The Challenge
Moat Community College, serving over 1000 students and employing 180 staff members, struggled with engaging parents, particularly those who did not speak English as their first language. The school's administrative staff were overwhelmed by the time-consuming process of forwarding emails and sending out important documents via post. This not only led to inefficiencies but also incurred high costs due to constant spending on stationery.
"Our administrative staff were spending a great deal of time forwarding emails and sending out letters or other important documents via the post. These high volumes were costly in practice but also expensive due to the stationery we had to buy regularly." Aziza Raidhan, Business Manager at Moat Community College,
The Solution
Moat Community College sought an innovative solution to address these communication challenges. They discovered Weduc's ReachMoreParents platform, which offered a comprehensive suite of tools to enhance school-parent engagement. After considering various options, the school chose ReachMoreParents for its ability to integrate with existing systems like SIMS and its multilingual support.
The platform’s customisation options allowed Moat Community College to personalise the app to match their school branding, further enhancing their communication strategy.
The Results
After implementing ReachMoreParents, Moat Community College experienced significant improvements. The streamlined communication processes reduced the time and costs associated with manual communication methods. The integration with SIMS and the multilingual capabilities of the platform ensured that all parents, regardless of language barriers, could stay informed and engaged.
The benefits to parents became immediately apparent. Clear and attractive visuals in a school-branded app help improve understanding and engagement for non-native English speakers. Where written communication is needed, different versions of the app can be utilised by harder-to-reach families in their preferred language to ensure understanding.
"In addition to the benefits the app provides us, we’re particularly pleased with the freedom to personalise the platform to match our school branding.
Teachers have benefited from a self-explanatory system that keeps all relevant information in one place, with time saved as there is no need to forward emails. Information can be processed efficiently and engagement with parents is simplified. The system updates SIMS with absence management, behaviour, payments, newsfeed, calendars, time and reminders, giving an instant view of what is happening across the school.
Teachers no longer need to rely on students writing down homework tasks while in the classroom, as the system can be used to set tasks quickly and easily. Exam timetables don’t need to be printed out as all data can be shared on the app and viewed with one click. For the school as a whole, the ReachMoreParents platform is also significantly more cost-effective in comparison to the previous solution. Expensive text messaging is no longer needed to send timely updates to parents.
The successful adoption of ReachMoreParents has not only streamlined communication but also strengthened the overall relationship between the school, parents, and students.
