Communication from School

Parent Portal

Our parent portal can be accessed via our website or via an app. You will be sent login details before your child starts at Alton School. The parent portal allows you to access information about your child’s activities, curriculum and progress. Our website (altonschool.co.uk) is the best point of reference for any policy documents. We aim to be as ‘paper free’ as possible, and so will not send you hard copies of these documents automatically. We are of course very happy to send you documentation if needed. Please speak to the School Office if this is the case.

The Weekly Roundup & Email Communication

We communicate via the parent portal as much as possible. Every Thursday we send out the Weekly Roundup via email to all parents alerting them to new information that has been added to the portal that week. This email also contains links to extra information and letters from the School. Urgent information which we need to communicate to parents, for instance a school closure, will be sent via a email and may be backed up by text message if needed. Parents are asked to ensure that they keep us updated with any change of email addresses or mobile numbers.

Parents’ Evenings and Welcome Evenings

At the start of each Autumn Term, there are a series of Welcome Evenings during which aspects of School life relating to academic and pastoral routines are explained. In addition, Form Tutors attend these evenings, which is a good opportunity for you to meet them.

There are two Sixth Form parents’ evenings. These are organised through the School Cloud online booking system, with a choice of in person and online appointments. Each appointment is 10 minutes long, if you need longer, please ask the teacher for a further meeting or telephone call.

Reports and assessments

There are several types of reports that pupils receive throughout the year:

» Interim reports, which are short, data-based snapshots of holistic progress

» Subject reports, which include teachers’ comments as well as data relating to progress;

» Tutor reports, in which Form Tutors comment on pupils’ participation in school life generally

» Exam reports, which contain the results of major exams such as Year 11 and Year 13 January mocks, and end of year exams for all other year groups.

The master reporting schedule for pupils’ reports and Parents’ Evenings will be sent to parents via the weekly Thursday Roundup in September. Reports themselves are published to parents and pupils via the ISAMS Parent and Student Portals and it is advised to download the PDF of each report in order to view the descriptors that explain the terminology used.

After the Summer half term break, students in Year 12 sit end of year exams, the results of which are reported to parents as detailed above. Year 13 students sit their mock exams in January.

SOCS (Sporting Fixtures)

We have a dedicated website and app for tracking sports fixtures including times, locations and team selections. Instructions on how to download the app are on the Parent Portal. All fixtures are put onto the app at least a week in advance. We ask parents to keep an eye on the app until up to half an hour before the fixture starts as it will be updated if the fixture has been cancelled.

Newsletters & Social Media

The marketing department produces a whole School Newsletter every half term which shows what has been going on throughout the School from our youngest to the oldest pupils.

We are also busy on social media sharing insights into all that is going on across the School. Please do follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

If your child has done something that you would like us to share, please contact the Marketing team via communications@altonschool.co.uk.