login for parents across every school in the group
EdTech case study
One parent portal across a group of schools that each did things differently
A school group with mismatched systems got a single parent portal that pulls attendance, fees and reports into one login.
- Client
- Cadence Schools
- Vertical
- EdTech
- Role
- Product build and integration with existing school systems
- Year
- 2023
How it ran
From brief to outcome.
- 01
Brief
Give parents one place to see all their children, without ripping out the systems each school already depends on.
- 02
Approach
Integrate, don't replace. Define one shared data shape and translate each school into it behind a connector.
- 03
Build
Connectors per school, a normalising layer, and a mobile-first parent app, built school by school so value landed early.
- 04
Launch
Rolled out to two pilot schools for a term, fixed the data mismatches reconciliation surfaced, then opened it group-wide.
- 05
Outcome
Parents stopped juggling logins, fee chasing dropped, and the group finally had numbers everyone agreed on.
What changed
Before, and after.
The work
The problem, and how we took it on.
The challenge
Cadence had grown by absorbing schools that each ran their own software. A parent with children in two of them needed two logins, got fee notices on different days, and saw attendance in two different formats. Nobody trusted the numbers because they never quite matched.
Our approach
- Mapped what each school's system actually exposed, including the ones with no real API, before promising a single view.
- Built a thin integration layer per school rather than forcing every school onto one back office, which would have stalled for a year.
- Agreed one shared shape for attendance, fees and reports, then translated each school into it.
- Designed the parent app mobile-first, because that is where almost every parent actually opened it.
What we built
- A parent portal with one login that shows every child across every school in the group.
- Per-school connectors that normalise attendance, fees and report cards into one format.
- A reconciliation step that flags when a school's numbers disagree, instead of hiding it.
- Push and email notifications on a single schedule the group controls.
The outcome
Parents now open one app and see every child in the group, whatever school they attend. Fee reminders land on one schedule and get read more often, so the office spends less time chasing. The schools kept the systems they were comfortable with, and the group got the single, trusted view it had wanted for years.
Built with
The stack on this project.
Where this fits
The services and industry behind it.
Services used
Industry
Straight answers
Questions about this build.
Did every school have to switch software?
No. Each school kept its existing back office. We built a small connector per school that translates its data into one shared format, so the group got a single view without a disruptive migration.
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