We asked schools what to look out for when considering starting out or developing existing technology and systems. Here are some handy tips and things to consider when you’re looking to engage and partner with parents:
Leadership and workforce:
- Parental engagement needs to be led from the top - develop your strategy and produce a strategy planning document involving all stakeholders; this should link with school evaluation and long-term planning. Expect your strategy to change and develop many times as you involve and engage both the workforce and your parents.
- When developing your strategy, look for ways to simplify existing workflow processes for admin and teaching staff – for example, saving teachers time by getting rid of traditional written reports.
- Remember that everyone should have a role; consider the ethos of developing school champions rather than having all expertise held by one or a few people. Make time for staff training and do share expertise between staff – it helps to make staff feel involved and avoids the ‘person in the cupboard syndrome’.
- Don't look for problems and reasons not to do it - join the 21st century and move with the times!
Set expectations:
- Contact all stakeholders (your staff, governors, parents and local authority) early on and keep them in the loop with regular updates.
- Initially keep your promises or expectations of staff to a minimum; let them grow into the system.
- Don't try and do everything at once – mistakes can and do happen. Prepare for these and understand how to put things right. Make good use of your software provider, your local authority and, if you’re lucky enough to have one, your ICT co-ordinator.
Parents:
- Talk to your parents early on and consider what parents will want to see – make a reason for them to visit!
- Engage 'difficult' parents early - offer workshops to parents at parents' nights on making the most of it and continually promote the system with parents at the school gates, through newsletters and through the learners themselves.
- Don’t be shy – hold a big glossy launch and ask engaged parents to be advocates. If they can demonstrate to other parents how they’ve benefited, more will be interested.
Learners:
Don’t forget that content on the system should also engage the children, so they can share the information with their parents after school – use interesting media and technology to get them excited – simple wikis, blogs and digital technologies all work very well.
The techie bits:
- Prepare your data in advance – you should be aiming for an ‘enter data-once use-many’ strategy, best stored in one place. Whilst software is important, it relies solely on the quality and the consistency of the underlying data and information.
- Fully check out the functionality of systems with schools that currently use software you may be considering – don’t rely on sales talk! Ask about the flow of information, real-time data, how data (and information) is presented at school, classroom and individual level.
- If you’re lucky enough to already have a management information system (MIS), use all the capacity of your management information system fully – talk to your software provider to get the best out of the system. They’ll listen to your ideas and requirements and the chances are, they’ve already encountered similar challenges or issues.
- Explore ways to link the underlying data with a front-end web page that can present the information to parents to make it easy and friendly to use.
'Trial, trial and trial again!'