Mobile technology strategist, Answer, has rolled out mobile and tablet support for UK parent and school community ParentMail, as part of a £2m project.

Over the last decade, ParentMail has gained a community of 3.5m registered parents from 5,000 schools, who use the system to help manage their children’s school life, such as when dinner money payment is required, when sports day is taking place and when swimming kit is needed. Its email and text update formula has helped parents avoid forgotten paper letters languishing in the bottom of school bags. 

Answer has now created a cloud app for iPhone and iPad, together with a web app for other platforms. The cloud platform stores and backs-up content securely and provides a flexible structure that can incorporate new services and functionality in the future.

A new Alert System will ensure that no concert will go un-heard, no sports day un-cheered and no cake un-baked, with details on all children, even those at different schools or nurseries, automatically placed in one central electronic calendar for parents to follow. Communication between schools and parents has become two-way, so parents can make dinner money or school trip payments automatically online and easily provide absence consent without having to print, sign and return slips.

“As all parents know, it’s difficult keeping track of all the schools and club activities that children take part in alongside busy working lives,” says ParentMail managing director, Paul Hughes. “ParentMail’s success over the last 10 yars has been to streamline and simplify communication of all information in an easy to digest and manage format. Answer Consulting opened our eyes and inspired us with what more we could deliver to schools and parents by implementing new web and mobile device technology. This made them the perfect match to overhaul ParentMail’s design, operation and structure so that we can expand our services beyond just schools, into nurseries and clubs. The Cloud-based software platform makes our offering scalable and resilient to drive future growth.”

For schools, the advantages of the service being rolled out onto mobile and tablet devices is that parents can be instantly reached anytime, anywhere. Answer says the new functionality will also enable greater depth of engagement with individual parents and groups of parents, helping to reduce paper-based communications, saving costs, and reducing school staff’s workload.