This has been quite a year!

As a school website manager, you don’t need me to tell you that things have been a bit full-on for everyone this past year. In the midst of everything, you have continued to strive to create the best online experience for your school community. We can’t thank you enough for all you do.

First of all, here’s to you!

Here are some stats on what you’ve achieved …

• 8,682 news articles published

• 3,478 events advertised

• 16,303 blog posts published

• 1,717 app notifications sent to parents

• 21,008 contact queries managed

That’s some serious work across all the schools we support. Here’s to you and all you’ve achieved!

What we learned in lockdown

COVID-19 continues to cause issues right across the education sector, and of course for all of us day-to-day.

At the beginning of lockdown, which seems like a lifetime ago, we were inundated with support requests and very quickly created a range of resources which are still free to access and proving very popular. Here is a breakdown of the most popular resources available to you as a school website manager:

• Coronavirus and your School Website
• Creating great video with your phone to support home learning
• Free Courses at SchudioTV (from website management and compliance, to SEND support and safeguarding)
• LIVE Replay Sessions at SchudioTV

Compliance Changes

We have seen a single change to the school website requirements at the end of August 2020. That is for financial information that you now need to publish. You can find the details of this specific requirement change here in our blog post.

But, the wider picture of compliance has continued to change and evolve hugely over the last 12 months.

In a recent blog post, I explored mistakes that we see time and time again and how to overcome them. You can read that post here but this is also explored in more depth as part of the courses included in the School Website Manager Membership.

Feature Updates

We have continued to develop and enhance our Schudio School Website Software and have added new features over the past 12 months, including enhanced compliance checks, a form builder and integration with SchudioTV online courses for all school website clients. We’re also made lots of changes to the backend of the system to enhance performance and the stability of the platform.

Partnerships

We have continued over the past year to expand our range of partnerships to ensure that we are only partnering with the very best in the Edtech sector and photography, videography and marketing partners.

That means we can now offer a wide range of services that sit in the periphery of your school website, driving users to your website as the key source of information and engagement.

Check out our latest Parental Engagement Brochure for this year.

SchudioCon

We’ve been so excited to launch our first-ever live, online event over 3 days! 300 schools joined us this event where we explored school websites, marketing, engagement and more with a range of experts and partners. Thank you so much to those of you who joined us. If you missed it, you can still access the sessions at SchudioCon.

Sessions include:

Driving users to your school website using existing tools
How to carry out a school website audit
School Payments – Going Cashless!
Creating and growing a YouTube channel for your school
…. and lots, lots more!

We’re excited that we’ll be running SchudioCon 2021 in October 2021 and can’t wait to share the details with you. Watch this space!