Parents are in for a Tweet
Warwickshire County Council has enlisted Twitter technology to give parents and carers advance notice of school closures this winter.
Twitter is the internet social network phenomenon where followers will be able to follow county council school closure updates, or ‘tweets’ as they are commonly known, at twitter.com/wccschoolclosed
The site will provide an invaluable service for parents of county pupils if schools are forced to close due to severe weather conditions or through other emergency circumstances such as a flu pandemic. The Twitter site will also provide visitors with notifications of bad weather.
John Betts, Warwickshire County Council’s Head of Resources for Children, Young People and Families, said: “Our venture onto Twitter is an exciting new development which we hope will prove to be a popular means for our parents and carers to monitor up-to-the-minute information if schools are affected by bad weather or any unforeseen emergencies.
“But this is just the latest string to our bow in alerting families to school closures – the public can already receive updates through text and email, visiting the county council website or tuning into their local radio station.”
Using Twitter is the latest of a number of innovations the county council has implemented to make this vital information as widely available as possible.
Warwickshire’s free school closure text message service has approved popular with parents in previous years. The service automatically issues a text message to all users of the service when schools have had to close. It only takes a couple of minutes to sign up online at http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/schoolclosures and up to three schools can be selected by each user.
There are currently more than one thousand people subscribed to the service which runs from September to July. Last year more than 4,000 text message notifications were sent out.
Subscription to the service expires at the end of the summer term each year, so parents and carers need to sign up at the start of each academic year to continue receiving updates.
At the same website, people can also sign up to receive email alerts and link to the school closures RSS feed – basically a live list of links to useful web stories.
Details of closed schools are also fully listed on the website or reported via local radio stations.