Piota Apps, as a technology supplier within the UK education industry, has been set a challenge! Improve parental engagement whilst ensuring we reduce teacher workload by up to 5 hours per term.
On 3 April 2019, the Department for Education published a policy paper “Realising the potential of technology in education”. It’s purpose is to educate and influence both the education sector and technology providers to improve the use of technology.
“We aim to support and enable the education sector in England to help develop and embed technology in a way that cuts workload, fosters efficiencies, removes barriers to education and ultimately drives improvements in educational outcomes.”
The policy paper sets a number of challenges, requiring the education sector and technology businesses to work together to innovate effectively.
Reducing teacher workload
It’s no surprise that challenge 1 in the DfE list relates to reducing teacher workload. In a survey carried out by the NEU teaching union, 40% of teachers say they will no longer be working in education in 5 years time. The main reason for leaving teaching? Workload was the main reason for leaving for 62% of respondents.
So with our teachers, school leaders and support staff exhausted, what can we do to help reduce their workload?
This is where Challenge 1 in the policy paper comes in.
Challenge 1: “Improve parental engagement and communication, whilst cutting related teacher workload by up to five hours per term.” Department for Education
Keeping parents engaged - improving pupil outcomes
A high level of parental engagement can be incredibly important for a child’s education and attainment. The primary reason that our school app was founded was to provide better communication between schools and parents. What has become increasingly important, is ensuring that the technology schools use to improve parental engagement, impacts positively on teacher workload.
Our school app has very positive feedback and we’re confident that it can meet the challenge!
“The app has saved us admin time as we are able to send out messages quicker than via other methods. I would estimate two-three hours of time per week are saved by this.” Russell King, Deputy Headteacher
And remember, it’s not only time that can be saved but also money with a mass reduction in the use of photocopying!
“[Our] school app has saved us money. It is so quick to get the information out to parents. No photocopying newsletters – just straight out to the target audience.”
After Easter, we will be gaining feedback from all our schools regarding the app and reducing workload. If you’d like to send us some feedback, or enquire about how an app could help reduce your teacher workload, contact us today.
We will be reporting back with our survey results and next round of innovation shortly!
