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Choosing a Tutor in Preparation for Exams

Exam time can be a stressful period for everyone involved. If your child needs extra help in a particular subject, of course, you may be thinking of hiring a tutor to get them through or improve their grades. This is a good idea but choosing the right person can also...

Top Tips on Helping Your Child With Their Homework

Once children start school, parents have to consider the prospect of homework. While this can be an exciting time as your child begins to learn new things, it can also be pretty challenging. Children can be enthusiastic or resistant to homework depending on their...

School Communication Barriers

As a company that helps schools communicate better in this brilliant technological age, working to bring down barriers is one thing that we’re particularly focused on at Parentapps. Most teachers and heads of school understand that good communication and involvement...

Parent’s Evening: Questions to Ask Teachers

One of the most important times that mums and dads get to meet teachers is during a parent’s evening. While these can be useful to understand how your child is doing in specific subjects and whether there are any problems, they can be quite hectic. Going in prepared...

Help with Pupil Premium

Since the launch of the Universal Infant Free School Meal Policy, schools have struggled to get parents to register for Pupil Premium because there is no longer the same incentive for parents to do so. Whilst the increase in children receiving school meals is fantastic…

How Surveys Can Help Improve Parental Engagement

The Surveys feature of Parentapps Connect, provides schools and nurseries with an easy way to find out what is and isn’t working when it comes to parental engagement. And, because you can choose whether to send them to the whole school, particular year groups, or…

How your school’s app can help with phonics

Now that Spring has begun, it will soon be time to start preparing your pupils for the Phonics Key Stage 1 Screening Check. Many children could benefit from having extra phonics help at home. And, many parents would be more than happy to work with their children in…

How an app can help improve safeguarding

Safeguarding is one of the biggest areas of concern for any nursery or school today. And, as parental engagement specialists, it is something that we take into great consideration when building our communication apps. A secure parental communication app can help put…

The Benefits of Having a Nursery App

If you want to build better engagement and keep your current parents up to date with the latest developments, you should consider a dedicated communication app for your nursery.
Increasingly, organisations are choosing to create their own apps to complement their…

Why Should Your School Have a Dedicated App?

Apps are everywhere. Collectively we download billions of them to our mobile phones and tablets each year. We do our weekly food shops, book flights and bank all from apps on our mobile devices.
But is a dedicated app suitable for your school? Can it deliver better…

Education software has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. Pop into any classroom today and it will look a lot different to a couple of decades ago. Interactive whiteboards and TVs are just a part of the technological mix.

The truth is that schools are communicating better and a range of different services and software, from the cloud to downloadable apps, are helping to deliver higher standards of education.

We’ve known for a long while that education isn’t just about teachers. It involves a close relationship between all relevant stakeholders, including parents and pupils. Being able to communicate directly with parents means they are kept up to date with what’s happening in their child’s education and have the facility as well as the encouragement to get involved.

Better and wider communication helps brings communities together that may have been contained in their own little silo in the past. That includes those from ethnic minorities as well as people from different socio-economic backgrounds.

The School App

Many educational establishments at all levels of a child’s development have taken on the need for better communication by developing their own school app. In the past, this may have seemed an extravagance. It cost a lot to hire a developer and create an individual piece of software that enabled people to communicate within what is a relatively small community.

The great thing about education communication technology software, however, is that the price has come down considerably in recent times. Part of that is down to competition between providers, part is the increasing sophistication of software solutions that means tailored apps are relatively easy to produce.

More important has been the development of smartphone and tablet technology and much greater connectivity. We are more likely to be carrying around an android or iPhone nowadays and we use it for a variety of everyday communication tasks.

The key here is that software can improve and consolidate your school communication strategy and has a number of significant benefits:

  • It allows you to send messages out to users at any time with the minimum of effort.
  • It reduces the admin time in reaching out to parents and pupils.
  • It allows you greater flexibility because everything can be done electronically. That means you not only maintain your current communication efforts but actually improve them exponentially.

Communication with parents is considered important for any Ofsted report. Having a downloadable school app means you have a centralised tool that delivers on a large part of those requirements. The good news is that school apps nowadays can be tailored to specific needs, branded to match your school’s image and scaled according to your current needs.

Education communication technology software is so much more accessible that many schools are, at a bare minimum, including an app that can be downloaded by parents. This can hooked into your management information system or MIS to provide seamless engagement at all levels for your school.

You can provide up to date menus and curriculum information, reminders of upcoming events and send out urgent notifications when required. At Parentapps, we have worked with a wide range of different schools to help deliver tailored software solutions that enable complete communication at a level never before seen in the education sector.

Contact us today to see how we can change the way you engage with parents and pupils.