ParentMail the “one stop shop” for school communications

With cash and cheques regularly coming into school for trips and school items, The Brent Primary School were keen to move to an online payments system to simplify managing payments from parents.

Already using two separate systems to communicate with parents, and having to continue sending paper forms and parents’ evening slips home, The Brent Primary School were looking for a system which would allow them to collect payments as well as communicate with parents – and ParentMail was the obvious choice.

We spoke with Business Manager Dan Baker to find out why ParentMail stood out above the rest:

“Initially, we were looking solely at online payments systems, as we already had a system in place for sending emails and another for sending texts. It was clunky, but it worked. We looked at the market leaders for online payments and ParentMail was head and shoulders above the rest – the software, the design and the back office payments in particular were far more advanced than any other system we looked at.

ParentMail was also the only system where parents could make online payments through a mobile App – as well as reading school messages, completing forms and booking parents’ evening appointments. This was a huge thing for us as parents regularly told us they didn’t have access to emails, so being able to do all of this from an App on their phone meant we got 96% of parents registered with ease.

It’s an added bonus that parents can report absences through the App – one that we now couldn’t live without.

We went from using separate systems for emails and texts, collecting payments physically and continuing to send letters and forms home, to a “one stop shop” doing it all through ParentMail -  and parents and staff love it.

We’re now collecting money from parents electronically, receiving responses to forms from staff and parents, sending regular messages home and being able to see who has read the information we send, and for our next parents’ evening will be allowing parents to book their appointments online too!

We’re now looking forward to using Registers to collect payments for our breakfast clubs which again will make our life easier.

Would we recommend ParentMail to other schools? Without a shadow of a doubt – yes!”

If you’re a UK school or college interested in using the leading online school payments system, get in touch today and we’ll show you how easy it could be.