Can your school save billions of pieces of paper?

10s of millions of parents sign 100s of millions of paper forms yearly. We can do better.

Each year around the world tens of millions of parents sign hundreds of millions of paper forms on behalf of their children or relatives. It’s a labour intensive, unreliable and inefficient process.

Most schools still rely on a paper-based form to capture parent permissions for activities like excursions and sports activities. Yet for busy parents, especially those with more than one child, this leads to literally dozens of pieces of paper that must be signed and returned to school every year.

A school with 2,000 students could be using 80,000 pieces of paper a year just to send forms home to parents – that’s around 10 trees a year that need to be sacrificed just so parents can give permission for their children to attend a sports carnival or other school activity!

The team at EdSmart are helping schools and parents communicate more efficiently, while making a real difference to the environment.

10 trees a year are sacrificed so paper forms can go unfilled...

EdSmart is an online platform to automate paper forms in education, dramatically reducing cost and improving liability management.  The system manages excursion forms, field trip forms, permission slips and many other forms parents need to complete for their children and send back to school.

EdSmart is simple to use. There is no set up required by parents. The forms are customisable so EdSmart can adapt to a school’s specific requirements.

EdSmart can connect directly to a school's management database, ensuring the school can communicate with their whole parent body.

Schools can log in at any time to track the submitted responses. With a single exported spreadsheet EdSmart saves a school having to carry literally ring binders of paper forms whenever they take students off campus.

Fiona Boyd and I started EdSmart after counting the dozens of forms we'd signed for our three children over the course of a few months.

We started consulting a schools in our local area last year and uncovered just how much teacher time and school resources are needed to manage the many paper forms sent out by schools each year.

EdSmart is looking to recruit school customers around the world for our online forms system.