Ashford Prep School
Miranda Palmer, Activities Co-ordinator and Head of Modern Pentathlon at Ashford Prep School discusses how CHQ is being used to manage extra-curricular programmes at this leading coeducational, independent boarding and day school in Kent.
Ashford Prep School provides an outstanding education for over 330 boys and girls aged from 3 to 11 years, with a focus on ‘Adventurous Learning’ to maximise the potential of every child. The school places an emphasis on the personal and social development of pupils to foster motivation, confidence and self-esteem. To facilitate this the school offers an extensive extra-curricular programme with a range of activities for children from reception up to Year 6, with all teachers encouraged to either run or participate in a club.
CHQ has made a huge difference to our activity programme and I would highly recommend it. The sign-up and processing of activity choices is now so much quicker. We have been able to introduce more clubs and sending out updates to activity participants and their parents is now so simple with CHQ.
Miranda Palmer,
Activities Co-ordinator at Ashford Prep School
Originally the school provided paper questionnaires for parents to choose activities for their children. The process proved to be a very long and laborious, frequently inaccurate and very inflexible. To improve the situation, a new system using Survey Monkey online questionnaires was introduced – parents emailing back their selections which were then entered into spreadsheets and paper registers created by copying and pasting the information. However, as the pressure from the leadership team and parents to offer more activities grew, the need for an alternative solution became very clear.
Ashford Prep introduced CHQ extra-curricular software in Aril 2016. Having online sign-up and system-managed activity allocations has transformed the management of the school extra-curricular schedules. Teachers now predominantly use iPads to take activity registrations, with sports coaches using their mobile phones when away from the school building. From a safeguarding perspective, using CHQ has meant that the school can centrally and very quickly establish ‘who is where’ during extra-curricular periods. Many of the school's clubs are over-subscribed and have waiting lists, and CHQ's 'random by preference allocation' and 'priority waiting list' option has made the allocation process much fairer.