Does your kids' school do this?

[WhoWants2Know]

Today after bringing my 2 kids home from primary school, they each handed me at least 6 letters/info sheets. This happens a couple of times each week, and half of the pages will be duplicated between the two siblings.

It's great that the school want to keep us informed, but in this day and age, is it really necessary to kill a rainforest every week?

Likewise, every school trip, dinner, club, and special event means drawing out cash and taking it in to the office.

I know that systems like parentmail and parentpay exist, and it seems that they would save time and resources.

Is it common to do things "the old fashioned way?" I'm sure there will always be a couple of families who don't do things electronically, but is there any other reason why a school would opt for cash payments and paper communication?

Our school mostly do emails. It's not often we get a piece of paper unless it's something we need to sign and send back. Also we have an electronic payment system for trips etc.

Can't you send in a cheque for trip money ? I suppose Parentpay costs the school money, ours doesn't have it.

Years ago our school wanted to send out more info electronically but they found that some parents didn't have an email address. This year they're putting out a lot of stuff on the schools website or Seesaw and just send notes for permission slips etc.

We have parentmail, online payment, and pre-approve all trips and they still send paper stuff home and ask for cash. And you can't pay per family for outside activity week, it's per child (and no change given) so they end up with £2.25 sellotaped to the back of each permission slip.

I don't think I still have a chequebook. It's been around a decade since I've written one.

I had 3 dc in primary school. 3 lots of letters +an email which says to prevent damage to the environment only print off if necessary!!
The same info as the letters!!

We have parentpay, only the oldest sibling at school gets the letter. Not many letters are given out as the newsletter at the start of the year has a list of important dates.

It's 6 yrs since my youngest left Primary school, and even then they had moved to electronic newsletters a couple of years prior to that. (You could go into the office and register to have paper ones, if you preferred, but that reduced 360 letters down to about 20 or 30 each time - sometimes multiple sheets though).
I am pretty amazed that anyone is still giving dc bits of paper to lose in 2018.

Yes, obviously Parentpay sort of companies are businesses so will charge, but it must save the office staff not to mention the parents hours and hours and hours across the year, so that saves staff costs.

Our primary uses Parentmail. Parents who still need to get paper copies do so, and I think only the oldest child gets them if there are siblings.

I work in a school. One letter per family for info, but consent forms are needed to each child gets ibe to take home to sign. Stuff like photo consent, school trips etc.

Oh and we use online payment system but lessbtgan 25%use it. They prefer cash

Just started reception here but we have parent pay, parent mail and we have had a few letters too but the bulk seems to be electronic for us

Our school has an 'oldest or only' system so only DD picks up newsletters etc. Works pretty well.

We also use parentmail & parent pay.

Some stuff still gets duplicated but not too much.

Nope. All emails and parent pay for school dinners, trips etc. But you should see how much photocopying gets done for lessons!!!

It was always the oldest sibling who got the letter in my day

We use parentmail, and the school basically won't accept cash (definitely not for lunch), it's all done online. Which is better than DD losing slips/letters/contributions, at least for us.

No we get a weekly school bulletin by email. They use School Money for trips, consents etc.
Paper sometimes- mostly clubs and things that are specific to DS class rather than whole school.

I understand that electronic payment systems cost money. But printing out 6 handouts X 250(ish) students several times each week must carry a cost in terms of printing, paper and admin time. So maybe if they reduced their paper consumption they could afford to go cashless. (That's complete conjecture, and I really have no idea how much it would cost)

Yes all on schoolmoney, class dojo, email here thank goodness.
Only cash for the endless charity events now!

We’ve been fully electronic for a few years now. At least half the parents in a school of 1500+ refuse to sign up to things like our homework app and link to seeing progress/behaviour and achievements on their child.
We do send text updates as well but many also don’t provide a mobile number or email address we can link it to.

I can see why some schools get fed up and resort to paper!

Have moved to school ping which is great when it's working, but when it doesn't you have no clue what is happening. Basically if your phone is playing up you are screwed.

Still need to print out reply slip letters.

Use parent pay for school meals, which is a right faff in comparison to cheques.
All other money is still cash or cheque though thank goodness.

We pay for school dinners and trips with cheque or cash. Only the secondary school has parentpay. Same with letters, primary school does paper and secondary is electronic.

We used to have parentmail but it is really expensive. We had it set up so only one copy per family, and printed out to only those without an email. No one returns the forms if you do this as they have to have access to a printer at the time they read the mail. You spend hours chasing and printing them out anyway. Lots of parents lock themselves out the app or email account so you think they are getting things when they aren't. It only comes to light when they miss the nativity cos no one told them about it. They then confess that they downloaded the app on a previous phone and haven't looked at a school note since October

We now have a free system which isn't as good. If it wasn't for the trees I think it would be far quicker to just print everything out so I can see why schools do this.

But I love trees.

I work in a school office. At my last school we had electronic payments... it didn’t save me much time at all and it cost a HUGE amount of money. We cancelled it in the end.

My current school looked into electronic correspondence and electronic payments. Electronic correspondence works out at more per communication than copying (we only do black and white) the letters for all pupils. Electronic payments cost several hundred pounds per year to have the system and the transaction charges on top are high too.

This is a charging table from 2016....

School copying also isn’t as expensive as you might think. Our black and white copies are 0.00243 pence per copy! Bulk purchased paper is quite cheap and I would still have to compose the letter and upload it to system if it’s done electronically so really only an extra couple of minutes slipping the bundle (batched by the copier while I was doing something else) of letters into the class pigeonhole.

Yes I understand the environmental impact but it is genuinely cheaper for my primary school to do it the ‘old fashioned’ way.

Paper is made from fast growing softwoods, not rain forests. The trees are a crop, sown then harvested, like a field of wheat.
Pop all those letters in your recycling and stop worrying.