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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…

There’s no doubt that a school app can make a significant difference to how, what and when a school communicates a variety of information. But how does it help parents themselves? Does it make that much of a difference?

In many homes today, both parents tend to work and we all seem to be leading increasingly busy lives. If you’re trying to juggle home and work life and get the right balance, you need all the help you can get.

Better communication, should theoretically allow parents to manage their time better and ensure they are more intimately engaged with what their kids are doing at school. Nearly all of us have some form of smartphone or tablet and greater connectivity across the board means we can communicate and access information on the move at any time of day.

If you’re a busy parent who is rushing from meeting to meeting, trying to juggle several jobs at once or even working from home, having relevant information at your fingertips is a godsend.

A school app can inform you through immediate notifications. For example, if there’s been a change to the timetable or you need a reminder that certain equipment is to be taken into school, you can get that information delivered straight to your smart device.

It’s not just a one way process either. You can quickly log into the school system and see what’s coming up over the next week. Perhaps your child will be staying late one evening which means you need to plan your evening meal for later. Maybe there’s going to be a training day and the school will be closed so you have to organise some child care.

The good news is that there’s nothing complicated about all this.

Once parents are aware there’s an app, they can easily download it and start engaging with the system you have set up. That app can be tailored to specific needs and should mean there’s much greater control if you have the right strategy in place.

While arranging an appointment, a parent can quickly check their app to make sure there’s nothing clashing on that day. If they’re working flexible hours, they can easily use the app to organise their office hours. If you’re a school running special events such as the Christmas play or the summer sports day, you can ensure better attendance because parents get notifications and reminders in a timely manner.

You can even make parents feel more involved by getting their feedback on certain issues through surveys.

However wide ranging your communication via a school app is, there’s no doubt that it helps busy parents organise their time better. It’s given schools greater scope and many have developed new communication strategies that are designed to bring parents on board at a deeper level.

For parents, it means they always have the information they need at their fingertips and which helps them run their lives, whether that’s simply organising the evening meal, making sure homework is done or taking part in events throughout the year.

Find out how creating a school app can transform the lives of parents today.