Case study · Education
One system for a school that ran on five.
A private secondary school in London was operating five separate systems for daily teaching administration. We built a bespoke management information system that replaced all of them.
The challenge.
Photograph above: generated, not the school.
Teaching and office staff worked across five separate systems every day: one for attendance, one for timetabling, one for assessment and grades, one for behaviour and pastoral notes, and a fifth for messages to parents and guardians.
None of them were connected. To understand one student’s situation, a teacher had to open several applications and piece the picture together by hand: attendance in one place, behaviour in another, recent results somewhere else.
Staff spent too much time on data entry, switching between systems and chasing information instead of teaching. Leadership had no real-time view of the school: every report meant extracting and reconciling data from several systems first. And every new member of staff had to be trained on five products.
What we built.
A bespoke management information system that brings daily administration into one system, aware of each person’s role. All five functions were rebuilt as connected modules, each designed around the school’s own way of working rather than adapted from a generic product.
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Timetabling
Class schedules, room allocation and cover, with conflict detection to prevent double-booking.
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Attendance
Teachers take the register for each lesson in the system. Absence patterns are surfaced automatically, so pastoral staff can act before they escalate.
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Assessment
Grades, progress and assessment history for every student; teachers can follow one student or look at a whole cohort.
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Behaviour and pastoral records
Incidents, commendations and pastoral notes, each timestamped and attributed: a clear, auditable history for every student.
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Messages to parents
Direct messages or broadcasts to parent groups from the same system, with delivery confirmation and a searchable archive.
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Leadership dashboard
Attendance, behaviour, assessment outcomes and other indicators in real time, by year group, class and student.
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Reports
Statutory and custom reports straight from the system, with no exporting to spreadsheets to compile them by hand.
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Access and data protection
Teachers, office staff, senior leaders and parents each see only what their role needs, managed centrally. Personal data is handled in line with UK GDPR, with retention rules, access logs and subject access request tools built in.
The results.
5 → 1 Systems consolidated into a single platform
The system went into daily use across all teaching and office staff, and the benefits were measurable from the first term.
With no switching between systems, teachers save more than two hours a week each on administration alone, time that goes back into lesson preparation and contact with students. Consolidation also reduced the duplicate data entry that had made the five systems inconsistent.
Senior leaders see attendance trends, behaviour patterns and assessment outcomes in real time, instead of waiting for end-of-term reports assembled by hand, and can respond to concerns before they become problems.
Parent engagement improved: every message to families is logged automatically, so staff no longer rely on email threads or personal inboxes to know what has been said. Training overhead dropped considerably, as a new teacher learns one system, with one login, instead of five.
Schools rarely lack software; they lack software that shares data and fits how staff work. A single data model, interface and access system gives benefits no single module can give on its own.
Running too many systems? We will give you an honest assessment of what consolidation could look like for your school.
contact@tiraverse.co.uk