Built for schools
Oswald brings the systems a school relies on into one platform, with one login and one roll: lesson visits, appraisal, line management, student passports, clubs and the everyday requests of the school office.
Each app has its own colour and its own job. Together they reduce workload and give leaders a picture they can trust.
Built by a serving headteacher and in daily use at a Pele Trust school.
What Oswald brings together
Every lesson visit against shared indicators, the pattern by faculty and department, and whether the current CPD focus is reaching classrooms.
Appraisal that follows the trust's process exactly, and line management that starts from a shared board rather than from memory.
Who is in front of you and what they need, who has found a club and who has not, how each subject's intake compares with its year group, and the rooms and requests that keep the day running.
Apps built for school leadership
Each app replaced something that used to live in a spreadsheet, a form or a folder. They share one roll, one login and one set of permissions, so a school adopts them one at a time without re-entering anything.
Every lesson visit in one place, and the pattern it makes.
Lesson visits and learning walks are logged against six shared indicators, with flags for best practice and concern. Faculty, department and whole-school dashboards build through the year, and a CPD focus that changes with each cycle shows whether training is reaching lessons.
The trust's appraisal process, held exactly, with the chasing done for you.
Three targets with clear criteria, an observation series rather than a snapshot, two reviews in which the teacher writes first, and an annual report that downloads as a Word file ready to sign. The trust's guidance and reference documents sit inside the app, where they are needed. Wellbeing and workload are recorded under shared headings and read across the school without names, so leaders can act on what staff say.
Keep priorities visible, aligned and moving forward.
A board for every middle and senior leader, and for anyone who holds an area of responsibility without a faculty title: what matters most now, follow-ups, tasks with owners, complaints, the faculty CPD plan and key documents, shared with their line manager and the Head. Five minutes on it before a meeting replaces the spreadsheet and the memory.
Give every teacher a clear understanding of the learners in front of them.
Every class a teacher takes on one page, drawn nightly from the MIS, with students on the SEND register shaded by support tier and their status, need and keyworker beside each name. Passports stay the SEND team's own documents: Oswald links to them, checks the register every night and tells each teacher when something has changed for a student they teach. Senior leaders see every year group and subject by characteristic, with the gaps worked out for them.
Registers in seconds, participation you can evidence.
Registers for lunchtime and after-school clubs on the school's two-week timetable, a published what's on with a printable poster, a reminder the same day a register slips, and participation reporting by year group and characteristic, including how many clubs each student tries and who keeps coming back. Faculty leaders see their own area, and form tutors can be sent the students who have not yet found a club.
Requests in, decisions out, nothing lost in an inbox.
Room bookings and everyday requests come in through a simple form, are approved in one place, and are visible to the people who need to know. The pattern extends to other operational workflows as a school needs them.
One login. One roll. One set of permissions.
Staff sign in with their school Google account. The student and staff roll is fed nightly from the MIS, roles and scopes are set once and respected by every app, and each app takes its own colour so people always know where they are. The home page tells each person what needs them today, every app carries a short written guide, and there is one address to write to when something is wrong.
Being built for the same platform. Not yet in use in schools.
Structured faculty reviews that draw on the QA record rather than starting from a blank page.
Drafting, reviewing and tracking statutory SEND documentation with less administrative load.
A self-evaluation built from live evidence across the platform, kept current through the year.
Why Oswald?
Oswald takes its name from the Northumbrian king who helped unite divided kingdoms into something stronger. That same idea sits at the heart of the platform today.
In most schools, vital information is spread across systems, teams and documents, and every new initiative adds another spreadsheet. Oswald brings those parts together into one connected platform: a clearer and more reliable source of truth for leaders and staff, and fewer places for personal data to sit.
It is built by a serving headteacher, in the gaps a working school leaves, and every feature exists because a member of staff needed it that term.
Brand story
A visual reference to Northumbria, where Oswald's story begins.
Security and data
Oswald holds the same information a school already keeps in its MIS and personnel records, under the same lawful bases, in an environment with fewer access routes and better audit than the spreadsheets it replaced. The school remains the data controller throughout.
The database is hosted in Ireland and the application runs in Dublin. Both providers hold ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2.
No passwords to phish or reuse. Only accounts a school administrator has created can sign in, and a leaver is switched off in one click.
Teachers see their own classes and their own appraisal; faculty leaders see their faculty; senior leaders see the school. Nothing is decided in the browser.
Every table is locked to the public interface. Only the school's own server, holding a secret key, can read or write, and it checks the user's role first.
Encrypted in transit and at rest. An independent, encrypted copy of the whole database is taken nightly and kept for 30 days.
Students, staff and classes arrive by a nightly read-only feed through Wonde, under the school's existing agreement, and the SEND register is read nightly from the SEND team's own sheet, so records stay accurate without re-keying.
A full data security and protection statement, written for governors, trustees and data protection officers, accompanies the platform and is reviewed each term.
Built for real school systems
Shaped by the realities of school leadership and tested every day by the staff who use it, Oswald is built to bring clarity, save time and reduce friction across the systems schools rely on.
