Best practice in setting up a face to face Parents' Evening

This guide explains some best practice policies when running a face to face Parents' Evening. Please follow this guide for help setting up an evening from scratch and for explanations on individual settings.

Configuring the evening

When setting up an evening you will first see the Basic Details page. Here you can enter the desired Title and Information. Whatever you enter here will be visible to parents when they log in, and will also form part of all confirmation emails the system sends in connection with the evening. 

We recommend adding as much information as possible to the Information box in order to help the evening run smoothly. For example the location of meetings (whether they will be in individual classrooms or a main hall), where parents can park and where to enter the school. 

Travel Time

For a face to face Evening, when setting Appointment Lengths you will be asked to input a Travel Time for Parents. Make sure to set this to a suitable period to allow parents ample time to travel between appointment locations. If all appointments are taking place in a main hall for example, travel time may not be necessary. Travel time is only for parents so teachers will still be able to make back-to-back appointments.

10 minute appointments with 10 minutes of travel time will show from the parents appointment view like this:

Note: The appointment length and travel time cannot be changed once a booking has been made on the evening in question.

Setting the room for each teacher

For face to face Evenings where appointments are taking place across multiple locations, it is important that teachers are assigned to the correct Rooms so that parents know where to go for their next appointment.

To set the Room for a teacher, access the teacher record by selecting Data > Teachers from the bar to the left and select the teacher you would like to edit. This will open the Teacher Information page for that teacher where the Room field can be edited.

The Room will show to the parents on their list of appointments:

Printing Appointment Schedule

We recommend that teachers print off their schedule for in-person appointments so that they have a copy of this to hand as they may not be using a device. Teachers can print their schedule using the Print button from the top of their My Schedule section or administrators can print schedules by following this guide. They will also be able to view their schedule from a mobile device if required.

Marking Attendance

Unlike with video appointments attendance must be manually marked. This will help to maintain accurate reporting for the evening. Please see this guide for more information on taking attendance and attendance reporting.