Vision
I have spent years inside the school as an organisation, in different capacities, from the lower rungs of the hierarchy to the top, and across its departments. In that time the school changed, and so did the tools it ran on. How a school was run when I was in one is not how a school is run now.
When I began, a school ran on paper: the register, the receipt book, the mark book, the file. The first software arrived to replace them one at a time, desktop programs that kept the same records in a computer instead of a cupboard. Then the systems moved onto the web and onto phones. Fees could be paid on M-Pesa, results could be sent by SMS, and a school’s records could be reached from home.
Then came the dashboards. The data collected over the years could at last be seen: enrolment, collection, attendance and results on one screen, without waiting for month end. It was a real step. For the first time a director could run a school by its numbers, and we could do so much with them. Today every system collects the data and shows a dashboard, and that is good.
I believed, and felt, that there was still more. A dashboard shows you the school. It does not know the school. It cannot tell you that the family behind an arrears figure also has a child on the bus, that a grade is not paying for itself, or that one teacher is carrying twice the load of her department. Those answers live in the connections between records, and a dashboard has none.
The world changed too. At the end of 2022 a chat window put a language model in everyone’s hands and showed what was now possible. We are in the era of agents and automated work, where software no longer only reports; it acts. A school that runs on paper, WhatsApp threads and a dashboard cannot use any of that safely.
So we adapted, ahead of the change rather than behind it, and built on what the industry had already started. Not another dashboard, but software ingrained in the institution: one model of the school in which every learner, teacher, invoice, lesson and bus is a record, joined to the others by the relationships that actually exist, and changed only through named, logged actions. The connections a director needs for strategy are one step away instead of three spreadsheets apart. And intelligence can act inside that model, drafting the reminder, the checklist, the staffing plan, while people decide.
So now we have Tutagora. It begins where it always did, in the classroom, with a teacher and a learner. Everything else exists to serve them.
Not a dashboard to admire. A school that knows itself.