Unsure where to begin? 
School trips can be the highlight of the academic year for both students and staff, but the process it takes to plan a trip is also one of the tasks we often find ourselves procrastinating on. When done in the traditional way, planning a school trip is a tedious job, along with sharing the announcement with families, collecting consent forms and signatures, and most importantly, taking payment. We at Teachers2Parents work on revolutionising time-consuming tasks for schools, and we have developed an efficient method to make your trip planning quick and easy.
Register of interest
Numbers are important, even when they are just estimations. Get started early in the year by sending out a form to parents and guardians as a proposal for a possible trip in the following term. Letting families register their interest well in advance gives you an initial figure to work with when looking for transportation methods, entry tickets, accommodation, meals, and everything that requires to be booked for your ideal trip.
Consent forms
You will need to ask families for permission for a lot of components before your school trip. First of all, you need a signature to confirm the parent or guardian is allowing their child to be a part of it. You might also need their consent if pictures are going to be taken, or to collect dietary requirements if food will be served on the trip, or to collate the children’s ID or passport information.
Relying on children to deliver paper slips to their parents and guardians and return them to your school staff once they’ve been signed is the wrong way to go for many reasons. The journey that one paper slip experiences before even getting signed by a parent or guardian is unpredictable: it could get ripped, stained, forgotten about, and most likely lost. Then it will have to do it all again to be returned to school. That’s why digital forms are a better idea: they take seconds to build (you can go even quicker by using pre-made templates!), you save a lot of paper and ink, they get sent directly to parents and guardians’ devices, and they allow e-signatures.
Trip payment
Collecting cash payments is outdated and inconvenient. Especially when it comes to school trips, your staff is required to keep large amounts of cash on school premises, which is unsafe, and will eventually need to be moved to the bank. Using a payments solution facilitates this entire process, eliminating the worries that storing cash brings; but did you know you can now incorporate the collection of payment into the consent form process?
We’re introducing a new option which integrates with Forms in Teachers2Parents, allowing you to attach ad hoc payment transactions to your forms. This way, you can send out a form to collect consent, dietary requirements, passport details, a signature, and payment, all at the same time. This enables your school to save more time than ever when going through the steps of setting up a school trip.
Get ready to pack your bags
By using FormsPay, all there’s left to do for you is get your suitcases ready and enjoy your school trip! If you’re interested in trying out our new feature, book a quick chat with your account manager and they will introduce it to you. Happy travelling!
