It’s no secret that parents are inherently busy people, having to balance their career and family life, as well as playing a key role in their child’s education.
Last year, an article appeared in a national newspaper, with the headline, ‘My brain can’t handle all of the school emails!‘ – a dilemma it seemed thousands of parents could relate to.
For parents, filtering an influx of school communications to find key information can quickly start to feel needlessly challenging, particularly if this requires accessing multiple systems, each with an individual username and password.
“Filtering an influx of school communications can feel needlessly challenging.”
This can become an even greater issue for parents who have multiple children at the same school, resulting in an array of updates on sport sessions, music lessons, pastoral initiatives, school trips and more. That being said, no parent wants to miss a crucial update that might result in their child missing out.
Effective parent communication
At Brentwood School, we recognise the importance of effective parent communication, and over recent years, we’ve taken meaningful steps to ensure it’s as streamlined, targeted and helpful as possible. A big part of this has been finding a single solution that could handle all comms, which has really helped us maintain an open dialogue with parents.
Working together to support better learning
It’s no secret or surprise to say that one of the most important ingredients in a child’s success is a strong partnership between home and school: when all three points of the triangle – teachers, parents and student – are working together, there is very little that can’t be achieved, and a key part of this is communication.
Research, including a study from Harvard University, proves that frequent and effective communication between schools and families increases pupil engagement, helps keep children on-task, and leads to increased participation.
Schools and parents are aligned in wanting the best for their children but too often meaningful, two-way communication – especially in a busy world – is made more difficult due to a lack of clarity, inconsistency, mutual misunderstanding, or an avalanche of messages.
Whilst we have made a lot of progress, we recognise there is more to do: standing still isn’t something we do at Brentwood, so we’re actively looking into ways to further streamline our comms, with our next project exploring how we can present our school calendar in the most accessible way for parents.
“Schools and parents are aligned in wanting the best for their children.”
Underpinning everything we do are our values – Virtue, Learning and Manners – which were established over 400 years ago. Any changes we make must be aligned with these values and we pride ourselves on encouraging students to solve problems, adopt a growth mindset and challenge the norm.
In the sphere of communication, this means embracing innovative solutions and ‘the art of the possible.’ For example, we were one of the first schools to offer cashless catering, which integrates seamlessly with our communications platform – another feature we implemented with the parent experience in mind.
The positive impact of new technology
Using the Access Education My School Portal software, we now send parents a singular, daily digest email which arrives in their inbox at the same time each day. This email contains all the important information a parent needs to know, personalised to their child and their daily activities.
Each Friday, a summary of my weekly blog is also included within the digest, covering a range of topics relevant to the wider school community and celebrating student achievements. While one-to-one emails are still a key part of our offering, this approach saves parents time, enhances efficiency and enables them to easily revisit key information as and when needed.
“It’s important to not take a blanket approach.”
The reception from parents has been overwhelmingly positive – proving how important it is to consider not just the activity going on within the walls of the classroom, but ways to strengthen the overall home-school relationship.
A personalised approach
Central to improving parent communication is putting in place strategies which are tailored to a school’s student and parent body. Sometimes, this means having the courage to reject popular approaches to improve communication which don’t align with our values or suit our school. It’s important to not take a blanket approach, and we were determined to find a way of maintaining individualised communication whilst ensuring maximum efficiency and user-friendliness. To that end, parents can easily contact teachers directly through our system, keeping up to date with their child’s academic and pastoral development and progress.
The end-goal is always to give students the best education experience, and perfecting our communication with parents is just one way we’ve been able to ensure this becomes a reality.