North Huddersfield Trust School

The team at North Huddersfield Trust School have been using IRIS Engage for four years. We caught up with Online Learning Coordinator at the trust, Chris Langstaff, to hear about his experiences of utilising the platform to engage with their parent community. 

“IRIS Engage is used at North Huddersfield Trust School. Like most schools, we were eager to reduce our reliance on paper; traditional paper-based parent communications are unreliable, inefficient and expensive. Looking into alternatives, it was clear that IRIS Engage could resolve all these issues and more.” 

“The forms application is fantastic. For school trips, events or any instance where we require parent information, permissions or data, online forms make it easy.” 

“The attendance and behaviour features are also really helpful. For our busy admin team, collecting absence notifications online, rather than fielding daily phone calls, makes managing attendance easier. Plus, it reduces the possibility of inaccurate data.” 

“We can’t quantify how much time IRIS Engage saves us every day because it saves us time at every turn. It is an invaluable tool for our schools. Staff now have more time to invest in the most important tasks. They aren’t stuck on time-consuming manual jobs, such as stuffing envelopes or managing paper-based communications.” 

“IRIS Engage is user-friendly and smart. It integrates with our school MIS, enabling us to contact year groups, classes and individuals with ease. Every member of our admin team has access to the system and utilises it every day. If we have a last-minute communication to send, for example, it’s done in moments – it’s that easy, which enables us to be very flexible.  

For this reason, depending on the staff member, we each utilise IRIS Engage for different things; for example, I use it regularly for circulating school reports and other staff teams use it every day to share important school news and announcements.” 

“The money that it saves our schools quickly adds up across the year and highlights the variety of benefits of digital parent engagement. Communication with our parent community has improved dramatically; we’re seeing a great response rate to information and messages – it has changed, for the better, the way we communicate with our school community.” 

“While the school-facing platform is great for our team, the mobile app for parents is a huge benefit of IRIS Engage. It’s free and we’re doing our best to encourage all parents to download and use it. Push notifications and messaging are both key methods of communication for us. During lockdown, it has been invaluable. We’ve been able to stay in touch and maintain contact with families like usual.” 

“Would I recommend IRIS Engage to other schools? Absolutely. If you need a parent engagement system which improves efficiency, improves parent engagement whilst saving time and money, IRIS Engage is for you. It’s changed the way we work for the better.”