Is my school open today?

If you work in an LGFL school you have access to a service called Opencheck. By registering your school's status on the LGFL website your school can then be seen on the area wide map available on www.opencheck.lgfl.net.   It looks like this:

What is even better is you can run a feed directly back into your own website updating both the area wide map as well as your website in one go. 
This is the current live feed for Redbridge area:


This code can be edited to show just your school's information so when you use it on your own website or blog it shows information specific to you.  Simply change the code marked in red below to be your school code.  The HTML used to produce this is...

    <iframe src="http://support.lgfl.org.uk/public/bits/opencheck.ashx?code=317" width="800" height="150" frameborder="1">
    Sorry, but your browser does not support the IFRAME tag.
    </iframe>    

The LGFL website states that "As an alternative, the status of a school can be checked by calling the OpenCheck phone line. An automated system prompts for the schools sevendigit DfE code, then responds by reading out the appropriate status message and last update time. "  This may be worth telling the parents at your school in case they can't get to your website or the opencheck website.

As you might imagine the schools' open status can only be updated by the headteacher and or contact nominated by the headteacher!  If you are an LGFL school, for details please see the LGFL information sheet.  For Redbridge Schools the main Redbridge website also maintains a list of school closures.

The next question is, what work will you set your students to do online whilst there are unavoidably snowed in!

Alex Rees, @alxr1