From the first enquiry to a confirmed place, a paid invoice and a working login — without anyone in the office re-typing a single detail. LiveClass is the school platform we build and run at Ummah Design.
Not because any single step is hard, but because none of them talk to each other.
Once in the enquiry inbox. Again in the applications spreadsheet. Again in the fee tracker. Again in the class list. Again in whatever sends the welcome email. Every copy is a chance to mistype a year group or lose a sibling discount, and every copy has to be corrected separately when the family changes their phone number.
A place frees up in Year 4. Somebody has to notice, find the list, work out whose turn it is, remember the sibling rule, email the family, wait, chase, and move on if they go quiet. In practice the place sits empty for three weeks — and an empty place is fee income you have already lost for that term.
Invoices raised by hand, discounts applied from memory, reminders sent when someone remembers to send them, and no clean answer to “who is overdue right now?” The school ends up with an unpaid debt-collection job it never wanted and a member of staff who does little else.
Fifty more pupils means proportionally more enquiries, more invoices, more registers and more chasing — so growth is paid for with another pair of hands rather than better margins. The work grows exactly as fast as the school does, which is the one thing a school cannot afford.
Student enrolment automation — or student enrollment automation, if you spell it the American way — is software that carries a family from first enquiry to a confirmed, paid place without staff re-entering the same details at each step. The enquiry creates the record; the record drives the offer, the payment, the class place and the login.
The test is not whether you have online forms. Plenty of schools have forms and still spend a fortnight on admissions, because the form only produces an email and a human does the other seven steps. Real automation means each stage hands off to the next by itself, and the office is left handling the exceptions — the appeal, the unusual sibling arrangement, the family who needs a payment plan — which is the part that actually needs a person.
Nine stages. In most schools, nine separate jobs across a spreadsheet, an inbox, a payment provider and a group chat. On LiveClass, one record moving through one system — which is why the ninetieth child costs the office roughly what the first one did.
Every screenshot below is the real product, not a mockup — taken from a live demo school of 175 pupils.
Your admissions pages, prospectus copy, fees and FAQs live in the same system as the enrolment engine, and the office edits them without ringing an agency. A parent who reads the curriculum page and clicks Register your child never leaves the system, so the enquiry arrives already attached to a year group, a family and a date — instead of as a message in an inbox somebody has to remember to action.
When a place frees up in a year group, the first family in line is emailed automatically and has 48 hours to confirm before the next family is contacted. Families with a sibling already enrolled join at the front. The office only opens the page to override the order — and every reorder is logged with its reason, which is exactly what you want when a parent asks why another child went first.
Confirming a family turns the place into money without a second system. A monthly fee subscription opens on the school's own payment account, invoices go out on schedule, and overdue balances escalate through reminders rather than sitting on a to-do list. Class access is tied to the fee position, so a family that pays at 11pm has access back at 11pm — no one waits for the office to open.
The second and third child in a family, staff children, scholarship and hardship places — the arithmetic that quietly eats an admissions week is a rule you set once. Discounts apply at invoice time for every family that qualifies, in the same way, every month, with no one editing invoices by hand and no one forgetting the family that was granted a reduction last September.
The moment a place is confirmed, the pupil has a timetable, a class, a personal join link and a portal; the parent has one login covering every one of their children. Nobody builds a welcome pack by hand, and nobody discovers on the first morning that a child was enrolled but never added to a class.
Registration conversion, enrolments against leavers month by month, roster and revenue by year group, and grouped reasons families gave for leaving. Most schools have never seen their own admissions funnel — how many enquiries became applications, how many applications became paying pupils, and which year group quietly lost four families in February.
An enrolment tool that hands you back to spreadsheets in September has solved the smaller half of the problem.
Attendance comes back from the live lesson as minutes actually attended per child — not a present-or-absent tick. A pupil who appears for four minutes is not recorded like one who stayed the hour. Parents get an absence email the next morning; leadership gets a Monday summary.
Typed answers, photos, PDFs or recorded answers, plus worksheets pupils write on and teachers mark over in the browser. Approved work goes to the pupil's portfolio; class posts wait for a teacher before anyone else sees them.
A markbook grid per class that autosaves, AI-drafted comments written from the pupil's real term that a teacher edits and approves, and missing assessments reweighted rather than counted as zero. Grades are never AI-generated. Published reports are a snapshot, kept forever.
What was covered, the topics touched and the homework set — attached to the recording. Search recordings by what was actually said in the lesson. A child who missed Tuesday gets the summary in the next morning's absence email.
Messages arrive in the office in English and the reply goes back in the parent's language, across twelve languages. The school stops losing families who simply could not ask a question comfortably.
A daily pastoral list scored across attendance, payment, homework and messages together — which catches the child sitting at 88% overall but 25% in one subject, the pattern a single-signal report never surfaces.
Parents pick a slot against real teacher availability, the Zoom room is created for it and the reminders send themselves. No spreadsheet, no phone tag, no booking add-on to subscribe to.
Today's classes and registers for teachers; cover offered to eligible staff with the first to accept taking the class and the meeting host reassigned automatically. Teaching and cover hours export for payroll instead of being re-keyed.
| The job | Forms, spreadsheets & an inbox | Enrolment automation |
|---|---|---|
| New enquiry arrives | Email someone must action | Family record, attached to a year group |
| Place frees up in a year group | Somebody notices, eventually | Next family emailed automatically |
| Sibling priority | Remembered, or not | Applied by rule, override logged |
| Offer expiry | Chased by hand | 48-hour clock, rolls on by itself |
| First invoice | Raised manually after the fact | Subscription opens on confirmation |
| Sibling & bursary discounts | Hand-edited on each invoice | Rule applied every month, consistently |
| Overdue fees | One hopeful reminder | Escalating chase, access tied to payment |
| Pupil login & class place | Created by hand, sometimes forgotten | Exists the moment the place is confirmed |
| Lesson access | Zoom link pasted into a group chat | Personal join link, window enforced server-side |
| Register | Teacher ticks names | Minutes attended, captured from the lesson |
| Admissions conversion rate | Nobody knows | Enquiry → application → enrolled, on a chart |
| Cost of the next fifty pupils | Another pair of hands | About £2.50 a head |
If pupils join through the year rather than once each September, manual admissions never gets a quiet week.
