SCHOOLS ONLINE
CASE STUDY: PETERBROOK PRIMARY SCHOOL When Steve McGaw became head teacher at Peterbrook Primary School (www.peterbrookschool.com) in Solihull back in 2001, the school’s web presence was non-existent. However, after working with Primarysite to create its first website in 2004, the way the school communicates has been transformed. The site now forms an integral part of the school community, receiving around 600 hits a week. It even has it’s own child-friendly mascot, Peter Brook the bear, who features heavily on the homepage. “We wanted to have something that encapsulated our vision, our values, our ethos, and it became the bear. When we launched the second version of our website in October 2008, we put little animated bears all over the homepage and it’s proved massively popular.” As well as give the site its own unique identity, the introduction of Peter Brook has also had an impact on pupils’ learning. There is an
need to be now,” Mary says. “When people come to us – new teachers, pupils or parents – they always say: ‘You’re the school with the website.’ That’s been quite important to us in terms of recruitment so it’s worth investing that time.” Mary knows the importance of an effective website. In previous schools she has tried ‘build your own’ web packages, and says that they are easy to set up but very limited in what you can achieve. “They give you a basic school website – they just let you display a few pages of information. But if you want to go further than that, you have to invest the time. I don’t think there’s a shortcut to that. “We’ve been lucky. The site’s been a labour of love for Mandy, and if it hadn’t been for her goodwill we wouldn’t have a site that was anywhere near as good without a budget. If we had to start from scratch, I would definitely need to employ someone to run it. It takes a lot of time each week to maintain the website,” she says. Former teacher Geoff Millington knows
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actual Peter Brook teddy bear in the school that pupils can take home with them on weekends and holidays, providing they write an account of their experiences for the website, thus improving their literacy skills. As technology has evolved, so has the site’s content. It now contains a link to a separate site, Radio Peterbrook (www.radiopeterbrook.com), which contains a selection of educational podcasts covering everything from phonics to music lessons. But it’s not just the pupils who are benefiting from the website’s content. “The site has had so many benefits that we didn’t anticipate,” says Steve. “For a start, any post that ever comes up at Peterbrook is advertised in the jobs section, and we find that no matter what the post that comes up is, we are swamped with applications. It’s also a great admissions tool. We have a video prospectus on the site, so the website really sells the school for us.” Parents have also embraced the site, although Steve says some were reluctant at first. “When parents enrol their pupils here, they have to fill in an IT permissions letter. One of the questions asks if they are happy for their child’s work to appear, anonymously, on the website. We used to have 3 or 4 per cent of parents who said no, but now it’s down to less than 1 per cent.” He adds: “Parents know that our website is safe. When their children ask if they can go online to play games, they tell them to go onto the games section of the school website, because it’s secure and they can trust it.”
just how much work goes into setting up an in-house school website; his initial attempts at creating a site for his old school, Bowbridge Primary (www. bowbridgeprimary.com) in Nottinghamshire, resulted in failure and frustration. “I was a fairly young teacher at the time, and I could see a lot of potential in making use of the school website so we could communicate with the kids at home, and give them advice on their homework. So, I approached one of the Governors at the school who had a web design company, and he created a website for us. But the problem was that we couldn’t update it – anything that we wanted to put on there had to go through him, which could take weeks to be uploaded if he was busy. Although the site looked brilliant to start off with, nobody used it after a short amount of time.” The second attempt also proved fruitless. “We then got the ICT leader at school to make a site using Microsoft FrontPage, which again looked quite good from the outside, but it wasn’t updatable, and so
after about six months there were still the same news stories that were on there from the beginning.” It was Geoff ’s wife, Rose, who finally produced a long-term solution. She’d been taking a web-design class and was able to come up with a content management system that met the school’s needs. “What I needed was the ability to update the site myself. I needed something that worked like a Word document, where I could go in and make the changes I needed to – nothing too complicated.” The new website worked. It quickly attracted attention from other primary schools in the area, also looking for a child-friendly, easy-to-maintain site. This demand led to Geoff and Rose setting up Primarysite (www.primarysite.net), a web design company that specialises in primary school web design. Primarysite has designed websites for more than 1,200 schools. “Most of the schools that come to us have gone through the process that my
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