How Schudio provided a ‘perfect’ new website for Acorns Primary School
THE BACKGROUND
We promote resilience, independence and curiosity. Our teaching encompasses everything from the new primary curriculum subjects to yoga, donkeys as therapy and sensory drama. We have high expectations of our pupils, our staff and our parents! Our new primary school website needed to very engaging.
That’s because we’re a very active school taking part in inter school sport and music competitions. In addition we go swimming,’ splash’ therapy, trampolining, outdoor and adventurous activities, go karting, cycling, vestibular activities. We recognise that frequent physical activity is good for the body. It also encourages a healthy mind and in the case of some our children, helps them to focus on the activities that follow.
Our staff are skilled, committed and wonderful and I consider myself fortunate to lead such a brilliant team of people. We wanted a new primary school website that truly conveyed all that!
THE CHALLENGE
Our old website wasn’t easy to navigate and wasn’t compatible with fancy phones! Parents were trying to find out key information like term time dates etc and they gave up because the information wouldn’t download quickly.
We wanted to easily upload some of the photographs we take and that was time consuming and laborious.
The home page was unattractive and wasn’t easy to translate into different languages (currently we have 10 different home languages).
More and more parents wanted to be part of the IT learning landscape – Teachers also wanted to start a class blog. The new website has made all this possible.
In marketing terms we wanted our website to reflect the range of activities we offer and how brilliantly the pupils engaged with them. A lot of our evidence for learning is photographic or video so it stood to reason that our website should reflect this! We also wanted our website to be fully inclusive and accessible to parents who may not be so IT savvy. The brief was quite a challenge!
THE SOLUTION: NEW SCHOOL WEBSITE, SCHUDIO SCHOOL WEBSITE SOFTWARE
Schudio have made a perfect website for our school. It reflects us and shows our true nature. We are a caring school with a nurturing atmosphere. A priority is to offer amazing learning experiences for all pupils within a specialised context and unique setting! The new website portrays that beautifully.
THE RESULTS
We see loads of parents accessing the information pages. That means they’re keeping up to date with school activities through the news pages. We also get far fewer requests for holiday dates sheets! At the school entrance, parents are commenting about what they have seen on the website and keeping up to date with school events eg, sponsored’ wiggles’ etc.
Staff are enjoying the more responsive web content and especially EAL parents are enjoying getting information in their own language. I am hoping that OFSTED gain so much from our new and improved website that they don’t even bother to turn up and just give us outstanding!
THE FUTURE
We’d like to develop class blogs – this will save money if all parents log on they can see photos of trips and events and activities – currently we print out one or two so that they are aware of how fantastic a time the pupils had that day!
We’re also going to develop the home area to include links to educational websites and signposting for parents. Also I think a community area would be good so we can share ideas about which local places are disability ‘ friendly ‘. I hope that the website becomes the info hub for the school.
