Education ministry launches app for better parent-teacher comms

With her four children, Mrs Yeo Wei Lin gets flooded with parent letters and school updates almost every month.

The housewife often receives unexpected calls from her sons' schools or finds out information from other parents.

Mrs Yeo, 47, who has four sons aged 18, 16, 14, and seven, said: "In lower primary, they tell you everything. But when they start to move into upper secondary, they just leave these letters in their bags and forget to pass them to you."

Things have been much easier for her since she started using the Parents Gateway mobile application last year, which was officially launched yesterday by Education Minister Ong Ye Kung.

The one-stop mobile app aims to improve communication between parents and schools at primary, secondary and junior college levels.

Speaking at Huamin Primary School, one of the schools involved in the app's pilot stage in 2017, Mr Ong said: "There is a lot of potential. We can look at other uses for parents, for example, travel declaration and checking of Edusave balance.

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"Once that is done, we can also include a payment function for school excursions, for example. This app is a step towards making Singapore a smart nation."

Parents can use the app for administrative functions such as signing consent forms, and to receive updates about school activities and programmes.

Those with children in different schools will be able to toggle between them on the home page of the app.

Mr Ong said the app will help schools save time and manpower, which will help teachers better plan classes.

The app currently has such features as the school newsletter, syllabus and consent forms.

Other features, such as travel declarations and updating of contact details will be introduced later this year.

Parents can log in to the app using their SingPass accounts.

It was developed by Government Technology Agency (GovTech) in partnership with MOE.

The app, which was piloted in 10 schools in 2017, with 56 more joining last year, will be progressively rolled out to all schools.

Huamin Primary's subject head Jeff Chang said: "This app greatly reduces time spent on administrative tasks by hours. Before this, teachers would spend up to four hours on issuing and collecting consent forms, which can now be done in 15 minutes.

"Convenience aside, the app encourages parents to be more involved in their child's school lives by bridging the information gap about school activities between parent and child."

Housewife Angela Chin, 48, who has four children and has been using the app since last year, said that while it has been useful, she wishes it would inform her when information is removed from the app.

"This would be good because parents can take screengrabs of the information beforehand." - ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ADELINE TAN