Growing fast and buried in admin

A community education charity that has grown organically into several schools and youth programmes for children, young people and families. Each programme has its own staff, its own way of working and, over the years, its own systems: spreadsheets, shared drives, separate registration forms, separate ways of taking attendance and separate payment processes.

The same child, parent, volunteer or teacher can be involved with more than one part of the organisation, and in each one they exist separately. A child moving from one school stage to the next is registered again from scratch. Information about a young person held by one programme has to be asked for by another, which works only because staff know who to ask. Access to sensitive documents depends on who shared which folder, and access given is not always taken away.

One school leader described an abundance of spreadsheets and the difficulty of tracking anything across them. The leadership’s question was broader than replacing them: how can several related programmes operate as one organisation digitally, while keeping the flexibility each genuinely needs?

We are at the discovery stage and have not built anything yet, which is the point. Before a platform is designed the charity needs to decide what should become common and what should stay programme specific, and that is a leadership conversation we are helping to structure rather than a technical one.

Through discovery sessions with the people who run the programmes we are mapping how each one works, where administration is duplicated, which information should follow a child between programmes and who needs to see what. The shape emerging is a modular platform: one secure core for identity, the student record, safeguarding, policies, permissions and payments, with programme-specific modules on top, so that a teacher sees a quick register on their phone rather than a management system.

Some principles are already clear. Permissions should follow role and group, through the charity’s existing Google accounts, so that joining, moving and leaving are handled once. Tools that already do a job well, such as Google Classroom and the current payment providers, should be integrated rather than rebuilt. The first phase stays focused on education rather than the whole charity. And a smaller, lower-risk programme should pilot the model before the larger schools move.

Discovery is giving the charity a clear picture of where administration is duplicated, what its programmes need to share and where they genuinely differ. A shared platform is being explored, with a smaller programme proposed as the first pilot. Nothing has been built yet, and the scope and order of any rollout are the charity’s to decide. If the build goes ahead, we will update this study with what it delivered.