High Street, Tonbridge,
Kent, TN9 1JP
The parents' portal provides an online link between school and parents. Our focus is on the provision of a wide range of information which we believe will allow parents an insight into the day-to-day life of the school and their son's place in it. The portal also acts as a "filing cabinet" for the various communications sent out by the school: on the portal they are always available for reference, and can be updated whenever necessary. Online forms for completion by parents simplify the administration of an ever more complex school life.
Portal content splits into essentially four types:
Take the example of boys' reports. Until fairly recently all reports were posted to parents. The printed report was well received, but took time to arrive for parents living abroad, and over time could easily get lost. It was also an expensive and time-consuming process for the school. For the last few years all reports have been emailed to parents (unless specifically requested otherwise) which is clearly more immediate; however, busy people receive an ever-increasing tide of emails, and storing them for future reference is quite a headache. Now all reports created during a boy's Tonbridge career are available on the portal, available for reference at any time.
The portal allows us some exciting experiments in innovation. One such is the "lift sharing" scheme. For some time parents of both dayboys and boarders have been keen to find out about others living in their neighbourhood with a view to sharing lifts. We have developed an application which combines their postcode (from our database managment system) with a geographical database and Google maps. The result is an interactive map which shows the rough location of parents who have signed up to the scheme, along with relevant contact details: we believe this is unique. We are also developing an application which will allow parents to see if their son has been selected to play in a school fixture, where the fixture is and relevant location details - followed by a full results service.
We have for some time had the ability to stream live media over the internet, but child protection issues have limited what we can do. Since the portal is for internal consumption, we can now broadcast a wide range of events: sports matches, concerts, plays and other key school occasions. This achieved using the expertise of the Media Centre, and the development of Tonbridge TV should provide exciting opportunities for the portal as well as within the school.