Follow the steps below, watch the help videos and download the resources provided, to create a video or in-person parents’ evening.
The most important part of a parents’ evening setup will be the “data import”. You need to upload/import your school’s pupils, parents and teachers so that parents’ evenings can be set up that show the correct teachers to the correct parents.
Most schools go to the Upload Data page in Parents Booking and press the ‘Upload Data’ button to import a fresh ‘data set’ from their school’s MIS database (e.g. SIMS, iSAMS, Integris, Bromcom, Abror, ScholarPack, Engage, etc.).
However schools in Scotland which use SEEMIS should download the either the primary or secondary version of the their data extraction guide.
To read the setup instructions and data upload guide for your school’s MS database, you can click the button below to see an index of instructions, and click on your school’s MIS database.
Watch one of the two training videos below before logging in to Parents Booking through, either at https://parents-booking.co.uk, or using your Groupcall Messenger account (https://m5.groupcall.com, and then click the Parents Evening tile on your Dashboard).
This video tutorial explains how a school admin uses the Parents Booking admin area to create a parents’ evening (using video call technology, or an in-person parents’ evening), including how to upload data and set up a parents’ evening, ensure the teachers/subjects are set up correctly, send out an invite, make/delete appointments, check statistics, print teacher schedules and facilitate teacher logins.
This video tutorial details how a school admin sets up a video call parents’ evening in Parents Booking. This video tutorial skips parts of the setup process, including how to import your school’s pupil, parent and teacher data, so if you are unsure how to do this please watch the full training video instead.
To supplement (or as an alternative to) the videos above, you can also download a PDF ‘admin area’ guide which contain step-by-step instructions:
This is best for new or inexperience customers. A PDF version of this video is available from here:
This .PDF training guide quickly details how a school admin sets up a video call parents’ evening in Parents Booking, but skips almost all of the other main tasks. If you are unsure how to set up a parents’ evening, use the ‘Quick Start’ Guide to the left.
If you would like help moving subjects/classes from one teacher to another, or adding new teachers to a subject and making them available in your parents’ evening to take appointments, there is a blog post especially for this task linked below.
Download other resources which will help invite and/or inform your parents and teachers:
It is very important that you run some internal tests of the video call technology. If you don’t, it’s possibly you will discover that teachers cannot have video meetings ‘on the night’, possibly because they are using a computer with old/incompatible browser, or security settings that are blocking the video call technology, or other unforeseen issues.
Running tests will check that the school’s network and/ or teacher computers/devices will facilitate the video meeting technology, but will also provide teachers with an experience of how the video call meetings will work, in advance of ‘the big day’.
If your school is new to using the Video Meetings module, share the “How To Run Video Tests” blog web-link below with your school’s IT team, and in particular draw their attention to the part at the bottom of the article which explains how to make sure the network/firewall is configured in such a way that it will not block the video meetings. N.B. This should have already been done by all Scottish local authorities already, but is important for schools who manage their own IT / network / firewall.
