You could employ someone in school specifically to do this. But the same questions apply. In addition, how big is your school? is one person enough for your school?

Truancy Call provides an all encompassing solution to this problem, which ensures that a school can do first day contact to all absent pupils, day after day AND can obtain a direct response from the parents, which does not need a new telephone system, additional phone lines or a new computer.

It is simple to use. Once a pupil is identified as absent, they are marked as such and contact is automatically made with the parents of absent pupils the same day by phone and/or text message and email, in turn parents can respond in the same manner.

Truancy Call, therefore, does not have the pitfalls of comparable systems, which send single one-way text messages, which when they elicit a response, will be taken via your school reception and will tie up important reception staff and your schools telephone system.

Our solution, also does not require the time consuming process of handwriting forms to fax to a company who will call the parents on your behalf and will handwrite responses back using codes as to the parents response rather than the recording of the actual spoken voice and/or text message response

Truancy Call is able to contact and text, multiple telephone numbers and is therefore not restricted to just having one telephone number to call or text, as can be the case with other solutions.

In addition the school is completely in control of Truancy Call. Telephone calls can be stopped, if necessary, or you can allow them to continue throughout the day and into the early evening in order to gain a response from parents (over a third of responses from parents occur between 6 and 8.30pm). Other systems will charge extra for this service or just make contact by text message once in the morning, giving no alternative but to manually follow up those parents who do not have mobile phones or whose mobiles are switched off.

In short, Truancy Call, developed and tested in the UK and used by over 120 secondary and primary schools in the Country provides you with the complete solution to First Day Contact and Response. But please do not take our word for it, feel free to glance at the summary table below and read the quotes from schools that use Truancy Call as well as some more in depth school case studies

Summary of current First Day Contact solutions and features

 

	A company who phones parents for you	A system which sends a one-way text message to the parents	TRUANCY CALL - phones, texts, emails AND gets a response from parents
No handwritten form filling	X	ü	ü
Contacts Multiple Numbers	X	X	ü
Option to Text Message and/or Call	X	X	ü
Computer produced reports	X	ü	ü
Full response by phone or text from parents built in	X	X	ü
Continuous contact throughout the day	X	X	ü
Contact in the evening	EXTRA CHARGE	X	ü NO EXTRA CHARGE.
Integrates with your current Management Information system i.e. can read and write back data.	X	X	ü(SIMs DOS and Windows SQL only, more to come soon, please call for details).