Earlier this year RHAC engaged an external marketing and communications consultancy, Imageseven, to help the college better understand how parents and staff perceive our community. Imageseven’s reports provided feedback that the school executive team has been working through in recent months.
One area of feedback, which the executive team have been taking some practical steps to address, was the following comment in the imageseven report:
Parents consistently described a school where students are known personally, teachers are accessible and care is visible in day-to-day interactions. These strengths create meaningful loyalty and advocacy. However, confidence is moderated by concerns about communication clarity.
I contacted some parents to help me better understand what the concerns are around “communication clarity”. It seems that RHAC has been communicating some, although not all, event information through too many different sources and at random times e.g. some information by email, some information on Seesaw (Junior School) etc.
To address this, we will be trialling a parent Pre K to Year 12 term calendar of events in Term 4. This will contain key events for the term, particularly events where parents will be involved.
However, the calendar will not contain all events because:
- Arrangements for some activities, particularly some sporting events, will not be known when the calendar is published.
- Arrangements for these activities will be communicated as they have been through the Edumate app.
- To ensure you receive important College updates and time-sensitive notifications, please download the College app and make sure push notifications are enabled in your app settings.
Some events or activities only involve a limited number of students e.g. a small Year 11 elective class going on an excursion. Including these events on the calendar would make the document enormous and may result in some parents not noticing an event of interest to them.
Parents don’t need prior notification of some events e.g. a teacher invites a guest speaker to visit a class. This could be celebrated after the event in a newsletter or on social media.
Therefore, in Term 4, events will be communicated in one of three ways:
- On the term calendar that will be emailed to parents at the end of Term 3.
- By Edumate and the parent portal for some events.
- The way that excursions and sporting events have been communicated will not change. We will always try to give parents as much notice as we can for events.
For a limited number of events an email will be sent. All the necessary information about the event will either be on the calendar or Edumate. While we will continue to publish the upcoming events for the next fortnight in the newsletter, the primary sources of information will be either the calendar or Edumate. For a limited number of events, RHAC may advise parents directly by email. Seesaw will no longer be used to provide information about future events.
What won’t change - Our existing Edumate and parent portal processes remain unchanged. Parents will continue to give permission for their child to attend an event through the app, and events will continue to appear in the app calendar as usual.
Please note that the whole school calendar is only a trial in response to parent feedback. Towards the end of the year, we will ask parents to complete a short online survey about the calendar. Your feedback about this initiative will be much appreciated. If parents find the term calendar beneficial, we will continue with this approach in 2027. If parents largely support the change, but suggest helpful modifications, we will incorporate the suggested changes next year.
