Good communication lies at the heart of any successful school. The great news is that technology has helped deliver major improvements in this area over the last few years. The latest dedicated school apps are designed to make communication with parents and pupils almost instantaneous and reduce the pressure on admin departments and teachers themselves.
Most of Us Have Smartphones
It’s only just a little over ten years since the smartphone burst onto the market. Now practically everyone has one, using them to text, phone, browse the internet, watch videos and even learn new skills. School admin departments that once sent out vast amounts of paperwork to parents and pupils, can now send quick messages and reminders via these incredibly powerful pocket size computers.
You Can Send Notifications
If you had to close the school early in the old days, for example, it would have meant everyone manning the phones and trying to contact parents to come and pick up their children. Now you can do this complex task with the minimal of effort through push notifications that appear almost instantaneously on a smartphone or tablet.
You can use this facility for a wide range of communications, linking into important pages on your website at the same time if you need to.
School Apps Can Be Tailored
While you might want to keep things simple, there are a variety of ways that you can tailor your school app to suit your needs:
- You can include a calendar feature so that parents always know when term dates start and finish.
- Maybe you want to make certain documentation available such as timetables or dress codes and other policies.
- All schools have events throughout the year and a dedicated app is a great way to keep parents and pupils updated on these.
- Maybe you want to advertise your school a bit more and tell parents what’s been happening – a blog is a great way to do this and can easily be included on your app.
- You can put in a whole host of other stuff too including photos, Ofsted reports, and you can even put in easy sickness and absence reporting or forms to sign up and pay for school trips.
Including some or all of these measures for your school app helps to reduce the workload on your administration staff. They’re no longer spending time printing out huge amounts of literature and making calls. It can also save parents hunting around for the right phone number to call. They simply head to the school app and get the information they need with a few taps of the icon.
More and more schools today are starting to see the advantages of developing their own app. It’s not as expensive as many people think and the savings in administration and quicker communication more than make up for any cost. School apps can also be branded so you can have your own distinct look which helps you stand out from the crowd. And if you want your school to have a greener profile, your app lets you do that too by reducing the amount of paperwork you have to use.
Discover how a school app can make life easier right now by contacting our friendly team at Parentapps.