Becky Lambton (Itchy Robot): School Websites are a Window for the World

In this Teachers’ Podcast episode, Claire meets with Becky Lambton, the present Commercial Director at iTCHYROBOT. Becky’s background and experience lies within strategic marketing; having graduated in marketing and spending several years in the commercial world honing her skills, she later joined iTCHYROBOT in 2014 where she was tasked with helping grow and develop the business. iTCHYROBOT’s main goal at this point was to help businesses improve their processes or efficiencies by utilising their websites to their fullest potential.   Becky notes that it was during this same year (2014) when iTCHYROBOT ended up working with their first school, subsequently creating their first school’s website. It was at this point where she experienced ‘a lightbulb moment’ and concluded that the benefits that businesses gained from improving their communications for commercial usage would also prove to be extremely beneficial to the educational sector.   Since iTCHYROBOT’s website, the company has grown massively and have gone on to develop a web platform on top of school websites in order to help improve overall efficiency in the school environment.     KEY TAKEAWAYS  Tips for schools: How to make your website stand out from others. A school website should be reflective of the entire school, for example, the school’s values. Many existing school websites tend to be more template based, with the same, generic information located on the school’s home page. A school’s website is a fantastic opportunity to celebrate what makes it unique and should bring focus on the celebration that is happening ‘inside’ of it. Ultimately, it should be a ‘showcase’ or a ‘window to your school’; parents and the larger community may never get the opportunity to see the amazing things an insider does, so it is important to make these things apparent.  Statutory Publishing and the influence of this on websites.  When schools first started creating websites, it was purely done in order to publish statutory information (a checklist of regulations given to schools by the Department of Education). This includes a variety of things such as how Pupil Premium and Sport Premium Funding is spent, Governance Information, Curriculum Content and OFSTED reports. It is important that a school website is viewed more than just a means of publishing statutory documentation, and more as a platform in which schools can promote themselves. For example, by using the information from Statutory Publishing, things such as key quotes from OFSTED reports can be used to help promote a school and their values. Statutory Publishing, therefore, needs to ‘look exciting’ in order to encourage visitors on the website to ‘want to find out more.   Exciting developments for iTCHYROBOT and schools in the future.  iTCHYROBOT have set themselves an ambitious goal for the future; to be the sole solution for communication, engagement and compliance for schools in the UK and beyond. The reasoning for this specific goal is that currently, schools are using a variety of different applications, communication tools and platforms to meet a range of different needs. iTCHYROBOT aims to integrate these systems, where possible, in order to create a single solution on one single platform, thereby solving multiple needs all at once.  What this means for schools and staff workload.  A school website should almost act as a ‘bespoke service’ where it looks at how the school runs and how it communicates. By providing this, the workload of staff should also, hopefully, lighten. For example, instead of inputting the same information multiple times across different platforms, it can be uploaded once and then automatically outputted to where it needs to be shown. This can already be a particularly difficult thing within businesses and schools; by having the website act as a ‘central point within a school for all communications’ overall efficiency and communication should improve dramatically.  A school website is only as good as the content on it. A school website needs to be a whole school approach where everybody is supporting it and views it with the same value, including senior leaders, teachers, pupils and parents. There are various elements to the running of a website and an emphasis on ‘shared responsibility’ is a necessity. This does not necessarily mean creating more work for staff members but emphasise that the website should be a central point where everybody will both contribute to and benefit from.  Experience with using iTCHYROBOT in the past is not needed. When starting out with a website with iTCHYROBOT, advise and support will be given. Web statistics is also something that is offered by iTCHYROBOT which tracks the number of hits on different pages on the website. For example, if the Statutory pages are the most frequently visited in a short span of time, there is even an opportunity to pre-empt visits from certain individuals. The use of statistics and ‘hits’ could also be used to encourage pupils to get involved with the website; pupils could be encouraged to run small campaigns to see who can get the most ‘hits’ on a page, which could even be integrated with the curriculum by linking it to statistics in Maths.  A school website should be used properly, effectively and bring real value. iTCHYROBOT supports schools with advice, marketing and communication strategies (both internally and externally). It is noted how various elements on websites are often missed, e.g. the admission pages for perspective parents. Limited information is often a key issue which may deter potential new starters. Similarly, staff pages and vacancy options are often left out, which means school could lose out on key visitors such as potential new recruits.  Schools are moving ever closer towards a business model with the implementation of academies.  Learning from people from the business sector has never been more important due to the dramatic change in how schools are run. It is imperative that those in the education sector utilise the lessons from business professionals and experts. Ultimately, a school website is more than just complying with one market, it should serve a variety of different people where the information provided is useful to all visitors. Artificial intelligence, virtual schools and digitisation has enabled more people to access education in more ways than ever before so the information on a website should be both important and vital to visitors.  BEST MOMENTS  “In 2014, we worked with our first school and did our first school website, and something sort of, I don’t know, a light bulb sort of turned on and thought ‘well, we’re doing all of this to improve efficiencies and adding value and improving communications for commercials, this is really what the education sector and schools need to start doing as well.”  “Since our first website, we work now, grown massively and we have developed a web platform on top of the school website so schools can do the parents’ evening online, there’s lots of integration with management information systems, to improve efficiency in the school environment.”  “…for me, it’s all about making the school website reflective of your school. I think a lot of the school websites that we do see tend to be more template based, they’ve got the same things on the home page. I think a school website is a really good opportunity for you to celebrate why your school is unite, the difference in your school and it should be a celebration of everything inside the school...”  “…back when schools first started with school websites, it was purely for that purpose – to publish statutory information on the website… a checklist of regulations that have been given to schools by the DfE that they’ve got to publish on their websites…”  “…you do go onto a school website and it looks exactly like that statutory content, where for me, don’t just publish your OFSTED report, identify key quotes from your OFTSED report and say what OFSTED found unique about your school, again, to fit with your school values and that celebration of your school that you’re trying to portray on your school website…”  “…what we’re trying to achieve from our product is to enable people to enable something once and automatically output that information to where it needs to either be published or to be shown, to stop you from suffering.”  “…run a competition to see who can get the most hits on the school website, integrate curriculum within it, your maths curriculum, anything to look at statistics and analyse the usage of the website! Encourage them to sort of run little campaigns to try and encourage use and visits to the website.”   “…there’s a lot of talk about people leaving education, but education is still a fanatic industry… but there’s never anything on the school website either about how they support their staff. If you go on any business sites, there’s a careers section and it’s got… investors in people and the benefits and I never see anything like that. One of the key visitors that will come to your school website are potential new recruits…”  “A school website is more than just compliance for one market. You’ve got lots of different people looking at the website and you’ve got to have something that is going to be useful to them.”  “I always ask the question, well, ‘Do they know that it exists?’, ‘How do you communicate with them?’, ‘Do you tell them that you’re putting your newsletters on the website?’, ‘Is it easy to find?’, ‘Is your website easy to navigate?’.”   “If you’re going to use you’re website as a communication tool, first and foremost, is it on every single letter than your sending out to your parents?”  “To me, it’s all about those unsung heroes… I go into schools and obviously speak to them about their vision and values and thing like that, and they always a have a really nice story to tell… the teachers will take time off out of their own school holiday time to go into the school because some of the children still need that place to go and that support… inspiration wise, it’s those people who are making that difference.”  VALUABLE RESOURCES  iTCHYROBOT: https://www.itchyrobot.co.uk/ GOV.UK - Guidance for Statutory Publishing https://www.gov.uk/guidance/what-maintained-schools-must-publish-online The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/ Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/ Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/ LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/  ABOUT THE HOST Claire Riley  Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide.  Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff.  Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend.  The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.