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Groupcall featured in article in The Guardian - August 24th 2007
Mobile phones are automatically banned in most classrooms - justifiably so if they are the conduit for unwanted outside interruption. On the other hand they are a convenient and reassuring means of communication, and so it is no wonder that parents often collude with their youngsters, allowing them to take mobiles into school with them.
Clearly, parents have a duty to work with schools to ensure sense prevails: accepting that inappropriate use will result in a mobile's confiscation and growing a bit thick-skinned when it comes to texted complaints about the more everyday trials children may encounter during a school day. "On the whole this hasn't been more of an issue for us with this texting generation compared their predecessors, who only had the use of a payphone," says John Pinkney, assistant principal at Bilton School in Warwickshire. "Our parents have busy lives and invest their trust in us. And students know if they need to communicate with home they should go through the school office."
At the other end of the spectrum, schools are learning to embrace texting both as a teaching tool and as an ideal means of keeping parents abreast of matters of concern.
Texting currently has only a toe-hold on the curriculum among the more adventurous teachers keen to mobilise what their pupils love best in the cause of education. Its presence is not without its critics, but the examples of classes analysing text-speak alongside more conventional forms of English do crop up.
Meanwhile, schools have employed targeted texting to provide mentoring support to youngsters outside formal education, and in one Californian example, sexual health advice.
In the UK, as ownership of mobiles among most schools' parents has become almost universal, so institutions have latched onto software that harnesses texting as a means of prompt communication with home. With an estimated 50,000 children truanting every day, it is perhaps inevitable that the most popular of these are geared to combating the problem. Two of the market-leading systems are Truancy Call, and Groupcall Messenger, co-founded by Bob Geldof (pictured). Both systems work with schools' daily automatic registration systems to highlight those children gone missing. The daily absence list the software generates can be tweaked by hand to suit home languages and to ensure children with legitimate reasons to be out of school are not targeted. Then, at a touch of a button, the system will generate texts (or phone calls) to parents until a response (automatically logged) is received.
"The job of ringing around the parents of missing children often used to tie someone up for an entire morning," explains Catriona Ketley, the principal administrator at Thorns community college in Dudley, West Midlands. "We use Groupcall, and now the job is done in five minutes. Feedback from parents suggests that they appreciate the texting system."
Of course, texting is a great tool for schools to generate more welcome messages for parents and at times of crisis too. For example, Groupcall came into its own during the Buncefield oil depot fire in Hertfordshire, when a number of schools needed to warn parents over the weekend that they would not be opening.
Meanwhile, at Whitstone community school in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, assistant headteacher Alan Tucker is a fan of Text Someone - a code-protected system that enables children to send him messages out of school hours. "To date I have had about 50 messages from pupils sent in this way, and only one was to do with bullying," he recalls. "Most were about other worries. And while it is really the icing on the cake of the school's anti-bullying measures, it is important to ensure that no one falls through the net."
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