Keeping your entire school community connected is vital to maximising efficiency and providing the best learning experience for students and parents. Better communication ensures that everyone is informed, and the right decisions can be made swiftly.
Research suggests that 85% of parents are keen to play an active role in their child’s education, so it’s important to make sure that your school provides the facilities for this wherever possible.
However, with so many different options for school communications and technology moving so quickly, it can be difficult to know the best approach for keeping your school community in the loop.
Keeping parents, teachers, and students up to date requires more than just an email client. You need to meet modern users' expectations and integrate multiple options for receiving important school news.
How do you manage each of these communication methods without increasing the demand on busy school staff?
- Integrated apps and portals
- Automation and notifications
- Social media
- Consistency
- Research and feedback
- School comms with iSAMS
Integrated apps and portals
Education apps saw a huge increase in usage during the pandemic, with the number of worldwide users of the tools increasing from 185 million in 2019 to 270 million in 2020. That’s an increase of 46% on pre-pandemic figures. The use of apps and portals within the education space is likely to only keep on growing.
Despite this, it’s not a given that every school has integrated an app or portal into their communication offering. If they have, it’s also no guarantee that it’s being utilised to its full potential by the entire school community.
Apps and portals offer parents, students, and teachers the opportunity to self-serve. The vast amount of information that they require is already stored in your management system. It’s important to ensure that this is accessible when it’s needed. Ultimately, this saves time and removes the need to manage requests for information that is already available.
However, it’s important that your apps and portals are seamlessly integrated with your chosen school management software. This ensures that the right information is displayed to the right parties, users can easily access the information that they need, and the administrative burden is reduced.
iSAMS offers a suite of apps and portals for the full school community. The apps are available in 10 languages, ensuring that you can stay connected with your parents and students – no matter their native language. You can learn more about apps here:
Automation and notifications
Your software can also further improve your staff resource management by offering the option to automate specific tasks and processes for sharing information.
Chances are, there are processes within your software and daily school management that are repetitive. This means they take up more of your staff time than is necessary. The right school software should remove the need for manual intervention wherever possible.
Software automation and notifications can ensure that all relevant parties are kept in the loop about changes, automatically. It can also share that information with integrated systems so that all databases are kept up to date.
For example, the iSAMS Wellbeing Manager module seamlessly integrates with the wider iSAMS MIS. When new events or concerns are created, or they are updated, notifications can be generated in other areas of the software so that those involved in a child’s care are always up to date.
Similarly, the Reward and Conduct module works in tandem with the MIS and integrated solutions to keep parents up to date on their child’s behaviour, including upcoming detentions or rewards.
By automating processes like this, there is no longer the need to manually keep relevant parties updated with new information. This can become particularly time consuming when communication needs to extend outside the school walls – so maximising the use of automation is key.
Social media
As previously mentioned, it’s important to meet the communication expectations of the modern user. This will depend based on a variety of factors, including average age, location, and technology – but chances are, most young parents and students would expect their school to have a social media presence.
Research suggests that 48% of learners aged between 11-16 report using social media sites or apps a few times a week. Over 80% of parents say that they use social media to discuss parenting topics. Whatever social discourse occurs around the topic of social media use in schools, it’s clear that it’s a mainstay in the communication expectations of your school body.
Your school doesn’t need to occupy every social media platform. For the majority of schools, choosing one will be more than sufficient. Consider discussing this with your school community and work with them to find the most frequented platform, especially for parents.
It’s not vital to share every school update on public social media. However, social networks also present an excellent marketing and networking tool for your school – so it’s important to find a balance in the types of information that you share.
Make sure to secure the appropriate permissions before publicly sharing pictures of students. This can be efficiently achieved at the admissions stage with iSAMS, thanks to the seamless integration between the iSAMS MIS, Admissions Portal, and the Data Protection module.
Consistency
While expanding your communication platforms is important, it’s just as important to ensure that you’re being consistent throughout. Not all parents, teachers, or students will use the platforms that you implement.
Some parents might prefer email and aren’t active on social networks, for example. They might miss vital information that is shared on your school’s Facebook page or local WhatsApp groups. Whatever you choose to use for your school comms, make sure that the same information is shared throughout your platforms – wherever possible.
Ultimately, the more members of your school community are up to date, the less admin your school staff will need to do throughout their day.
Research and feedback
While these tips can help make your school comms more efficient, the most important step is to gather feedback and listen to your school community.
Each group of parents, students, or teachers will be different. They will have different expectations from their school communications. It’s your job to meet those expectations and ensure that they aren’t missing out on vital school information.
Take the time to open up discussion groups or share surveys to better understand their needs. These could be easily included in termly newsletters or as notifications in their portal and apps. This feedback should fuel your decision making about your school comms.
Ultimately, the school community are your priority and it’s important to meet their needs so that key information can be shared widely and efficiently.
School comms with iSAMS
iSAMS offers a range of solutions that maximises the efficiency of your school communications and enables you to keep the entire school community connected.
Our range of apps are tailored to the needs of parents, teachers, and student. These dedicated apps enable users to stay up to date on vital school information, manage timetables, reward and conduct, find contact information, and more.
Similarly, our portal ensures that parents have access to any information they need, enabling them to self-serve and access the most important data. You can set tailored restrictions and the platform seamlessly integrates with your MIS.
The iSAMS MIS and its integrated solutions were created with independent schools in mind. We provide an all-in-one solution to reduce the administrative burden, enabling you to focus on providing the best education.
To learn more about iSAMS Apps, you can watch a full demonstration below. Alternatively, you can request a demonstration of our MIS and any of our integrated solutions by clicking here.