Parents' Evening

Parents' Evening Booking provides a quick and easy way for parents to book appointments with teachers.  You can select to create a parents' evening event using any of the groups synchronised from your MIS system for example, registration groups or classes.

IMPORTANT:  Before inviting parents to an event, ensure you have generated their accounts.

• Integrating your MIS Data & Generating Parent Accounts
• Creating Your Parents Evening Event
• Checking Staff Details
• Administering the Parents Evening
• Booking Appointments on behalf of parents

Integrating your MIS Data & Generating Parent Accounts

Once you are happy with the data that is appearing in the Data Dashboard, follow the instructions to generate accounts for parents.

Creating Your Parents Evening Event

• Click onto the Add-ons tab on the admin bar, then choose the Parents' Evening module.
  
  
• Click on the 'Create' tab on the left-hand side:
  
  
• Give the Parents Evening a relevant Title 
  
  
• Using the '+ ADD' button, you can choose which registration or year group(s) or other groups are included in this Parents Evening.
  
  
  
  
• Tick the groups you wish to include then click 'ADD' 
  
  
• Set the date of the event plus, start and end time.  If your event is over multiple days, click Add Date to add more days
  
  
• Set Booking Available Between to set the booking window within which parents can make a booking for the parents evening.  If you choose to end bookings on the same day as your first event, you will be able to set a time for bookings to finish, so you can allow some time to prepare on the day.
  
   
  Once the booking window ends, the Booking Form will no longer be available for parents to book in.  
  
  
• Set the Slot duration, to indicate how long each appointment will be
  
  
  
  
• Travel Time can be set (if needed) to allow time to get from one appointment to the next.  
  
  
  
  
• Additional notes for parents allows you to provide any useful information for parents, such as whether appointments are in person or online, or if a particular teacher isn't available.
  
  
• Click Next at the bottom of the page to continue
  
  
  

Checking Staff Details

For each member of staff who is allocated to the groups you selected in the previous steps, you will see a row allowing you to tweak their settings.  

• Check that the relevant teachers have been pulled through in correlation to the group(s) you've chosen in the first steps.
  
  
• For each staff member you can:
  • Change the Start Time and End Time if the particular teacher is only available for part of the evening. 
    
    
  • Change the duration of the meetings with specific teachers if, for example, you had a special needs class that needs a little extra time.
    
    
  • Remove any groups a teacher does not need to meet under the Class field.  For example a Head of House may be allocated to all pupils in the house, but may not want to meet with all of those families, just the classes they teach.
    
    
  • Mark as unavailable on a particular date by unchecking the tick on the right.
    
    
  • Change a teacher's name which is visible to parents when booking.  This can be used to facilitate making only one set of appointments available where teachers work together with one class. 
    
    
• Save the booking form as a draft to work on it at a later date by clicking on the 'Create Draft' button, or you can publish the booking form by clicking on the 'Publish' button. 
  Publishing will make the event visible to any parents who log in, but they will not be able to book until the booking window that you set arrives.  
  
  

Administering the Parents Evening

Once your parents evening has been published, you can view the event to manage it and check the progress of bookings.

• Send Email will allow you to send an invitation to all the parents associated with the Parents' Evening. 
  • By default the email will include the details of the event, including a link to take them to log in to the booking page.
  • You can edit the wording in the email if you need to and, personalise the message using placeholders.  When sending, you can choose all parents or just the primary contact.
  • You can choose whether to send reminders to parents with bookings the day before your event, this can be set globally for all your parents evenings in Add-on Settings
    
    IMPORTANT: 
    Before inviting parents to an event, ensure you have generated their accounts.
    

• Group Sending Options
  • By default, the message will be sent to any contact associated with the child who has Parental Responsibility AND an email address (or mobile number for text messaging), as recorded in your MIS.
  • Click the dropdown on the send button, to select Primary Contacts Only.  This will only send the message to contacts who have an email address associated (or mobile number for text messaging), and who are both Parentally Responsible, and priority contacts for a pupil, as recorded in your MIS.
  • Bear in mind that anyone with access to the pupil details will see ALL appointments, no matter which parent booked the appointment. 
    If you have any parents who you do not wish to receive messages, you will need to ensure that they are not marked as having Parental Responsibility, or as a Priority/Primary contact, as appropriate, within your MIS system. Or, that they do not have an email address or mobile number associated on their record in the MIS.

• Add to Website Calendar allows your event to be added to your website calendar directly from the parents' evening admin area.  Key information will be populated for you, including the link to book.  
  
  
• Recipients allows you to check which pupils & parents are included in the event.  You can select by group, and also filter to show students with No Contacts, which will enable you to identify anyone who won't receive an invitation to book online.  
  
  
• Report allows you to see who has booked onto your parents evenings.  Again, you can select by group, and this time you can filter to find pupils who have no appointments booked yet.
  
  
• Teacher Schedule is used to distribute the teacher appointment schedules to staff.  It can either be printed of emailed (if you have synchronised teacher work emails from your MIS).
  
  
• Pause can be used if you need to stop parents booking in the event of an issue.  You'll be able to email parents to let them know you have paused bookings, and also when you reopen them.

Booking Appointments on behalf of parents

• Click please select staff and choose from the list of teachers, and select a date (if you have a multi day event) on the right.
  
  
• Click the Book Now button to the right of an available appointment to choose a pupil who an appointment can be booked for.  You'll only be offered pupils who are expecting to see the selected staff member.  
  
  
• Notes can be added for
  • All parents booked with the selected teacher
  • Against a particular booked pupil
    * Notes can either be private, so they will only show on the teacher schedule, or public, so they can be viewed by the parent when they log in to the Parents' Evening add-on.  
    
    
• Scroll to the bottom of the page, to save bookings.  When you save your changes, you can select to email the parents with any changes you have made, by ticking the checkbox, if required.
  
  

Making Slots Unavailable & Setting Teacher Breaks

Once you have saved your Parents Evening, you will be able to change the status of certain time slots to 'Unavailable' so that parents will not be able to book them.

This can then be used for breaks for teachers as well as to make appointments for a second parent if needed. 

• Click on the 'Available' button on the timeslot that you would like to make unavailable:
  
  
• You will be prompted to input a reason
  
  
• Enter a note.  For example, 'Break time' or ''Appointment for Billy Jones' Dad'.  
  
  
• Then click 'OK'.
  
  
• Once you have set the note, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save Bookings
  
  
  
  
• The appointment row will now be marked as Unavailable and the note will appear on the Teacher Schedule, so the staff member can see what the appointment has been booked out for.

How can a parent access the Parents Evening Event and how do they book?

Please note: When your Parents Evening Booking is enabled, a dedicated page is usually created on your website that you can share with your parents.  This page can be edited as required.  

Accessing the Parents Evening

• Parents can access your booking system at any time by appending /parentportal/parents-evening to the end of your website address/URL.
  • For example: www.schoolname.co.uk/parentportal/parents-evening 
    
    

• They will be prompted to log in by entering their email address and password. If they have not yet set their password, they can request a password reset email by clicking ‘Forgot your password’. They should use the email address that they have registered with the school.

  

• Booking Appointments
• Parents can select the child they wish to book for in the top right-hand corner of the screen.by clicking the circle containing the child's initials. 
  
  
• If the event is across multiple days, they will be able to select the day they would like to attend using the drop down.
  
  
• The parent click a time slot for each teacher they would like to book with to reserve the time. The selection will show in green with the word “RESERVED”.  The slot will only be reserved for 10 minutes.
  
  
• They must confirm the reservation by clicking the Save button in the bottom right corner.