Expo Creative’s School Website Enhances Stakeholder Engagement

May 11, 2010 - PRLog -- West Yorkshire specialist education design agency Expo Creative has produced a new website for a major secondary school that will change the way its stakeholders engage with each other online.

The site for the 1500-pupil Morley High School, near Leeds, uses commercial thinking to deliver a high-end user experience to provide easy access to its virtual learning environment (VLE).

It includes many features designed to fully engage users in the life of the school, including a scrolling student showcase on the homepage as well as an online virtual planner for families to access.

Communication is at the heart of the school’s work with parents and carers so that all departments feature a photograph of a named curriculum or pastoral leader along with direct email access.

Expo’s creative director Neil Beattie, which is based in Bingley, near Bradford, said: “One of the key challenges was to get students, parents, teachers and governors to make better use of online resources, and we have achieved this by making it easy to use and simple to access.

“The new website is feature packed and has around 250 pages; delivering information and resources to support students and parents in learning.

“All stakeholders are now able to benefit from having simple access to resources, which aids learning and encourage parental involvement.”

Neil added: “Support resources can often only be found on password protected VLEs, which are not always ideal for parents to access.

“When designing the new site, we knew that the route to these support services was the key to its success and made the resources sections easy to access and attractive to use.”

Morley High School assistant head teacher John Ziltener, said: “Our new leading edge website provides an innovative tool for engaging parents and carers in learning.

“All evidence points to the powerful impact that parental engagement has on student attainment, however, in many cases, parents often feel unsure about how they can most effectively support learning at home.

“Our new website will radically alter this picture, providing parents and carers with access to over 170 differentiated online activities and empowering them as partners in learning with us.”

He added: “We firmly believe that our website will be of enormous future importance to the school as an oustanding organisation and look forward to engaging learners from our own community and beyond through this exciting new online media.”

Expo Creative is a specialist in the education sector, producing websites, branding and prospectuses that deliver real impact and change in schools.

It is already developing an advanced learning resource to help students and parents even more in the future, which it is hoping to launch in late-2010.