The pioneer programme

The first schools help decide what the second year looks like.

Ashee SMS is onboarding its first schools. That is an honest position rather than a marketing one: the product is running, the year works end to end, and the schools that join now get a direct line into what is built next.

There are no customer logos on this page, because there are no customers to name yet. What follows is what the programme involves.

What being early means

Four things a pioneer school gets.

Not a discount and not a beta: a school running its own year in the product, with the people who build it listening.

Your term, not a demo data set

A pioneer school runs its own year in the product: its classes, its subjects, its grading policy and its real marks. Nothing is staged for the purpose.

A direct line to the people building it

Questions and problems reach the team that writes the software, and a gap you find is likely to be the next thing changed.

Your structure is the input

A school whose year or grading does not fit the seeded shapes is the most useful kind of early school: it is what turns a template into a product that handles more than one way of running a term.

Leave with your data

The school's records are the school's. A pioneer school that decides against the product does not lose the year it entered, and nothing is kept to make leaving hard.

Two scenarios

A term, as it would actually run.

Neither of these is a customer. Each is a labelled example of a term in the product, written to answer the question a feature list cannot: how would this work for a school like mine?

Representative scenario

A Ghanaian basic school, 420 students

Three terms, fourteen classes, a staff of twenty-two. The office keeps last term's spreadsheet as the starting point for the next one, and the end-of-term report is produced by one person who knows the formula.

Setup. The year is named with its three terms, fourteen classes and the subjects each year group offers. Grading defaults are stated per subject: assignment, class test and examination, with the weights the school already uses.
The term runs. Students are placed in classes, teachers are assigned to class-and-subject pairs, and marks are entered against each student for each assessment. A teacher sees only the classes they hold.
A mark is corrected. An examination mark is entered wrong and noticed a week later. The correction is requested with a reason, reviewed by the head of department, and applied; the value it replaced stays visible with both names on it.
Results are published. The term's results are calculated from the marks and the configuration, ranked within each class, and published as a snapshot. The report a parent is shown is a version, not a live query.

Representative scenario

A United States district, four schools, 1,900 students

Quarters, four schools with their own class naming, and a district office that needs the same question answered the same way across all four.

Setup. Each school states its own calendar and class naming inside one deployment. The district's grading policy is stated once and inherited, and a school that needs a different weighting states its own.
The quarter runs. Enrolment and moves are recorded as dated placements, so a student who transfers between schools keeps their record and the receiving school sees the history rather than a blank row.
The district asks. A quarter-end question is answered from the published results rather than by collecting four spreadsheets: each school's snapshot exists, and each school's record is still its own.
A policy changes. The weighting for a subject changes for the next quarter. It is a configuration change with a date, so the previous quarter's published results are untouched.

Onboarding

Four steps, then a term behind you.

The programme is a term long, because a term is the smallest honest test of a school's record.

A conversation, not a form

Thirty minutes on how the school actually runs a term: its calendar, its classes, its grading policy, and where the current process hurts.

The year is set up with you

The first year, its terms, classes, subjects and grading defaults are entered together, so the seeded shapes are checked against a real school rather than accepted on trust.

One term, run for real

The school runs its next term in the product, with the old process kept beside it until the results are published once successfully.

Decide, with a term behind you

At the end of that term the school decides: continue on a plan, change tier, or stop. Nothing is charged during the programme, and nothing is owed if the answer is stop.

Start here

Bring your next term onto Ashee

Start with one school. If the year closes cleanly, the rest of the group follows.

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