Leeds City Council

Improving internal communications for one of Leeds City Council's Schools

Leeds City Council

The City of Leeds in West Yorkshire, England is governed by Leeds City Council, a metropolitan district council that provides most of the local government services in the area. One of the schools under their jurisdiction is Hovingham Primary School, which serves the diverse community of Harehills in Leeds. The school is proud to support its students and families who come from various ethnic backgrounds, with 95% of its children being from minority groups and collectively speaking 32 different languages.

01

The Challenge

For Hovingham Primary School, internal communication between teachers and other staff is essential, especially in times of crisis. When they approached Calls9, they needed to:

  • Connect over 100 staff to centralised knowledge and information to improve standards and streamline communication. 
  • A way to track staff engagement to demonstrate their new communications strategy was working and drive a culture of excellence throughout the school.
  • Be able to provide online CPD training to their teachers.
02

The Delivery

Hovingham’s digital transformation journey with Calls9 started with a series of workshops with the school’s headteacher and staff members to understand the best solution to the communication challenges they faced. They needed to improve internal communication and standardise the process of working together and training staff online. 

To help Hovingham Primary School continue to do their work more efficiently, we deployed the Calls9 Nucleus Platform.

Using the Calls9 Nucleus platform to power an employee portal, Hovingham can connect all parts of the school. This makes it quick and easy for them to create, manage and share essential knowledge and information across the school.

Enabling Online Training 

Hovingham also needed to provide online CPD training to the teachers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, where in-person training was impossible. Using Calls9 Nucleus made it quick and easy for Hovingham to set up custom learning objectives for their teachers and measure their performance. It also works as a central place to store key policies and documentation that teachers and staff could access from any device.

Increasing visibility across the school

To ensure the Hovingham leadership team could measure staff engagement and activity, we deployed an analytics dashboard to provide real-time insights across the school. We also deployed a compliance tracking system that makes it easy for Hovingham to track employee engagement with the content.

03

The Results

  • Employee Portal: Over 12 months, nearly 8,000 messages are sent, and members of the Hovingham team read over 13,000 pieces of information.
  • Improved internal communication across the school.
  • Standardised the way Hovingham’s teachers and staff work together. 
  • Reduced the time it takes to train new starters and roll out policy changes. 
  • Provided an effective way for the headteacher to manage the team’s remote working during the COVID-19 crisis.
Leeds City Council
What I like most about the employee portal Calls9 built for us is that when schools were instructed to close down due to COVID-19, I had everything there. [...] I was able to confidently send my teams home & tell them that it’s ok and that I’ve got this. I could communicate easily with the team, and it helped me feel safer.
Kellie Halliday
Headteacher
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