New calendar and changes to Year Group Noticeboards

Following the annual parent survey and discussion with the Governing Body’s parent communication working group, we are making the following changes:

• Move the calendar from Laser to the main school website.  Parents will have the option of synchronising our calendar to a calendar system of their own choice, for example, Outlook or Google.  This will give updates as and when dates are added or when changed.  We will continue to publish dates for the whole school year by the end of July and rarely change an event once published.  We hope that parents will use our calendar to give a long-term overview of school events.
• Launch an App, directly linked to the school website, to give parents more choice about how they wish to view published information.  This is not an additional ‘channel’ of communication: content replicates the web-site.
• Refine Year Group Noticeboards to become a single point of reference for the age-group, including letters, home-learning, details about current learning and year group specific notices.
• Shortening the Weekly bulletin and Latest News to only include whole school information.  Interesting, but less critical, information from year groups about learning will move to Year Group Noticeboards.
• Consistently sending links from Latest News articles to Twitter and Facebook for those parents who follow us on social media.  This is not an additional information channel: content replicates the web-site.  Live updates about school events, for example, return to school time from a trip or latest score from a sporting event, will continue to be published on social media and the front page of the school web-site.
• Continuing to welcome the use of social media by parents to support one another.  However, the school has no involvement in these groups.
• Work with developers to improve the look and feel of Laser.  Continue to use Laser for individual booking, payment and email to individuals and groups.
• In return, we kindly ask parents to
  • Check our calendar periodically
  • Read latest news and check Year Group Noticeboards weekly.  These are updated by us ready for publication every Friday morning.