Callington Community College, Cornwall
Unique Challenge: Having the resources to encourage parents to use School Gateway
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
Why did Callington Community College decide to use Schoolcomms to reach these goals?
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 via email, text and app.
It’s easy to target specific groups to send messages to – classes/year groups/whole college/staff/students etc.
Schoolcomms technical support also has an excellent reputation and this was important to us.
Were there any advantages to using Schoolcomms that you hadn’t considered when originally looking?
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.
Most parents now pay online for dinners, milk, school trips, afterschools clubs and more.
Schoolcomms technical support also has an excellent reputation
What challenges were you concerned about and how did you overcome them?
We were initially concerned about how to encourage parents and carers to sign up to School Gateway, but the use of the marketing tools such as letter templates, posters, flyers etc. provided by Schoolcomms made this easy.
When we introduced the cashless payments system 18 months after School Gateway was first launched to our parents and carers, there was a concern regarding the initial uptake and how parents and carers would respond. All went very smoothly and the response and feedback has been very positive. Easy to pay for lunches, trips, revision guides etc.
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
Speak to an advisor
They can answer any questions you may have or walk you through a demonstration of the system and its capabilities
