is designed specifically to help you get parents on board for the new academic year, and follow up with those who are still behind in taking advantage of the benefits of their parent app. The guide is broken down into four steps:
- Launch – From templates for website announcements to newsletters, use our Success Guide’s resources to promote the benefits of School Gateway before the launch.
- Promote – Chase those parents who have slipped through the gaps and encourage those who may be wary by promoting School Gateway with our resourceful tools.
- Maintain – Sustain your parents’ interest in using the app with these resources on best practices and how to use School Gateway to make sure your parent engagement really is outstanding.
- Launch again – Make sure to remember these steps are cyclical, as every new academic year brings new parents and a new launch campaign. Stay updated with improvements and new features!
Our handy step-by-step parent guides are another excellent resource for preparing your parents to use the School Gateway App. Whether they need help registering for School Gateway, information on changing bank details, or instructions on how to book, amend, or cancel club bookings, our Access Guide, Payments Guide, and Clubs Guide make it simple for them to get up to speed.
By leveraging the full potential of Schoolcomms, and utilising our handy resources, schools can create a more organised and efficient environment, leading to a smoother return to school in the new academic year.
Need advice on going paperless, cashless, or boosting parental engagement? Our friendly team is always here to help you streamline your school’s operations. Get in touch with our team.
