Schools have for many years run websites which provide an online brochure detailing what they offer and how to contact them. More recently they have started to realise the power of the internet to bring together their disparate groups of users: Staff / Governors / Pupils / Parents. Moving beyond the simple online brochure, there is the ability to offer far more interaction, from news (with newsflashes for adverse weather or other important notices) to calendars which parents can download into their own calendar, private areas for Governors' board papers to discussion forums for the whole school.
Adams Grammar School, a Haberdasher school, was founded in 1656 and is a thriving modern school of over 800 pupils. Its website: www.adamsgs.org.uk provides essential information to prospective students and parents, to current pupils and staff and parents.
Abraham Darby is a more recent addition to the network of Haberdasher schools recently becoming associated to Adams Grammar School. Their website, based on a parallel copy of Flarebox and with a similar look and feel, sits at www.abrahamdarbyacademy.org.uk
Each website has the ability to be edited by a wide team of editors, each with access to their own areas, and unable to edit other sections. This allows the schools to delegate editing and control to a lower level, minimising workload for each editor and ensuring that specialist information is maintained by the experts. e.g. the English department can edit their own pages, the History department theirs, but they can't touch each others. The flexibility of the Flarebox user system is such that a member of staff who teaches across several subjects can easily be added to each group and has access to each area.
