Jan 23, 2018

Sobs includes a compliance notice facility.  The compliance notice allows the school the option of having the parents acknowledge some conditions of use prior to the parent entering any data into the booking system.

Why would you use a compliance notice?

Originally we wrote this to comply with education department legal requirements.  Parents are going to be entering potentially private information into the interview booking system and the education department wants the parent to be sure that the privacy of this information is not under the departments control, but that of a third party provider – namely Focus Computing (the company that developed the Sobs application).

Use of the compliance notice is optional, however the school maybe at risk if the private information of the parents is:

• Sold to mailing list companies without the parent’s permission
• Not securely protected and therefore open to theft

You will be glad to know that our privacy policy includes this type of protection.

You could also use this notice to make parents aware of any other policies in regard to booking interviews, such as:

• Interviews are allocated on a first-come first-served basis
• No interviews will be booked after the closing date/time as specified in the notice you received
• The school and staff will make every effort to accommodate each parent, however due to limited availability of some teachers there is no guarantee that you will be able to book an interview with each teacher
• etc

Our sample notice

Entering your compliance notice

Go to the ‘School Settings’ page and the ‘PT’ tab.

Near the top of the page you will find a row beginning ‘Compliancy notice’.  At the end of this row is an option to click ‘here’ to create or edit a compliancy notice.  Click this link.

The area where you enter your compliancy notice is a rich text field, so you should be able to create a notice that is visually appropriate to the task.

At the end of this page is a selection box allowing you to define how frequently parents are prompted with this compliancy notice.  The default is ‘Session’ which is related to the term of an interaction with the website, and at least as long as the session timeout of approximately 30 minutes.  Generally this means that each time the parent visits the website (after a break of 30 minutes or more) they will be prompted to accept the terms and conditions of this compliancy notice again.  You can set a longer compliancy time if you desire.

What if the parent doesn’t accept this?

The parent is prompted with the content of the compliancy notice and options to ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject’.  If they Accept the contents of the notice then they will progress to the next screen to enter their email address.  If they do not ‘Accept’ the terms of the notice then they are returned to the Sobs home page.

If a parent is insistent on not providing any personal information to the system, they will generally ring the school and make their bookings over the phone, or by talking to the teachers directly.  In this instance the teachers should simply mark themselves as unavailable for the agreed time-slot and make a note in their personal calendar regarding the parent and child that will be at that interview.