Parental engagement is a challenge for most schools, but for those specialising in SEND, it’s an even more critical factor. Teachers and school staff need to maintain excellent two-way communication with parents and carers in order to offer the best possible support to the children they look after.
In order to do this, the right tools need to be in place, along with clear strategies to help foster good relationships between school and home. Building trust and consistency is extremely important, so that both staff and families can work together and advocate for their children.
What your MIS should offer for SEND pupils
In order to build this trust and collaborate effectively, a central source of information is needed. Of course, all schools use their MIS to store their essential student data, but for SEND specialists it’s more important to expand on those basic details. This is why SchoolPod has the ability to capture much richer information around students’ educational needs, their behaviour, and other aspects of their wellbeing.
Contextual information around each pupil’s specific needs can help school staff ensure those needs are met as consistently as possible. If a child is able to learn more effectively in a certain environment or with additional support, teachers need easy access to this information so they can plan accordingly.
As well as storing information for use in school, your MIS should directly connect you to parents and carers at home. Using your MIS to facilitate two-way communication helps to ensure everyone is on the same page.
How your MIS supports parental engagement
Your MIS should make it easier to stay in regular contact with parents and carers. There are several ways this usually works with a system like SchoolPod, which is designed with SEND specialists in mind.
Incident notifications: SchoolPod gives you the ability to notify parents immediately about incidents that occur or changes in routine. Triggering these alerts automatically means that all information is populated directly from the MIS, ensuring accuracy and saving time. This is particularly important for medical emergencies or when safeguarding is involved.
Positive progress: For busy schools, communications about positive things can sometimes be forgotten, which can be a barrier to building better parental engagement. Automated notifications about progress at school or rewards for good behaviour can be a great way to improve this. SchoolPod can also automatically generate certificates and send them via email when milestones are reached.
Event reminders: Your MIS can help with planning meetings and catch-ups, which helps to ensure families get as much face-to-face time with teachers as possible. Sending automated updates with a summary of recent progress can be a helpful way to support these conversations.
Enhance your engagement with integrated communication tools
Beyond your core MIS functionality, you might want to take advantage of more ways to increase your parental engagement levels. SchoolPod integrates with our communication platforms like Teachers2Parents and Groupcall, giving you even more useful tools to help reach more parents and carers, including:
- Automatic translation for SMS and email to reduce language barriers
- Two-way messaging to help keep track of conversations easily
- Parents’ Evening management for online, in-person and hybrid events
To take it another step further, consider how your MIS, communications and payments systems are all integrated. Making things simple for users at home generally leads to higher levels of engagement, which can in turn help you streamline payment collection and reduce arrears.
Choosing the right tools for your school
There are a lot of choices when it comes to school technology. To ensure you have the right tools in place, it’s important to ensure all staff are using them consistently, and regularly gathering feedback from parents and carers about what works best. In most cases, specialist platforms designed for SEND can make a huge difference to parental engagement, and ultimately lead to better outcomes for children.