Custom Software DevelopmentUnited Kingdom
They implement all the desired features and come up with their own suggestions which further improved our product.
5.0
Work
The Whole School, Run From One Secure Platform
A school management system that runs students, staff, attendance, performance and parent communication from a single secure platform, on any browser.
Project snapshot
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Services provided
- Development period
- Jun 2021 – ongoing
Project
Sled Studio is a school management information system for school leaders and office staff, built and run by Arcadia Education. It first went live at Cambridge International School in the UK and is still actively developed today.
The school was losing hours every week to manual, paper-based admin, and digitising it could give those hours back. The owner had tried to build the platform with other agencies and developers before us, but the work stalled, it was never started on the right architecture. We rebuilt it properly from June 2021.
The challenge
The school ran its operations, records, planning and reporting by hand, with no single system holding any of it. They needed one online platform that pulled all of it together and served five different user roles, management, staff, teachers, students and parents, each able to access, manage and share only the data they should, securely. The earlier failed attempts had already shown the hard part: getting the architecture right from the start.
Solution
One secure system for the whole school.
We built an intuitive, secure system that centralises data, automates workflows and reduces operational complexity, so the school can focus on education, not administration.
Sled Studio app
Sled Studio is a school management information system for school leaders and office staff, with the tools needed to run school life efficiently. It is secure, easy to use and saves everybody valuable time, so the school can focus on the quality of teaching and learning.
One platform replaced hours of daily admin work.
Central register
All the school's data, one source of truth.
Student and staff records live in one secure register instead of scattered files and spreadsheets. Everything is easy to find, and any record exports straight into structured reports and PDFs when the office needs to send or file something.
Tracking the pulse
Real-time attendance, from the whole school to one student.
Teachers mark students present, absent or late, and the dashboard rolls it up live, for the whole school, a year group, a subject or a single student. The patterns that used to take a manual count to spot now surface on their own.
Student progress that turns itself into a report.
Staff track academic progress in the platform and generate tailored reports from it, then share them with parents as clean, structured outputs. No re-formatting, no copy-paste between tools.
Parent access & notifications
Parents see their child's progress as it happens.
Parents get their own view into attendance and performance, updated in real time, so the office is not fielding the same questions by phone. Transparency that raises engagement without adding to anyone's workload.
One hub for every message to students, parents and staff.
Targeted messages to students, parents and staff all go out from one secure system, so communication is not spread across personal email and paper notes. Everyone hears the same thing, from the same place.
Two agencies couldn't deliver it. The school runs on it every day.
Wireframes
Technologies
- Management
- Staff
- Students
- Parents
Server infrastructure
- AWS EC2Linux/UNIX
- MySQLRelational database
- RedisCaching
- Amazon S3Data storage
Backend
- PHP
- Laravel
- Docker
- DomPDF
- SwiftMailer
Frontend
- JavaScript
- Angular
- TypeScript
- HTML
- CSS
- Angular Material UI
- Service workers
Secure, scalable data storage
Secure by design, built to scale.
A custom school platform lives or dies on safe, scalable storage. Records, XLS and PDF imports and exports, reports and archives all run on AWS S3 with document encryption using S3-managed keys, files are encrypted at rest and decrypted only on access. Storage stays fast and reachable from any device.
Measured impact
- Daily admin hours given back to staff
- 3
- Students on the platform
- 400+
- Records centralised from paper and spreadsheets
- 50+
- Years live and still in active development
- 6
Links
- Websitesledstudio.co.uk
- InstagramArcadia Education
The client says...
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