As we begin to ease back into normality, primary schools can now start to explore the different streams of income to increase their revenue. Budgetary constraints have been plaguing primary schools, especially community based schools, for many years and as such schools have had to become innovative with how they increase their revenue.
Schools have explored many ways to increase their revenue e.g. charging for parking spots during holiday times and renting out school halls for public use. There is however an innovative way to increase your schools’ revenue that is yet to be explored; inhouse wraparound care.
Many schools have chosen to outsource this service and lose out on the benefits it offers. For parents, having wraparound care on school grounds is not only convenient but also financially efficient. Parents are able to save time on school runs by having their child attend a breakfast and afterschool club on-site, and payments are made easier by consolidating their financial transactions to one organisation, the school.
For schools, having your own wraparound care means you can set your own prices to meet the schools financial needs. This tends to work out financially both for the parents and the schools involved.
Despite the advantages that come with having your own inhouse wraparound care service, we at magicbooking acknowledge there are two main roadblocks that hinder primary schools from using this as an opportunity to increase their revenue:
- The overall time and administration it takes to run this service.
- A lack of staff to manage the service.
To combat these pain points, magicbooking have put together a few resources that can help you and your team implement wraparound care as a means to increase your revenue.
How Magicbooking can help
Without an efficient online solution, the time it takes to manage your breakfast and afterschool club can account for up to 80% of your admin time. This leaves you little to no time to focus on the children and developing the activities for this service.
Magicbooking is the UK’s leading wraparound care bookings, payments and communication online solution. Using our automated system, your school can introduce a new stream of income, with a solution that reduces the time spent on manual admin processes. Once you are ready to implement your own wraparound care service, our system can help you manage all aspects this service. Our system will help you to:
Manage online bookings by:
Offering 24/7 booking availability.
- Fully automating your booking process.
- Stop parents from booking whilst in arrears.
- Record injuries & incidents and notify parents via email.
- Customising your registers which can be updated to reflect booking changes for parents.
Manage online payments by:
- Offering card instalment plans.
- Offering online payments via card and direct debit.
- Automating the reconciliation of Childcare Vouchers.
- Applying sibling, weekly, parent and staff discounts and offer promo codes.
Manage your communications by:
- Communicating efficiently with parents through email and SMS.
- Notifying parents instantly through the use of our noticeboard feature.
Implementing inhouse wraparound care has been made easier and more efficient with magicbooking. Alongside increasing your revenue, our clever dashboard gives you an instant financial health check of your wraparound care service. You can instantly see bookings made, income generated, payments in arrears, and deferred income. This allows you to improve your cashflow and offer better income projections.
For more on how magicbooking can help you.
Lack of staff
One of the main constraints for a school’s budget is staffing costs. Primary schools have reported that one of the major hurdles they experience when trying to set up a wraparound care service, is not having the staff to run the sessions. As such we have provided some tips and tricks that can be use to ensure you are adequately staffed to allow you to offer this service and increase your revenue.
Lunch time study clubs
Diversifying the responsibilities of your breakfast and after school club staff members is a great way to promote this service as a full working day to potential hires. This allows for staff to remain busy between the wraparound care hours and your students are given an opportunity to develop their knowledge in key subject areas.
In some cases schools usually employ a number of staff members specifically for the supervision of the children at lunch time. Offering these members of staff the opportunity to work in your before and/or after school care setting will give them the opportunity to work full time.
One evident obstacle with diversifying your work force would be the lack of funding that schools have to pay the needed stuff members. If your school finds its self in this predicament for resources provided by the Department of Education to help meet your staffing cost needs.
Children should always be the focal point when exploring the idea of increasing your revenue, and that’s why magicbooking encourages schools to utilise the diversification of your work force to meet other needs in your school. Existing staff members who may only be employed for one school service are already familiar with your children, therefore positioning them in other services such as wraparound care is beneficial for the children as well as the school.
Employ parents
Involving parents in the staffing of your wraparound care service is a great way to ensure you are able to offer this service without having to use existing staff members. Parents can be brought into the fold on a voluntary basis or through offering them a discount on their wrapround care sessions for their children.
Offering parents the opportunity to gain a child care qualification from their time with your school is another good incentive to ensure you have the staff to cover your breakfast and afterschool clubs. There are a list of free level 3 qualifications that the government offer, which you can recommend to parents as an incentive to review the best suitable VRQs or NVQs that they can receive.
Pupil Premium (PP)
Pupil Premium (PP) is funding to improve education outcomes for underprivileged pupils in schools. This resource can be used to help deal with the lack of staff available for your wraparound care service. Your school could offer a limited number of places to children within this scope for breakfast and afterschool clubs and use the PP budget to allocate a paid member of staff who will support that group of children for this service. This is a great way to use the PP budget to staff your wraparound care service and use it as a means of increasing your revenue.
There are many advantages that come with using this resource as a means to facilitate inhouse wraparound care. This mechanism will give the underprivileged pupils a chance to improve their punctuality by offering them a free space, facilitated through the PP budget, ensuring that they are in school and ready to start the school day on time. Working parents under this scope are given a chance to have cost effective childcare and have the advantage of receiving all of their child’s services from one premises.
Apprenticeships
Apprenticeships are a cost effective way to bring in new people on board or help upskill existing staff members. Apprentices benefit your school as well as the apprentices themselves. You are able to run your wraparound around care service and award qualifications at the same time! Everyone wins.
There are various schemes that the government have offered in the past to incentivise organisations to run their own apprentice programmes. The most common scheme that the government offer is , alongside incentives such as hiring 16-24 year old in order to receive additional funding for your programme. We have provided further information on the aforementioned scheme and incentives, and how they can be used to help you implement inhouse wraparound care.
Employer Co-Investment
The was introduced to help community schools explore the great benefits of having an apprenticeship programme. Through this scheme the government are able to cover 95% of the costs for the training and assessment of the apprentice, removing the burden of having to fund the entirety of the programme yourself. In order to access any governmental support, you must create an account on the apprenticeship service account, allowing you to access funding for the scheme and any incentives they may offer to run your programme. Apprentices aged 16 -18 or 19-24 with an education health and care plan provided by their local authority or an apprentice that has been in the care of the local authority could get up 100% of the funding for your programme covered. For more information on how to start your own apprenticeship programme to implement wraparound care within your school.
Magicbooking can help you increase your school's revenue
Increasing your school’s income is never an easy task. One of the most important aspects of managing school services is the perfect online solution that will meet all your needs. Using magicbooking as your online solution, you will be able to manage your wraparound care with ease, spend minimal time on admin, manage payments online and communicate efficiently with your parents. With the resources offered in this article not only are you well equipped with the right online solution, but we have provided solutions for your staffing needs.
For more on how magicbooking can help to manage all of your school services