How can our website and booking software help you?

As well as being incredibly easy to set up and use, there are some very serious benefits to using iSmart software solutions to help run your extended service provision.

Significant cost reductions
Having a website with a live integrated booking system, database and email marketing program could add up to a very significant saving each year. If you take into account the cost of printing leaflets each term, the admin and staff costs associated with taking and confirming bookings and then possible additional costs of informing applicants individually if a course is oversubscribed you could well be talking thousands of pounds. At a time when budgets are under serious scrutiny, this is a vital consideration.

Streamlined, cost-effective marketing for your extended school services
Live, online registration means that ESCO's have immediate and up-to-date information on which courses are selling and which are not. Therefore, additional marketing emphasis can be switched to those courses which are undersubscribed and booking deadlines can be extended where necessary.

Most current systems result in very popular courses being sold out - but ESCO's are unaware of this until all the necessary paperwork has been processed. They then have to contact each unsuccessful client individually and send refunds, wasting huge amounts of time which could be better used elsewhere. With an iSmart live online system, this cannot happen.

Significantly higher uptake
Having an online registration and payment system makes it much easier for clients to sign up and pay for the courses they want, resulting in a higher overall uptake on all courses. And iSmart's unique client account software encourages loyalty by making it even easier for them to keep coming back to your site to book again and again.

OFSTED
"OFSTED will report during school inspections on how wider services available in school are contributing to improved standards, as well as improved well being."

This statement by OFSTED indicates that a well-managed and progressive programme of Extended Services will rate very highly in school inspections. iSmart software solutions can make the provision of such programmes simple to achieve and affordable.

Funding
Government funding is currently available to assist with start-up costs of providing Extended Services. These services must be "...developed in such a way as to ensure that they are affordable and sustainable." By keeping admin costs down and revenue up, this is precisely what iSmart software helps you to achieve.

Another important point on funding and costs is that any monies raised through the provision of Extended Services can be used to finance other community initiatives or to supplement budgets in supporting the education of pupils. So an efficient, well-managed Extended Services programme benefits pupils and the wider community even further.

However, the current funding is part of the Area-Based Grant and will be reduced during 2011 as focus switches to maintaining and developing existing Extended Services provision. Therefore, to take advantage of the available funding, anyone planning on creating or improving an Extended Services programme needs to move quickly.

Maybe now is the time to take a thorough look at iSmart's range of software solutions. Everything has been developed from a commercial perspective. It's fast. It's live. It's interactive. And it works.