Summer 2024 Software Update

Hello and welcome to the Summer 2024 Parents Booking software update.

This Academic Year (August 2023 to end of May 2024 at the time of writing) has been one of the most exciting for us. Not only did we welcome over 1600 new schools as customers, we completed two enormous tasks that have been being worked on behind the scenes for about two years. We have now released a big software update which brings with it all the new features below, but also 1) a totally new Admin and Teacher area web page design, and 2) significant changes and updates to the technology that underpins Parents Booking, including our database technology.

New features:

• Parents Booking’s Admin and Teacher web pages have a brand new look.
• The Notifications area, driven by a red banner at the top of all Admin area web pages, has had a significant upgrade so that it is much more intelligent. It should now:
  • Diagnose problems with your parents’ evening, e.g. new students can be added, or students in the parents’ evening not being ‘linked’ to teachers (meaning parents cannot book appointments for them)
  • Notice changes to class lists or similar, that have been made by Admin or imported via CSV or data sync, and offer to apply these to the parents’ evening.
  • Email admin users a reminder to apply the changes it is recommending if these go unnoticed over several days.
• The Admin Dashboard has a new page (Dashboard > Options > Show Teacher Availability) which provides a colourful interface that presents teacher availability in a simple, pretty way. This will help Admins preview teacher availability before, during and after a parents’ evening.
• Schools can now activate a Waiting List when creating/editing a parents’ evening. This allows parents to make clear that they wanted an appointment with a teacher that was fully booked. Teachers can see this list who wanted an appointment with them, and the Admin users can check and download the waiting list in case they want to share it with colleagues who may want to send a report or email to these parents instead. If appointments become available, the Admin can book the highest prioritized parent from a parents’ evening’s Waiting List page, as well.
• Where allowed by your school, local authority or MAT, Parents Booking will be able to import flags such as ‘SEN Status’, ‘Pupil Premium’ or ‘EAL’ to help with prioritizing appointment invites or analyse uptake and parental engagement among certain groups of students.
• Community Brands customers, such as Teacher2Parents, Messenger, Xporter, WisePay, SchoolMoney and ParentApps users, can now login to Parents Booking from these products from their Launch Pad and 9-Dot via a single sign-on.
• We’ve also added a ‘Sign in with Xporter Identity’ option to our login page, for schools who use Xporter Identiy / Idaas.
• Admins no longer need to create a Class Code name when making changes to class lists. We have created a naming convention which uses today’s date plus the name of the Reg, Class Code or Year that the students were in, instead. This will make the task of changing class lists much easier and straightforward.
• Parents can now book all their children ‘manually’ on on web page, the same as they could using Suggest Bookings for Me, without having to toggle between their children like before. This will make booking for siblings who are in the same parents’ evening even easier.
• We’ve made the teachers’ video meeting room even easier to use, with the clock even more obvious (and the clock will flash red for the last 30 seconds of meetings).
• All Reports now have a search box on them to find parents/students/teachers more easily.
• You can now add and delete students from a parents’ evening by their Reg, Class Codes and Years, more easily. This is really helpful when you want to just add a Custom Group or Class Code to a parents’ evening – for example for Targeting evenings.
• Comments/discussion topics added by parents during the booking process are now being shown in the video meeting room.
• Schools which use Teachers2Parents are now able to upload their CSVs to Parents Booking, to make it even easier for them to set up parents’ evenings using a process they’re already familiar with.
• There’s now an easier way to send teachers their logins, using a ‘login statuses’ drop-down on the Teachers page.
• There are now handy tool tips to the Create/Edit a Parents’ Evening page, to make all the settings easier to understand. We’re presently adding these to the Create/Edit Event, Club and Wraparound pages too.
• We have added a wizard to the ‘create a student’ process which lets you add them to their teachers/classes at the same time – this should be a great time-saver for these infrequent situations.
• School staff and parents can now all login using their Microsoft account as a SSO.
• Parents will now see a new “My Bookings” button on their Dashboard, which takes them to a web page that summarizes all of the events/clubs they have booked, bought places/tickets for, or subscribed their children to. This will help where a school offers lots of clubs, and can be something parents can stick to their fridge.
• We’ve expanded our ‘Unsubscribe’/RSVP “No” functionality so that parents can explain in as much detail as they like why they can/will not attend. This helpful qualitative feedback will be shown to school Admins.
• Parents can now be given a voucher balance (e.g. from their childcare vouchers) to spend on events, clubs or wraparound that the school allows this to be spent on. The Admin simply needs to input the amount the voucher is worth on a parent-by-parent basis.
• The Reports pages have been upgraded to show lots of new features, for example analysis of the quietest and busiest hours, the most popular appointment times, more statistics and percentages.
• Teachers can now flip a switch on their Dashboard to see past parents’ evenings, making it even easier to look at old schedules and/or input attendances.
• Schools who have parents login with a username and password will now find it easier to send specific parents and year groups their login info. Following a feature request, there’s also a way to bulk-reset all parent passwords.
• We now show the Payment ID on any refund requests parents send, to make it easier for you to find their payment in PayPal and Stripe.
• Lastly, there’s a new crop tool to help make uploading your school’s logo easier now.

To follow imminently:

• We’ve almost finished a bigger, better, more functional Attendance section, which will be a big help for managing both in-person and video parents’ evenings live / on the day.
  • A separate Manage Attendance section for Events, Clubs and Wraparounds will follow around 3 weeks later.
• An integration with TeamSOS.

Coming next:

• Detailed logs which capture every action undertaken by every user, reviewable by admins, will be added in Q3 of 2024 hopefully.
• A direct data sync with SIMS’ “SIMS ID” API will be added in Q3 of 2024.
• A Room Booking System is slated to be released by the end of 2024.
• We want to build a login portal for local authorities and multi-academy trusts, to display return on investment and usage statistics.

Separately, Twilio, our video meeting technology partner, have announced that they will be depreciating their programmable video meeting technology by the end of 2024 and are replacing it with Zoom’s SDK technology. Migrating to this technology and gracefully releasing it for all customers will be a significant development project through Q3 of 2024.

In addition to all of the forthcoming features (which we hope to release mostly in over the summer of 2024), we have a road map containing around 70 other tasks that we spend every day working through. However, if you want us to add a feature which you don’t see here, send us an email about it.