Using SMS in Schools

Making contact with parents when a school needs to can be a time consuming and therefore expensive task when someone has to pick up the telephone and speak with each parent. When the boiler breaks down, getting the local radio station to broadcast the news that the school is closed can allow a large percentage of parents to be reached but not everyone will get the news. When Sally didn’t turn up for school, in addition to John, Aidan, Karen, Paul, Kirsty, and fifteen other children, someone at the school needs to speak with a parent to find out why the child is absent.

As every parent typically carries their mobile with them, even when at work, the parent is instantly contactable. Add to this the instant means of reaching a large number of parents simultaneously through SMS, you have a powerful and scalable means of communicating instantly with parents when you need to.

SMS is integrated into a number of school attendance management systems and allows SMS to be sent by the school to the mobile telephone of a parent of an absent child. This capability to send SMS typically also allows broadcast messages to be quickly sent to parents even when the broadcast has to go to many, many parents.

During the winter months in the UK many schools were closed due to snowfall. SMS played an important part in allowing schools to communicate with the parents of pupils in such a way that the high number of parents that had to be contacted did not prevent them being reached before pupils would be arriving at the school. This direct, immediate and almost total communication is something that TV, radio or word of mouth cannot fully address.

HSL provides a number of services and solutions that can be used to enable communications with large groups of people. HSL WebSMS provides a web interface that can be used to easily send a message to distribution lists via a web browser. HSL AlertBroadcast allows a controller to send a message from their own mobile to distribution lists, thus removing the need to be at a computer to send a broadcast message.