Full timetables taught live, families in several time zones, and a roster that changes every month rather than every September.
Madrasahs, community and faith schools running Saturdays with hundreds of pupils and a fraction of the office hours to administer them.
Rolling intakes, levels rather than year groups, and parents who often want to correspond in their own language.
Small groups, per-subject enrolment and fee collection that has to work without a finance department behind it.
Twelve-language parent messaging, and fee reminders that reach a parent who does not read English comfortably.
The setup that worked at 60 pupils and quietly stopped working somewhere around 150, without anyone deciding when.
Every question your DPO is going to ask, answered before they ask it.
Zoom credentials encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and decrypted only in memory. Passwords bcrypt-hashed. Two-factor authentication available, and head teachers can mandate it.
Concerns are recorded, not just felt: who raised a flag, who resolved it, and when. Attendance flags can require a parent to acknowledge them.
Eight staff role types with granular permissions. Revenue goes to the owner, pay and policy to the head, and pupils see only their own day, work and recordings.
Rolling-window retention, so a bad afternoon is recoverable. Genuinely sensitive documents are held outside the web root and released only to signed-in staff.
A written data processing agreement, a privacy policy and published terms — ready for a DPO or governing body to review rather than promised for later.
Ummah Design builds, hosts and supports the platform. It grew out of running a real online school with several hundred pupils, not out of a product workshop.
Priced on your roster, not on how many people log in.
Starting from
£3per pupil, per month
And the rate per pupil falls as your roster grows. We work out your exact monthly figure on the demo, using your real pupil count — no obligation, and we’ll tell you honestly if it isn’t a fit.
Weeks, not terms. And you do not have to move everything at once.
Thirty minutes on live data, not a slide deck. We use your pupil count and fee structure so the pricing conversation happens on the call, and we tell you honestly if it isn’t a fit.
We bring across pupils, families, classes and fee arrangements from whatever you have now — spreadsheets included — and check the result with you before anyone relies on it.
Office, teachers and leadership, each trained on the part they actually use. Included in the setup fee rather than sold as a package afterwards.
Most schools begin with admissions and fees, then bring attendance, homework and reports across at the next term boundary. Running your new intake on LiveClass while the current roster finishes the term is a perfectly normal start.
Student enrolment automation is software that carries a family from first enquiry to a confirmed, paid place without anyone in the office re-typing the same details. The enquiry form creates a record, the waiting list offers places in order, the offer collects the registration fee, the accepted place opens a fee subscription, and the pupil's login, timetable and class access are created from the same record. The office handles exceptions instead of doing data entry.
A form gives you an email. A CRM gives you a pipeline you still have to action by hand. Enrolment automation closes the loop: the application, the offer clock, the payment, the discount rule, the class place and the parent login are one record, so confirming a family is a single action rather than eight tasks across five tools.
No. Most schools start with admissions and fees, then bring attendance, homework and reports across at the next term boundary. Running the new intake through LiveClass while the current roster finishes the term on your existing setup is a normal way to start.
Weeks, not terms. The platform is already built — we configure it for your school, migrate your pupils, families and classes, check the data with you and train your staff. The one-off setup fee is quoted on the volume of data being moved.
You keep 100% of them. Parents pay through your school's own payment account, so the money never passes through us. Card processing fees go to the payment provider exactly as they do now.
No. LiveClass works with Zoom. Each class gets one meeting created for it, each pupil gets a personal join link, and attendance comes back from the meeting data automatically — nobody pastes a link into a group chat again.
On our own servers in Germany, inside the EU, on hardware we run — not an account with a US cloud provider. Each school's data is isolated, Zoom credentials are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, passwords are bcrypt-hashed, two-factor authentication is available for staff and head teachers can make it mandatory. Everything is backed up nightly, and there is a written data processing agreement your DPO or governing body can review.
Yes — those are among the schools it was built for, alongside online primary and secondary schools, language academies and tutoring companies. A Saturday-only madrasah with 300 pupils has exactly the enrolment, fee-chasing and register problems a five-day online school has, usually with fewer office hours to solve them in.
Discounts, year groups, term dates, absence rules, staff permissions and fee structures are all configuration, not code. Sibling, staff and bursary discounts are applied by rule. If something genuinely doesn't fit, tell us on the demo — we built the platform and we can extend it.
No. The parent portal opens in the phone's browser. Adding it to the home screen takes two taps, gives your school's icon on the phone, and enables real push notifications for absences, payment problems and meeting reminders — with no App Store, no Play Store and nothing for families to update.
Pricing starts from £3 per pupil, per month, and the rate per pupil falls as your roster grows. One fee covers the whole school: no per-parent, per-teacher or per-login charges. There is a one-off setup fee for migration, data checking and staff training, a twelve-month initial term and no lock-in after that. We work out your exact monthly figure on the demo, against your real pupil count, so you get a straight answer rather than a range.
You get a full export in an open format on request, at any point — including on the way out. No exit fee and nothing held hostage.
Ummah Design, a UK web and software studio. LiveClass grew out of building this exact system for a real online school with several hundred pupils, so the workflows come from an office that had to run them daily.
Thirty minutes, on live data, with pricing for your roster included — and an honest answer about fit. Tell us your pupil count and what you use today.
