Preparing for the perfect parents’ evening

Don’t underestimate the importance of parents evening

The first parents’ evening is an important milestone for parents, teachers and most significantly, pupils. It provides a good opportunity for parents and carers to speak to the teaching staff who spend around 30 hours with their child each week! It allows parents the chance to ask any questions, find out how their child has settled into their new class, what they are learning about in lessons, their progress and how they can best support their child’s learning at home. It is for this reason that it is extremely important for parents’ evening to run smoothly.

Logistics, logistics, logistics

It is a massive organisational task to organise a parents’ evening, with school staff having to co-ordinate the logistics, parents having to sync their availability to that of the teachers they need to see, and office staff having to spend hours going through parents’ evening slips trying to allocate times to parents (sometimes for several children who all have different teachers).

Can you please everyone?

If you’ve ever had to be involved with organising a parents’ evening you will know just how stressful it is trying to please everyone, with parents unable to book the appointments they wanted, parents who know nothing about it all due to their children having lost the booking form in the depths of their school bag, or parents who cannot make the proposed dates and want to see the teacher on a completely different day! It can be a nightmare!

Fear not – there is a solution

SchoolPing’s parents’ evening booking form system eliminates these complications and frustrations by allowing the office staff (or teachers themselves) to set up the parents evening through SchoolPing and then letting the parents sign up for a parents’ evening slot directly within SchoolPing.

Automated ‘real-time’ booking

The system allows staff to specify exactly when they are available and how long each appointment slot should be. They can organise their parents’ evenings to span multiple days and are able to customise the start and end time of individual days as needed. They can reserve slots for comfort breaks and manually book slots for parents who may need longer appointments. The parents’ evening booking form then gets sent directly to the parents via SchoolPing.

Booking slots directly via the app

Parents then receive a message asking them to choose an appointment slot to book. Parents are only presented with available time slots and they cannot see who has booked the other time slots for the evening. Parents can also make a note of any specific issues or queries they would like to discuss with the teacher. This then gives the teacher a chance to prepare in advance for each parent, enabling everyone to get the most out of the parents’ evening.

More info?

If you would like more information on how to eradicate the administration of parents’ evening with SchoolPing, visit our SchoolPing page or book a demo with our team.