Name: Jigsaw School Apps
Based: Stoke-on-Trent
Website: www.jigsawschoolapps.com
Jigsaw School Apps (JSA) help schools revolutionise their parental engagement by building them a set of customised apps on iPhone, Android and Windows. The apps have a web-based control panel for schools to add news, events (which parents download to their device’s calendar), surveys and PDF files. It also has automatic translation into 80 languages.
The objective is to improve school-to-home communication and JSA identified the issues with current systems: lost letters, expensive, restrictive text-based systems, reliance on parents not looking at the website frequently enough, and also the low response rate to surveys sent home to parents and the hard-to-reach parents who do not have English as their first language.
In order to be judged as outstanding by Ofsted, schools must show “highly successful strategies for engaging with parents and carers, to the very obvious benefit of pupils, including those who might traditionally find working with the school difficult”. So it is an important issue for all schools.
We launched at the Bett Show [a trade show for educational technology and resources] in 2014 with a small stand and no idea how we’d be received. However the interest was amazing and this year we return to as finalists for IT Company of the Year at their awards.
We attend many trade exhibitions and make full use of blogs and social media to inspire interest in what we do. We feel our market is huge and global, and are beginning to partner with other companies to expand our reach.
Berni Williams is the social media manager at Jigsaw School Apps
