Communicating with School

A Guide to Communicating with Kingswinford Academy

Kingswinford Academy is committed to continually improving how we communicate with parents/carers. It is important that we work together with parents and carers to ensure communication between home and school is accurate, timely and professional at all times. We acknowledge that it is often difficult to communicate with teachers because of timetable constraints and we also recognise that parents and carers also have very busy schedules.

This guidance aims to help ensure consistent and efficient communication between parents/carers and school and will help us to continue our strong home-school relationship and clarify expectations to ensure that we are mindful of staff workload and wellbeing.

How can you communicate with Kingswinford Academy

You can give your son/daughter a note/letter to bring in for a member of staff (student is responsible for giving this to the correct staff member)
Email your request to info@kingswinford.windsoracademytrust.org.uk identifying the member of staff you would like your query to be forwarded to
Put a note on Class Charts for your son/daughter's Form Tutor / Class teacher to see

Telephone contact can be made via the main switchboard number. Reception is open between 8.00am and 4.30pm each day (Friday closes at 4.00pm). If you call outside these hours there is a voicemail facility available, which will be picked up the next business day. Reception staff will relay messages to staff as soon as possible. Lessons can never be interrupted for teachers to take calls.

Kingswinford Academy staff will endeavour to acknowledge your query (in whatever form it takes, i.e. telephone, email, Class Charts) within 24 hours and resolve the query as soon as possible. Staff who work part-time may take longer to respond. If you have not had a response within three working days please email info@kingswinford.windsoracademytrust.org.uk.

Communication by Email / Class Charts

Class Charts is a very useful way of communicating between school and home. Our first priority is to deliver excellent teaching and learning to all our students therefore staff will check their emails / Class Charts messages at times during the school day that are outside of lessons, planning and assessment time and carrying out other school duties.

Contacting Kingswinford Academy

We will act respectfully and responsibly at all times when communicating with you and ask that you do the same so that together we can model effective home-school partnership to our students. Physical or verbal abuse of any kind will not be tolerated.

In the first instance please contact the following members of staff who are responsible for your child in the following order;

Subject Teacher, Curriculum Leader, Faculty Director, Deputy Headteacher (curriculum), Headteacher
Form Tutor, Head of House, Deputy Headteacher (Student Services), Headteacher

Meetings

Meetings with staff must always be pre-arranged. Parent/carers must not turn up unannounced as they will not be met
If you urgently need to see someone, for example if there is a serious family emergency or a Safeguarding / Child Protection issue please phone ahead and reception staff will do their best to find a senior member of staff to see you
We aim to arrange non-urgent meetings to take place at our earliest opportunity. Kingswinford Academy will determine the level of urgency at its discretion to enable us to manage multiple demands on staff and school

Contacting you

Our preferred means of communication is ParentMail; all parents have the opportunity to register for ParentMail. This allows us to communicate with you quickly via the ParentMail APP (download this from your APP store). Parents' Evenings appointments are also booked through ParentMail.

Telephone calls will be made if immediate contact is required i.e. injury which results in your child needing to go home. We will contact the first named emergency contact listed; if there is no answer, we will call the second named contact. If necessary, we will leave a voicemail message.

We prepare and share a Parental Calendar via the school website at the beginning of the academic year which sets out key dates. Any amendments to this are shared via our Newsletter/Bulletin. Examples below of events in school and how we share information throughout the academic year:

Weekly bulletin
Half-termly Newsletter
Parents’ Evening (one for each year group, scheduled throughout the academic year)
Progress reports set out as per our Parental Calendar
Year 11 Revision Information Evening
KS3 Accelerated Reader Evening
Dance and Music Productions
Year 9 Options Evening
Higher Education / Careers Fair

The Kingswinford Academy website is another source of useful information and will be updated in emergency situations like snow closures or system failures. https://www.kingswinfordacademy.org.uk/

We share achievements and events in school via X (Twitter) and Facebook. We would encourage Parent/Carers to follow our social media pages.