For years the way to speak to a teacher at this school was to come to the gate at the start of a session and wait. Twenty or thirty parents did it every morning. Teachers were teaching in ten minutes, so most of those parents were asked to come back another day, and the ones who got through were the ones who could stand there longest, which favoured exactly the families with the most time rather than the most need.
The change: ninety booked slots of fifteen minutes a week, across both sessions, with form teachers, heads of house and heads of department, bookable on this site or by telephone. Teachers' slots are in their free periods, they know who is coming and what about, and they have the child's file in front of them.
What was measured. Parent meetings actually held went from about twelve a week to eighty seven. The wait for a slot is four working days and never more than seven. The gate crowd is gone.
What went wrong at first and how it was fixed. In the first month slots were bookable only by telephone, and they were taken almost entirely by the same families who had been winning at the gate, because the line was engaged all morning. Putting the booking on this site changed who was in the slots within one term, and that is the part of this project worth copying.
The school also holds twelve slots a week unbookable, released each morning for anything urgent, because an appointment system with no room in it is a way of saying no politely.
