The Benefits of School-to-Home Management with SchoolsBuddy

SchoolsBuddy offers a complete School-to-Home management system for all kinds of functions across your school.

Using one or more SchoolsBuddy modules within a school creates a dedicated portal on the web or via mobile apps, where every parent goes for details about their child or children and their school activities.

Streamline tasks requiring parent interaction on a single, easy-to-use platform.

SchoolsBuddy provides a range of modules covering every aspect of school life where a parent is involved, from choosing extra curricular activities, to booking parent teacher conferences and making micro-payments plus a lot more in-between. SchoolsBuddy improves engagement and communication between school and home, reduces confusion and eases the burden of the admin team.

Engage, inform and involve parents with all aspects of school life with SchoolsBuddy’s school-to-home management.

Communications
Easily send communications to the whole school or pre-defined groups such as the cookery club participants, or all of Grade 6. Communications can be sent by staff members via the web or mobile app which is emailed to parents and stored in the parent’s SchoolsBuddy inbox for later reference.

Calendar
Each user has his or her own unique calendar that only shows events and entries relevant to the user. This calendar includes whole-school events such as closure days as well as every after school activity, parent-teacher conference booking and school trip. If the school is using SchoolsBuddy’s transport system, the daily bus will also be shown.

Sign-Ups & Choices
SchoolsBuddy is the perfect partner to help organise your ECA/CCA or After School Activity program. Parents can choose preferences for each day, and the system intelligently allocates places based on those choices. Manual allocations are also possible. 

Bookings
Our bookings module can be used in many ways, but the most common is to take bookings for wraparound childcare such as breakfast club. Parents can book the sessions they would like their child or children to attend, while admin can place a cap on numbers and a booking cut-off to ease the administrative burden.

Parent Teacher Conferences / Parents Evenings
Allow parents to book appointments to see their child’s class teacher or teachers with a clever booking system that doesn’t allow double bookings, even if booking for multiple children and sessions. Each booked appointment will appear in their SchoolsBuddy calendar and easy to view staff schedules can be downloaded. Staff can determine appointment duration and spacing and manually book some appointments where required.

Payments
Using SchoolsBuddy payments links everything from school bookings, activities, trips and everything that requires a payment including one-off payments as required. School administrators have a central location to work from, and reporting and summary views make checking and chasing payments much easier. Parents can also easily see what they owe and even receive credits to their wallet for cancelled activities or events for use against future transactions.

Trips & Consent

Having a single location for trip management makes everything clearer for parents, reducing questions and queries coming into the school office. Add all the necessary information for the trip to be shown in the trip invite, which can also be used to obtain parent consent online via a single button. Once consent has been given, the trip details will be added to the parent’s calendar. Easily see a list of consents received and those you need to chase. You can also add a fee for payment if using our payments module.

Sports Fixtures
Working in a very similar way to trip management; arrange and invite team members to fixtures containing all the information required which is shown in the parent/student calendar. Consent can also be collected if required.

Emergencies
Use SchoolsBuddy to inform parents of emergency information such as school closure. Parents will receive messages in the usual way – email and in their SchoolsBuddy platform. If they have downloaded the mobile app and enabled push notifications they will also get the notice to their phone. SMS messaging is also available for immediate communications.

School Transport

If you provide a range of transport services including buses, you can administer timetables, routes and stops in SchoolsBuddy and add students to their default route. Bus scheduling can be automatically updated to a later option when students participate in after school activities or one-off events. Each bus will appear in the parent’s SchoolsBuddy calendar and from there, one-off change requests can be submitted for school approval.

Combining all these features into a single platform has been proven to reduce admin burden by at least 50% on a weekly basis. See our recent Customer Feedback Infographic for more details.

Our modules can combine in a way that is tailored to your school needs. Schedule a Demonstration to find out more.