How Does Your School Communicate With You?
Yesterday, our school ran its fifth Bag2school collection.
For those of you who are not familiar with this organisation, it’s worth looking into as an easy and effective fundraising activity. Our schools make around £1000 a year from recycling unwanted textiles, but we have over 600 pupils and should be able to make more. Many smaller schools do.
The problem is, we have no place to store bags, so people are required to bring their filled bags to school on the morning of the collection. The success of a collection is wholly dependant on people remembering to do this, or rather, on us successfully reminding them.
Our school largely relies on newsletters to communicate with its parents. Every child gets a paper copy of every letter in their bag, which means in my case I get 4 copies of a lot of them. You’d think I would be the most organised parent in the school, but sadly this is not the case. So, for parents like me, who know there was or should have been a newsletter, but can’t find it, our schools also put their letters up on their websites as PDFs.
That’s fine for parents looking for information, but what’s the best way to reach parents who take no notice of newsletters?
Because before a bag collection, we send home two written reminders, the kids come home with a bag to fill and this time around we sent them home with stickers as well.
But each time we run a Bag2school collection, I have people approaching me asking what all the bags are for. Or they say ‘Oh, is it today? I’ve got some clothes that I could have donated!’ Some ask if they can drop their bags off tomorrow, or later on that day. It’s so frustrating.
These are probably the same parents who regularly send their children to school in uniform when it’s mufti day, without a can for harvest festival and unprepared for any school trips their class may be going on. It’s obvious that a high percentage of parents do not check their child’s school bag for letters, or if they do, they don’t read them.
Our school has an unofficial Facebook page which has proved very useful for reminders and questions about school events, but of course, not everyone is on Facebook.
I have heard stories of other school who use email or text messaging to communicate with their parents. This would require a lot of time and effort to set up, and I wonder about the expense. It would be nice not to be drowning in paper though.
If anyone has children at a school who uses a method like this to send you information, is it any good?
I know I live in Denmark but our schools over here have somthing called Intranet. It’s on the internet via their website, you get a code when your child starts school and that’s how you communicate. It’s easy and you can write to the other parents in the class and the teachers or headmaster. You can find all you need there from adresses of the other children, phonenumbers and what ever we need to know. The children have their own Intranet, their own code, where they can communicate. Sometimes links are put on there which is kind of homework. I love it, it’s easy and no notes in the schoolbags gets lost. Maybe that can be done at your school.
You see, we are not allowed to be given contact details of anyone at our school. It would be so much easier if we were!
Your intranet sounds great!
We signed up for our school’s system which uses “ParentMail” which I think some schools use. They e-mail all letter, PTA updates, school newsletters etc. I find this much easier, means less paper and I don’t have to worry that stuff being sent home in the school bag is the only way I get anything. Also we get sms’s from the school to remind us of dates, or things that are happening etc, which are handy too.
However, I will say that there will always be parents who don’t read any letters, no matter how they are sent! We’ve got one mum in our class who literally must live in la-la land, because she never reads stuff sent home in the school bag, and she doesn’t read her e-mails either, and her child comes in uniform on mufti day, forgets packed lunches for school trips and never has his homework done because she doesn’t read the notes the teacher sends home on what he needs to do. She’s not horrible, and she can read, (I’ve worked with families where the parents can’t read) she just doesn’t seem to bother. Frustrating I know!
I wondered if some of these parents could read as well, as we have a lot of ESL families in our school but these are the one who come up and ask about the bags using English!
Both kids schools use parentmail and only send paper copies to those who haven’t signed up. We also get texts from GWood about important stuff. In CFord we can use parentpay too to pay for lunches, trips etc online. So much easier! All part of the parentmail system.
Interesting. I wondered if there was a reason primary schools didn’t use Parentmail but it seems they can and do!
We’ve had ParentMail (including texting) in all schools we’ve been in ranging from one that had less than 100 kids upwards, so financially it must be easily viable and certainly doesn’t seem to be a huge problem to set up. In fact this page: https://www.parentmail.co.uk/pricing.html implies it saves the school money.
The only confusion I had was when I started getting texts for Z’s new (too efficient) school last December, when she was due to start in January, at the same time as texts from her then current school and not being able to identify which school they were from without asking someone or knowing e.g. that she’d already been to the xmas disco so it couldn’t be ‘today’!
It’s been great in crises too. I had one from M’s school that was pleading to parents to collect their child early if possible as they had so many other children being sick and couldn’t cope!
That looks really good. I wonder if our school would consider it? Will ask!