Tips for Boosting Parent Engagement

Is parent engagement an ongoing battle at your school?

“I didn’t see that email….” 

Sound familiar?

It’s more important than ever to make sure your parents are engaged with your school communications and can easily find and see information relevant to them. It’s easy to think that the more communication the better, but sometimes less is more. Here we explore a few ideas and tips that may help you to boost your parent engagement.

TIPS FOR SENDING PARENT MESSAGES:

• Regular, but relevant, communications are key to engaging your parents. Don’t bombard your parents with too many ‘whole school’ notices to ensure that parents don’t just scroll past your latest newsletter. 
• Make your whole school newsletter less regular, perhaps just once a term, but create more regular updates for each year group, so all information is relevant and interesting. 
• For other communications, keep them short and relevant and avoid including the main bulk of information in an attachment. The easier it is for parents to quickly see the content, the better!

How can SchoolsBuddy help?

Messages can be sent from SchoolsBuddy to any predetermined group, whether that is a year group, subject class (taken from your MIS via integration) or a manually selected group; for example, all students going on a particular school trip.

Messages sent via SchoolsBuddy will appear in the parent’s SchoolsBuddy inbox (online or on our mobile apps), a copy will be sent to their email address, and if the app has been downloaded and push notifications enabled, they will get a notice on their phone, too!

TIPS FOR SHARING PROGRESS UPDATES:

• Even during such unusual times, don’t forget to update your parents on their children’s progress; it’s more important than ever with classroom time missed and virtual learning being introduced alongside in-school teaching.
• If in-person parent-teacher meetings aren’t possible right now, run your appointments virtually, either using video conferencing or simply by phone.
• Leave a slightly longer break between virtual meeting appointments so you can easily move between calls/video calls without overlap.

How can SchoolsBuddy help? 

Using SchoolsBuddy’s appointment system as usual, you can utilise the ability to add in a Zoom (or similar) link to each teacher’s profile which will be shown in the parent’s calendar entry. If you are using phone meetings, simply find the primary contact number for each student within their SchoolsBuddy profile. 

SchoolsBuddy’s appointment system is flexible and can accommodate any length of meeting and interval in between, plus, appointments can be blocked for breaks. Parents can easily book appointments via SchoolsBuddy and will see all their appointments in one place, even for more than one child.

Once a slot is booked it will automatically block the same time for all other subjects/teachers to ensure double bookings aren’t possible.

TIPS FOR YOUR SCHOOL CALENDAR

• Keep your school calendar up to date with entries which are important for everyone in school to know, such as non-uniform days, school closures and other one-off events. 
• Have a single source of truth, with all school calendar entries in one place to make it easy for parents to find the next event concerning their child or children.
• Make the titles of each calendar entry clear and concise to enable quick viewing, don’t hide key information inside the calendar entry.

How can SchoolsBuddy help?

Events are central to the SchoolsBuddy system. While each parent has a calendar within their SchoolsBuddy account, showing the trips, appointments, clubs and other events which their child or children are involved in, there is also scope to add ‘whole school’ events as well.

Simply add an ‘event’ such as a school closure day or a non-uniform day into the calendar for the ‘whole school’ or just a year group if it’s more specific to show in all the parent calendars. This makes a single point of reference for parents to check upcoming events for their child or children.

SchoolsBuddy is a multi-functional software solution that can consolidate a number of separate functions into a single platform, easy for staff and parents to use and manage, including:

• After School Clubs / Extra Curricular Activity Management (sign up, allocation, attendance)
• Online Payments
• Parents Evenings / Parent-Teacher Conferences (appointment booking, schedule management)
• End of Day Dismissal / Transport System (dynamic dismissal / bus lists, attendance)
• School Trips, sports, bookings and other events (including online consent)
• School Communications (messaging, push notifications, inbox)

If you are interested in finding out more, why not book a personal demonstration where we can show how SchoolsBuddy can help transform parent engagement at your school.