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Rapid COVID testing: How RGS Worcester has found a simple way for collecting results

We received great feedback about how one school was reducing the stress of managing COVID test results using Firefly's communication tool, SchoolPost.

We caught up with Stephanie Harris, School Administrator at the Royal Grammar School Worcester to find out the highs and lows of bringing in this new requirement and how they have made it work.

How did you go about planning the rollout of COVID home tests? What were you most concerned about?

Even though parents have to report the results to the NHS, schools also need to keep a record of the self-tests. For us, using a simple reply form in SchoolPost was perfect. 

We can set an email reminder to go out every Sunday and Wednesday for parents to carry out their self-test. An unexpected additional benefit was being able to send the unique barcodes directly to the right parents to help with the testing we had to do in school.

 

How did you go about managing this process?

Outgoing messages linked with forms were scheduled in advance and then parents (or older students) can hit a reply link and complete a simple form to register their result.

When staff view/download the responses, the system automatically adds the student details (name, ID, Year, Form) to identify who the result relates to, without the parents needing to complete all these details every time they reply.

 

For students who forgot to log a result, it was very easy to send reminder messages.



Did it get off to a good start? What were your key learnings?

I don’t know how we would cope with the Covid-19 testing admin without Firefly’s communication tool, SchoolPost. The way in which we are able to record the self-test replies, and use the merge publication function to send the barcodes to parents has really simplified the testing process for us.

 

What are your three top tips for other schools that might be struggling?

  1. Keep the reply form as simple as possible.
  2. Have a set time for the reminder email.
  3. Use the copy email function to easily set up the email for each publication.

 

During such a stressful time for schools, it has been great to hear how Firefly’s communication tool has been helping schools to manage their day-to-day admin burden and make life so much easier. If you’ve got any questions or would like to find out more please do get in touch.

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