What Is Schoolcomms? And What Does It Do for Parental Engagement?

We describe ourselves as a ‘single solution for all parental engagement needs’. But what does that mean and why is Schoolcomms the chosen provider of so many schools? As a school, you’ll already know that better parental engagement improves student performance. But managing this day-to-day can be crippling in terms of costs and staff time. And that’s where we come in. Working closely with schools, we’ve built parental engagement technology specifically designed around the school day and the school MIS. But it doesn’t stop there. Through our close relationships with schools, we’re constantly developing additional functionality and products. To bring you up to speed, we’ve put together a short and helpful guide which best explains how Schoolcomms can transform the way you communicate and engage with parents.

What does Schoolcomms do?

Schoolcomms has been designed so that schools can keep parents informed of every aspect of their child’s school day. It also streamlines administrative tasks freeing up precious staff time for other activities. Our products are great independently, but the real power comes from their ability to work in unison. At its core is Parent Communication and the parent app: the two vessels that give schools the ability to send information and parents to receive it. This means no printed items need to be stuffed into a school bag and discovered days later; everything gets delivered to the parent’s fingertips. A fundamental part of good parental engagement is keeping parents informed about their child’s progress. With Schoolcomms, this can be achieved on a regular basis. Better still, there’s even no restrictive text messaging costs courtesy of free app messaging and push notifications in the parent app. By the same token, everything from attendance and achievements to progress reports and timetables can be drawn by Schoolcomms from your school MIS and sent directly to parents via the app.

Built to make school life easier

But what about all those other things that you need parents to know about? A big part of school life is requesting payment from parents for things like dinner money, trips, clubs, book bags, uniform – the list is endless. Schoolcomms’ Cashless Payments can handle all of this online. This means no more cash coming into school. Furthermore, reconciliation reporting and integration with your cashless caterer and financial software streamlines the whole process. Cashless Payments even comes with Parent Communication. This allows you to easily communicate to parents when their next instalment for a trip is due, or to send automatic low balance notifications. What’s more, if you partner up Club Management and Meal Management with Cashless Payments, you give parents the ability to book and pay in advance via the parent app. Again, Parent Communication underpins these allowing you to message parents easily. This is great for when clubs get cancelled or there’s a new menu to let them know about. All in all, using technology like this for your parent communication eases the burden from administrative staff and enables teachers to easily communicate a student’s progress efficiently and regularly to the parent. For more detail about these products visit schoolcomms.com/products.

Online portal and school app for parents

Alongside Schoolcomms, we developed an online parent portal and parent app for schools: School Gateway. Everything that Schoolcomms does can be delivered to the parent via the app, improving the school-home relationship. Subsequently, parents receiving information about their child’s life at school feel empowered. Plus, the parent app is interactive and enables schools to provide a 2-way flow of information, which vastly improves parental engagement.

A single system

Having a single system that can handle everything from text and app messaging to cashless payments and club management makes parent communication easier than ever. Additionally, a single solution takes away the frustration of staff having to log into multiple different systems to access the information they need. Ultimately, the fact that all our products integrate with each other and your school MIS makes them simple and easy to use. With Schoolcomms, you’ll be able to demonstrate to education industry inspection agencies how parental involvement has resulted in a positive outcome for your students. You’ll also have audit trails of all your communications with parents, as well as being able to show how you’re delivering progress information to them regularly. We’ve taken care of the parental engagement technology, so you can focus on teaching.

It’s not just about the products

There’s a whole team at Schoolcomms striving to make the experience of schools and parents a good one. Many of our team members have come from school backgrounds, so they really understand the challenges schools face with parent communication. Good customer service is in the detail and we go that extra mile to look after our customers. From personalised one-to-one training to a support team that has a 98% customer satisfaction rate, we’re here to make sure you get the most out of Schoolcomms. Our advisors, training and support teams are always on-hand to guide you through every step of your journey with Schoolcomms. If you’d like to know more about Schoolcomms, call the team on 0333 332 7147 or request more information here.