You can use parfeval on top of a parallel pool to do this. (Note that by opening a parallel pool of workers, you're actually reducing the number of workers available to run batch jobs - workers can work on either parallel pool things ( parfor, parfeval, and spmd ), or batch - but not both at the same time).
The programming interface to parfeval is broadly similar to batch, so it should not be too difficult to adapt your code to use that instead. parfeval has the advantage of lower overheads once your parallel pool is set up ( batch has to launch a new MATLAB worker process for each task that it executes).
