The staff at your child's school interact with their school software every day. You might even be familiar with the specific service, if your school implements portals or apps to enable you to engage with the school.
The right school software can drive performance and improve the overall school experience for all those involved in a learner’s journey. It’s important that school systems serve school parents, just as much as teachers, school leaders, school administrative departments, and students.
Innovative new features and developments come to the market every day. As a parent, it’s easy to feel out of the loop when you’re outside of school walls. iSAMS aims to connect the entire school community for efficient communication and daily learning management for all.
So how do you know that your child’s school is utilising its management software to its full potential? What features can you personally take advantage of, as a parent, and what benefits do the systems have for you?
- Online portals for parents and students
- School report visibility
- Facilitating parent-school communications
- Flexible fee payments
- Your child's wellbeing matters
- Your child's data is protected
- More about iSAMS
Online portals for parents and students
As a parent at a school that uses iSAMS, the dedicated portals will be your primary source of information and contact, and where you interact with the software directly. The portals offer a range of features for both parents and students, but it’s important to contact your school to learn more about your portal’s set up.
Popular iSAMS Parent and Student Portal features include:
- School news and events: Stay on top of what’s new at your child’s school and upcoming events, including group events and parents' evenings
- Contact details: Find the right point of contact for any queries relating to your child’s care and ensure the school is up to date on key information
- Timetables and groups: Keep track of your child’s lessons, upcoming exams, and school activities all in one place to make sure they’re set up for their school day
- Wellbeing and behavioural events: Understand your child’s school experience outside of academic performance to ensure they’re getting the right support
- Attendance and registration: Monitor your child’s school attendance records and registration times for a better understanding of their school activities
- Homework and school reports: Access all your child’s assignments and school reports in one place for your records
- Form management: Easy access to permission forms shared by the school, enabling you to complete important requests quickly and easily
- Key documents: Avoid missing key information from your school thanks to the document repository, ensuring that you can always refer back later
- Fee Payments: Benefits from functionality that supports a variety of payment methods for your school fees and extra-curricular payments, including support for bank accounts, credit and debit cards.
If you’d like to learn more about the features available to you, or what portals and apps your school offers, please get in touch with your school's administrator directly. They should also be able to help you set up your account.
School report visibility
Thanks to this system’s integration with the Parent Portal, you can access an overview of performance, feedback, and grades for a more transparent school, teacher, and student relationship.
Better communication between these three parties ensures that each student has the best chance at academic success. It's important to ensure that a student is supported with their academic performance in all areas of life, including at home.
If you’d like to learn more about the Parent Portal or find out about your school’s implementation and its benefits, please reach out to your school's administrator directly.
Facilitating parent-school communications
Maintaining an open line of communication between the school and parents is equally important for both parties. School software should facilitate this and make the transfer of vital information as simple and efficient as possible. iSAMS ensures that the full school community is connected, offering a range of solutions and features to help keep parents up to date.
One of the most important lines of communication within a school is that between a parent and a teacher. It’s important that teachers have the tools they need to get in touch with parents as efficiently as possible to avoid adding to their extensive workload, while also keeping parents informed.
Email features within iSAMS were created to provide an easy communication method for the school, including teaching staff. Email may not necessarily be the only method that your school implements, but it remains one of the most popular tools to disseminate key information. The email facilities within iSAMS have been integrated across the system and the iTeacher app, providing teachers with an instant and flexible solution to parent-teacher communications.
Additionally, iSAMS provides the facilities to meet the communication expectations of modern parents - recognising email isn’t necessarily the preferred communication method for all parents, students, and schools. Apps and portals often take the place of traditional online communications today, as they offer quick and easy notification facilities.
The iSAMS Parent Portal and iParent App offers automated notifications and alerts for rewards or detentions – ensuring you’re always updated when details are shared or records are updated, without the need for manual intervention from school staff.
iSAMS also provides schools with a dedicated SMS solution. Ultimately, SMS remains one of the quickest and easiest ways to share mass messages with all parents. The software ensures that your school can share vital information as quickly as possible, such as school closures, learning changes, events, and more.
Flexible fee payments
Managing fee or deposit payments can be one of the most challenging areas of school life, for both the school’s financial department and parents. It’s important to make this as efficient and flexible as possible.
iSAMS recognises that making these payments isn’t always simple. Parents need a variety of payment options and to be able to easily keep track of their money relating to their child’s school.
The iSAMS fee billing system aims to help schools manage fee payments and, thereby, help parents to keep better control over their account. The software is flexible, enabling you to set up payments to suit you. For example, school finance teams can manage multiple split-billing payment options for each student's account. This is key for school accounts that might have multiple fee payers, like mum, dad, or grandparents. They can also implement split-charging for specific costs.
For example:
Christabel has piano lessons. Her parents have separated, and until now, have each paid 50% of all the fees and charges. They have since agreed that her father will cover 100% of the associated piano lesson costs.
Parents can further manage payments by logging in to the Parent Portal to make payments for bookings, school trips, and more using credit or debit card, or bank accounts.
Parents can also view their invoices in the Parent Portal or iParent App. This ensures you can stay on top of your account, manage any arrears or missed payments, and plan ahead.
Your child's wellbeing matters
Your child spends a large amount of their time within school walls, and each school has a duty of care to its student body.
With iSAMS, your school can keep track of your child's wellbeing. Automatic alerts within the system make sure that staff members don’t miss a change in a child’s behaviour, including the raising of any key concerns such as major life events that teachers should be aware of.
Your child's information can be strictly shared with only those involved in their care, ensuring a holistic and focused wellbeing approach. Teaching staff can also quickly understand a student’s record as needed and provide the appropriate care.
It’s important to always keep your child’s school up to date on key events or concerns in the home environment. Your school will always be happy to help, and a collaborative approach is important.
Your child's data is protected
Every institution that stores personal data has a responsibility to protect that data. This is even more vital in schools, who work with vast amounts of children’s personal data each day.
iSAMS offers features that enable schools to comply with necessary data protection requirements, including GDPR and managing consents.
For example, modern schools utilise social media for a wide range of purposes, such as marketing and communicating with those outside of the school – including parents. However, this can come with risks, especially regarding the use of multimedia on social platforms.
It is entirely up to the parent or student whether they wish their images to be shared on the school website, social media accounts, or other public platforms. Gathering and identifying the right parental and child consent is crucial to protecting a child’s privacy.
Your school will already be prioritising the safety of children and their data by ensuring that the school system allows parents to give consent quickly, at the point of Admission, and enable parents to make changes to these where necessary. If you’d like to know more about your child’s data protection and the consents your school has set, you should reach out to your school's administrator anytime.
More about iSAMS
If you’d like to hear more about any of the above solutions, please get in touch with your school directly. They will be able to tell you about their available options and how you can better utilise them to support your child. You can also ask them about pursuing additional systems if you feel they may benefit your community of parents.
You can also find a list of iSAMS FAQs for both parents and students here: https://public.isams.com/hc/en-us/p/student-and-parent