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http://thewaistline.blogspot.com/2009/12/school-closure-service-success.html

I still feel it would work better as a local rather than a central service (as I believe the more ‘local’ it is, the more likely it will be accurate), but any service of this nature is better than the ‘none’ we had a few weeks ago, and it would certainly be of benefit to people who didn’t necessarily know which was the appropriate local authority.

Disclaimer: I am biased and have a vested interest here, however I try to be fair and rational with my comments.

We provide a text service to schools for this and many other reasons. We tried late last year to tempt councils with a fixed price all inclusive offer but had no takers. The approach it seems is to push back the responsibility to schools. The problem we see though is that purchasing a text system for a school is a big decision affected by a lot of factors, of which emergency closures is only one. If we rely on schools to reach their decisions individually to the level where the approach is consistent across a county, it will be a long time.

Our message volume was as high in the first 3 days of this month as the whole of last month and the feedback from the schools and Children’s Centres was brilliant.

There is certainly a lot of text envy where I live between the schools that have a text system and those who are frustrated listening to the radio. The web isn’t the answer as many low income households don’t have internet access at home.

I appreciate the comment on cost. Even buying huge volumes from the networks the cost of messages to us doesn’t change much, and we’ve certainly not got it anywhere near 1p. That said, if used properly text messaging saves a whole load of other costs and we find pays for itself overall.

I was led to believe that there is a minimum SMS charge levied by the carriers – but I had thought it was something like 1p per message. For a primary school that’s (say) 210 children = £2.10 — yes, it will quickly add up, but in comparison to the hassle of having to listen to the radio etc – e.g. in my view it’s certainly worth 5p of my council tax money!

But I accept that the SMS method may in the end be cost-prohibitive.

http://www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/closures/closures_rss.xml

One problem with SMS might be cost but perhaps there are ways of sending out bulk SMS for free these days? If not, the volumes and frequency of school closures up here would potentially be prohibitive.