School Parent Communication App

Families rarely fit neatly into one school. Siblings move between primary and secondary, and some trusts have several schools in the same town. The app supports multiple children across multiple schools from a single login, with each child’s school, timetable, attendance and lunch balance on their own card.

Switching between children takes one tap, and notifications are labelled with the child and the school, so a parent always knows which message, payment or trip they are looking at.

• Multi-child, multi-school accounts
• Each child’s timetable, attendance and balance in one place
• Clear labelling on every notification

The biggest change for schools was consent. Trip permission, medical notes and payment are now collected in one form, with reminders sent automatically to families who have not replied. Payments run through Stripe, so the school receives the money and the consent together rather than matching paper slips to cash later.

Return rates for trip consent improved dramatically once replying became one tap and a payment, and the end-of-week scramble to chase missing slips has largely gone.

Parent–teacher messaging includes read status, so staff can see that an important message has been opened, and parents can reply without hunting for an email address. Every conversation is held against the pupil record, which keeps safeguarding and pastoral teams informed and stops messages disappearing into personal inboxes.

Push notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging mean urgent updates, such as a closure or a change to pick-up, reach families quickly, while routine news can be read when it suits them.

None of this works if the data is out of date. The app integrates with the school management information system, so attendance, timetables, lunch balances and contact details stay in sync without staff re-entering anything. A local SQLite cache keeps the essentials available on a patchy connection.

Built in Flutter with BLoC for state management, one codebase delivers both the Android and iPhone apps, which keeps the features identical for every family and the maintenance manageable for the trust.