Schoolcomms

Callington Community College

Time to read: 2min 20 Jul 2022

Schoolcomms case study

Phase: Secondary

Local Authority: Cornwall

Unique challenge: Having the resources to encourage parents to use School Gateway

Objectives

  • To improve college-to-parent communication.
  • To reduce paper usage.

Solution

  • A user-friendly system.
  • A company with a reputation for supporting their schools.
  • A system that could offer everything we needed and more.

Outcome

  • Dramatic improvement in parent-college communication.
  • Huge reduction in paper usage.
  • Became a cashless College.

What goals were you hoping to achieve when you decided that an engagement system would be a good fit for your school?

  • To improve communication with parents and carers.
  • To reduce the amount of paper-based communications to parents, carers and students.
  • To implement an interactive and user-friendly system for staff, parents and carers.

Were there any advantages to using Schoolcomms
that you hadn’t considered when originally looking?

The ability to do so much more than just send/receive messages – parents and carers can view timetables, attendance, reports and more.

We also knew there was the potential for a cashless system in the future for payments and school lunches – which we have now introduced since our initial launch of School Gateway.

What has parent and staff reaction been to School Gateway?

Very positive and a big initial uptake from parents and carers. We now have 82% of parents and carers registered on School Gateway and 59% using the app. These numbers are increasing all the time.

We found Schoolcomms to be an extremely user-friendly system that incorporated so much more than just a way to communicate with parents and carers.

What has been the impact of adopting Schoolcomms?

  • Improvement in communication and in a much more timely manner, especially for emergency closures, cancellation of clubs/fixtures, etc.
  • Huge reduction in printing and postage costs.
  • We are now a cashless college.
  • Staff are more regularly engaging with parents and carers.
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