In this Teachers’ Podcast episode, Claire meets with Becky Lambton, the present Commercial Director at iTCHYROBOT. Becky’s background and experience lies within strategic marketing; having graduated in marketing and spending several years in the commercial world honing her skills, she later joined iTCHYROBOT in 2014 where she was tasked with helping grow and develop the business. iTCHYROBOT’s main goal at this point was to help businesses improve their processes or efficiencies by utilising their websites to their fullest potential.  
Becky notes that it was during this same year (2014) when iTCHYROBOT ended up working with their first school, subsequently creating their first school’s website. It was at this point where she experienced ‘a lightbulb moment’ and concluded that the benefits that businesses gained from improving their communications for commercial usage would also prove to be extremely beneficial to the educational sector.  
Since iTCHYROBOT’s website, the company has grown massively and have gone on to develop a web platform on top of school websites in order to help improve overall efficiency in the school environment.    
KEY TAKEAWAYS 

Tips for schools: How to make your website stand out from others. A school website should be reflective of the entire school, for example, the school’s values. Many existing school websites tend to be more template based, with the same, generic information located on the school’s home page. A school’s website is a fantastic opportunity to celebrate what makes it unique and should bring focus on the celebration that is happening ‘inside’ of it. Ultimately, it should be a ‘showcase’ or a ‘window to your school’; parents and the larger community may never get the opportunity to see the amazing things an insider does, so it is important to make these things apparent. 
Statutory Publishing and the influence of this on websites.  When schools first started creating websites, it was purely done in order to publish statutory information (a checklist of regulations given to schools by the Department of Education). This includes a variety of things such as how Pupil Premium and Sport Premium Funding is spent, Governance Information, Curriculum Content and OFSTED reports. It is important that a school website is viewed more than just a means of publishing statutory documentation, and more as a platform in which schools can promote themselves. For example, by using the information from Statutory Publishing, things such as key quotes from OFSTED reports can be used to help promote a school and their values. Statutory Publishing, therefore, needs to ‘look exciting’ in order to encourage visitors on the website to ‘want to find out more.  


Exciting developments for iTCHYROBOT and schools in the future.  iTCHYROBOT have set themselves an ambitious goal for the future; to be the sole solution for communication, engagement and compliance for schools in the UK and beyond. The reasoning for this specific goal is that currently, schools are using a variety of different applications, communication tools and platforms to meet a range of different needs. iTCHYROBOT aims to integrate these systems, where possible, in order to create a single solution on one single platform, thereby solving multiple needs all at once. 
What this means for schools and staff workload.  A school website should almost act as a ‘bespoke service’ where it looks at how the school runs and how it communicates. By providing this, the workload of staff should also, hopefully, lighten. For example, instead of inputting the same information multiple times across different platforms, it can be uploaded once and then automatically outputted to where it needs to be shown. This can already be a particularly difficult thing within businesses and schools; by having the website act as a ‘central point within a school for all communications’ overall efficiency and communication should improve dramatically. 


A school website is only as