Designed for schools and integrated with SIMS, these two products provide fast and reliable online payments, email and text messaging – offering low cost, real-time engagement with parents and carers, teachers, students and governors.
The Challenge
Electronic communications are increasingly important in people’s lives. Keeping in touch with parents and others is extremely important for all schools. Parents increasingly expect to use online systems to pay for goods and services and send and receive information about their child and schools have to respond to this.
The Solution
Capita (suppliers of SIMS) provide two products to address these issues: a school payments system (Agora) and a communication solution (In Touch). Designed for schools and integrated with SIMS, these two products provide fast and reliable online payments, email and text messaging – offering low cost, real-time engagement with parents and carers, teachers, students and governors.
With In Touch you can:
- send messages to any individuals or groups, including SIMS Discover groups
- send cover slips to teachers
- send exams reminders to students and/or parents
- link school messages to Unexplained Absences
- organise Templates in category order.
With Agora you can:
- provide your school with a cost-efficient, secure and simple way to collect payments from parents and sell school items online for trips, activities, meals, uniform or other school items.
- have peace of mind that SIMS Agora is securely integrated with SIMS – making the most of the pupil and parent contact information already managed by the school.
- be confident that payments are being handled properly. Capita payment processing is hosted in Capita’s own Data Centre – the first in Europe to achieve PCI DSS Level 1 ‘hosting provider’ certification.
- The ICT Service provides Helpline support on all aspects of the use of Agora and In Touch. Our trainers are also approved to train the system.
How Our Service Works
The ICT Service will:
- provide service desk (The Helpline) support on all aspects of the use of Agora and In Touch, which together with our other support services make us a ‘one-stop-shop’ ICT support service for schools. Calls are handled in accordance with our normal procedures and targets for resolution.
- provide Agora and In Touch training courses to schools
- provide an ‘implementation service’ to new Agora and In Touch users
- log development/change requests with Agora and In Touch on behalf of customers where these need to be escalated to Capita.
Availability
All schools in Cambridgeshire. There is no additional charge on your SLA for support for this product.
