“Making communication easy and accessible increases parent engagement, which in turn can help to improve the quality of education in our schools.”
Justine Greening, UK Secretary of State for Education
It’s no secret that parental engagement is key to a child’s success in school. According to a report by the National Center for Education Statistics, children who have high levels of engagement with their parents are more likely to have higher academic achievement and are less likely to have disciplinary problems.
So why do UK parents feel left out of the loop?
According to a 2019 report from the National Foundation for Educational Research, only 14% of parents in the UK feel that their school is doing enough to involve them in their children’s education.
It’s a major challenge for schools to drive their parent engagement, and it’s often comes down to the time it takes to involve parents (that schools simply don’t have enough of) and the tools they have available.
There are many ways for parents to become more engaged in their child’s education. From the events you run as a school such as parent-teacher conferences, open days, and performances, to inviting parents to volunteer in the classroom or at school events.
Another way to engage parents is to keep them informed about their child’s progress. Parents can be sent regular updates about their child’s grades, homework, and behaviour which allows parents to be more involved in their child’s education and to provide support when needed. This is heavily entangled with the tools and software schools have to facilitate this communication.
When parents are involved in their child’s education, both the child and the school benefit. Therefore this is a major point of focus for us at Compass. All Compass schools use and love the email, News Feed, SMS and push notifications built into our MIS and the Parent App. However we’ve seen and heard from our 2,000 schools across Australia, Ireland and the UK that there isn’t enough time in the day to regularly email parents to help keep them involved in their students learning.
We found through client feedback and discovery sessions that there was an appetite for more informal and easy to use chat functionality. So we set to work creating Compass Connect.
What is CompassConnect?
CompassConnect is a chat feature built into the Compass portal and app, allowing users to manage all school communications in one place.
Staff can quickly and easily chat with and send files to other staff members and (if enabled for your school) parents and students, too!
How does Connect work?
Schools will have the option to enable Connect for different user groups: staff, parents and/or students.
Users will be able to access Connect in the Compass portal by clicking on the speech bubble icon in the navigation bar.
If using the app, users can either click into the hamburger menu on the left hand side (staff) or the speech bubble icon in the horizontal navigation bar (students and parents).
Once in the Connect module, users will be able to send and react to messages, as well as send images and files.
For any out of hours communications, a banner will appear to alert the sender that their message may not get read or receive a reply as it was sent after school hours.
Want to chat?
We invite schools to book a discovery session with our team to learn how we are leveraging innovative solutions and listening to client feedback to create better experiences for all. Our team is dedicated to learning from our clients and creating the best outcomes possible.
