Schoop attracts praise from SEN schools

While Special Educational Needs (SEN) schools face their own challenges, the impetus to engage with parents is just as important as any mainstream school, arguably even more so.

Schoop director Chris Hamblin knows this better than most. He was recently invited by SEN consultant Andy Henderson to speak at the latest meeting of South Wales Association of Special Schools (SWASSH), where his presentation discussing parental involvement using Schoop specifically within a SEN school environment was very well received. Schoop is already making strides in this arena, with one of our clients, headmaster Wayne Murphy of Greenfield Special School in Merthyr Tydfil, confirming the considerable benefits his school had gained from Schoop. After using the app over a year to facilitate communication with parents of his SEN pupils, he reported he found it a ‘great platform for safe delivery of information’.

During his presentation, Chris noted that an estimated 70% of special needs pupils arrive at school by bus, therefore there is little potential for parental engagement – an old-fashioned catch-up with teachers at the school gates being out of the question – so snippets of information, good and bad, may not always be passed on.

Another issue faced by mainstream and SEN schools alike is the perennial problem of notes going missing from school bags, however this is coupled with the the added burden of safeguarding SEN Home/School Link books in these same school bags. It therefore becomes evident that a secure, GDPR compliant method of school-to-parent communication can provide an invaluable service.

Schoop resolves all these issues, as well as encouraging parents to help with at-home learning, in itself having been proven to greatly improve student outcomes. Schoop offers:

• Unlimited push notifications of up to 500 characters – communicate securely with one parent or the whole school at the touch of a button
• News section – upload rich text, images, even videos to Individual Education Plans to aid at-home learning
• Schoop also acts as a hub to complement existing communication channels, directing parents to school websites, learning resources etc. in order to flag up areas of note that may otherwise be overlooked

Both mainstream and SEN schools are able to connect via the Schoop app with parents who traditionally are already engaged in their children’s studies, as well as those ‘hard to reach’ parents who perhaps aren’t always as involved as they would like to be.

We’d like to thank SWASSH for allowing us to present the benefits of Schoop, with Chris reporting, ‘it was a fascinating morning and helpful for us to hear where Schoop fits into the day-to-day life of an SEN school. We think there’s an ideal synergy between the secure, safeguarding requirements of SEN school communications and the easy to use, yet technologically advanced, Schoop platform.’’

Want to find out more? Contact us for a free demonstration and see how Schoop can help with parental engagement at your school!