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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…

The Conservative Government has done a lot to create more academy schools in recent years. While they have their detractors, academies have also certainly thrived and are providing high standards of education for pupils all over the UK.

As with any other type of school, academies need to be able to communicate with their pupils and parents as efficiently as possible. While in the past, this was achieved on websites which provided relevant information, more and more institutions are starting to turn to dedicated apps.

For academy schools, these have a host of great benefits that in many cases have transformed the relationship between stakeholders at all levels.

It’s Cost Effective

As a way of disseminating important and useful information, a mobile app for academy schools is not only cheap to set up but can save on costs in administration and time. Rather than staff being tied up with trying to contact parents when an issue has come up, the mobile app can send out notifications that go direct to smart devices such as phones and tablets.

Teachers Don’t Have to Worry About the Cost

Because it’s cheaper to install an app, you can send as much information to parents and pupils as you like. Your teaching staff don’t have to think about saving your academy school money and can therefore entertain more dynamic and varied engagement with all those who have the app downloaded onto their device.

You Can Tailor Your Academy School App

Using a website is fine for disseminating information but it requires the parent or pupil to actively go to that online location. With an app, you can send out a range of different communications which can be received as notifications and get an immediate reaction. You can also decide what sort of information parents and pupils access through the app. In short, mobile school apps can be better tailored to what you school needs and provide exactly what parents want – you can even send different messages and have select content for certain years or sets of pupils.

Make Your School Greener

Academy Schools normally have a lot of information that they need to get out to parents and pupils. In the past that would have included printing off a lot of material and sending it out. Most of us nowadays have at least one smart device and we’re used to getting information and updates on them.

It makes sense therefore to utilise this powerful way of communicating. For academy schools that want to boost their green credentials and help save the planet, cutting down on all that paper and time consuming engagement can lower carbon emissions as well as giving admin staff extra time to do more important work.

Just a couple of years ago, if you’d wanted to create your own academy school app you would have had to employ a professional designer at great cost. With the range of templates now available online, all your school needs to do is sign up for an app and start using it. You don’t need to worry about getting updates to the software either as this is done automatically, keeping your app working and safe from the latest online threats.