Good Practice - Case Study

William Ransom Primary School

School No: 47

Use of Twitter to Communicate with Parents

“It's so reassuring to see my child happy in her class. Thanks for the picture.”

“No kids in R/1R but fun to see some photos anyway :-) My kids tell me very little about school. Useful to spy a bit thru twitter!”

Last summer, I decided to try and highlight the positive aspects of social networking to the parents of the Year 6 pupils, by setting up a secure Twitter feed which we would use and update whilst we enjoyed our residential trip on North Wales. We invited parents of the pupils coming away with us to set up a Twitter account and follow the School Journey feed. It was a fantastic success, with every family, many governors and many staff following the goings on in Snowdonia. We posted comments, pictures and even ran competitions for the followers with prizes being given out by the office staff back at school for the winners. It was a fantastic success!

On the back of this, and again with the approval of the governors, I wanted to widen the feed, and so set up a School Twitter account. Again, this is a secure feed, with parents ‘applying’ to follow and therefore the school is able to track who receives the information. This fits in with the School’s acceptable use policy.

To date, we have about a third of our families following, and my target is to get over two thirds. We are using it to post reminders about events, instant sports results or club details, and also photographs and information from school activities and visits. I also want to run similar competitions to those we ran during the trial, and get parents interacting with the school. It is not designed to replace Parent Mail which we use to send out correspondence, it is not designed to replace the School website, which gives much more detail and hundreds of photographs, but I feel it can be very powerful when it comes to providing ‘snippets’ of information, or reminders.

Over time, we will be asking the pupils to ‘tweet’ as well as the staff, and will, when appropriate let the pupils see the replies we have had in from our followers. Social networking is here to stay and as a tool is very powerful. As schools, it is our responsibility to highlight the correct way to use it and the positive impact it can have on our lives. By embracing the technology rather than running away from it, I hope that our parents and pupils will see the potential of this method of communication, and also the ‘fun’ that can be had with it.