Furlong has been producing first class education software for two decades now and our approach of building meaningful partnership with schools has helped us to appreciate that music departments have individual and unique needs. The administrative tools that a music department needs to function effectively cannot be met in full by anything other than software that is built specifically for the use of music schools and music departments.
That’s why we created Maestro!
Maestro benefits the whole school
Maestro doesn’t just handle scheduling. We have drilled down into the needs of our music school clients and understand that music departments need so much more than the ability to easily schedule lessons and exams. And the bonus is that what we have created will not only benefit Music Administrators and Directors of Music - but can benefit the whole school!
We believe this will be music to the ears of Bursars, Registrars and Heads! Anything that helps to save time and money will always pique the interest of senior managers. Maestro will also help with the safeguarding of all students as it can track their movements around the whole school estate and register student attendance.
Scheduling flexibility
We know that effective scheduling and resource booking really matters - it’s key to the smooth running of any music department. That's why Maestro will enable you to move backwards and forwards in scheduling rotation, add breaks and fix students in a schedule when needed. It will also detect clashes, add protection rules and distribute the completed schedules individually to students, parents and teachers - so everyone knows where to be and when. You can even schedule ensemble groups whether as a one off event or on a regular schedule. Exams can also be managed via the software whether internal or external (Trinity or ABRSM) and all exam fees can be easily managed through the system.
Communication is everything
Especially with the 18 months that we have just experienced, we all appreciate the importance of good communication. Many of our partner schools love the added bonus that Maestro aids communication with parents, teachers, students and visiting music teachers (VMTs). It is possible to produce and manage communications for billing and other important information and will also enable you to contact parents, students and staff from within the system - or even produce emails with merged content for distribution.
VMTs can complete attendance and progress notes on students, upload documents and print lists. As well as this, the school has a personal dashboard for each teacher, accessible by each VMT, featuring timetables, messages and whatever features you need to make your job easier!
Add to this the ability to produce reports that are branded to your school together with tools for viewing or exporting data as spreadsheets or graphs and you have everything at your fingertips to aid communication with all key stakeholders.
Investing in technology
We also know that many schools struggle with storing the data needed for a complex admin system on the school servers so we have built Maestro to be totally based in the cloud. Because Furlong is committed to investing in technology, we are planning to introduce a Maestro app in the near future which will help all our school partners but also aid VMTs to manage all their lessons in any school using Maestro. We also know that it can be difficult to transfer a student’s entire music history when moving to another school so we are putting functionality in place to enable the easy transfer of data from, for example, a prep school to a senior school. Excited? We are!
So many schools have found Maestro has been the best move possible for their music departments. Eastbourne College Music Department said “Maestro has proved to be an excellent investment, allowing efficient and effective timetabling of all music lessons and ensembles.” And Millfield School says Maestro is not only “an intuitive and easy-to-use music timetabling system with brilliant communications tools” but they also like our “fantastic support and training”.
Would you like to understand how Maestro could benefit not just your music department, but help to harmonise the whole school?
Contact us now to find out more and to arrange an online demonstration.
