Introducing Groupcall Messenger

How Flakefleet Primary School boosted attendance and
reduced truancy using Groupcall Messenger

Background:

Flakefleet Primary School had a mission to reduce truancy rates after missing attendance targets for the past five to six years. At the time, their last Ofsted report stated "Improve the attendance of the small minority of persistent absentees to increase their rates of progress and so raise their attainment".

Challenge:

Discovering why students were absent at any given time was paramount to progress, yet proved difficult to determine. Government statistics showed that the school is located in an area of social deprivation, where parental engagement can be significantly low. Traditional methods of calling parents or guardians following daily registration to establish why students were absent proved futile.

Mike Barnes, former Headteacher at Flakefleet explained;
"Ultimately, we needed to source and implement an effective parental communication system that would encourage parental involvement, be simple to integrate, improve efficiencies and provide cost savings - no small feat!".

Solution:

The school set about meeting this challenge, and is now recognised as having the most improved attendance rate in the area, going from 7% to 0.2% in unorthorised absences after implementing Groupcall Messenger following a successful trial period.

Mike Barnes, maintains that the main contributing factor to the school’s improvement is because of Groupcall Messenger's alert feature, which enabled the school to automatically send a text, email or voice message, in any language, to a parent or guardian’s mobile phone or landline, alerting them that their child has not turned up to school, or a particular class.

Messenger can also help your school to:

 Boost attainment 

 Reduce costs 

 Drive engagement 

 Save admin time 

By providing an early alert to parents if a child fails to arrive at school, Messenger ensures that children are in school which in turn helps boosts overall attainment levels.

Groupcall Xpressions is the free parental app within Messenger, which makes communication between a school and parents easier.

Parents can download the app on their on mobile phones and tablets. As all messages in Xpressions are free of charge to send, this significantly reduces the money spent on paper, printing and postage.

Messenger enables your school to enhance parental engagement by allowing for a two-way communication between parents.

Improve communication with non-English speaking families by sending and receiving messages which can be translated in over 100 different languages.

As Messenger reads information direct from the MIS system and sends messages instantly, staff save time by not having to make time-consuming calls and updating data manually.

With incoming messages and attendance write-back, this process is even quicker when using Messenger.

Messenger works with your school's MIS

Groupcall is an integration partner with all major UK Management Information System (MIS) providers, including SIMS, CMIS, Progresso, Bromcom and many more, meaning Messenger can be easily setup and implemented across your school. For those schools who do not have an existing MIS in place, you can still use Messenger via a manual import.