EdSmart: Simplifying School Workflows and Administration with Digitalization

According to Gartner, 87 percent of senior business leaders consider digitalization as a company priority, but only 40 percent of organizations have brought digital initiatives to scale. This implies that digitalization in the education sector is certainly way less as schools are still heavily reliant on paper to manage critical tasks and workflows. Often, MS Word forms are filled out and mailed to the concerned authorities or parents, which is again as good as paper. Post-it-note systems are still in place; people fill out a paper form and leave a post-it note on it requesting a signature by the appropriate authority. And this paper goes into someone’s in-tray. Manual paper-based processes are hard to track, maintain an audit trail for, and lack the security to safeguard sensitive information. This paperbased system of managing critical admin operations clashes with the growing demands for compliance and regulation imposed on schools today. “Photo permissions are a great example proving this. These days, we've seen photo or media permission forms sent out by schools with a dozen options on them, such as ‘my child's photo can/cannot be used for promo purposes,’ or ‘my child's video or audio can/ cannot be used,’” explains David Eedle, CTO of EdSmart. If a child's photo is used for a purpose that the parent hasn't permitted, it becomes a compliance issue for the school.

This is where companies like EdSmart make a difference. EdSmart is a premier provider of marketleading enterprise solutions for streamlining educational operations and improving productivity for individual and multi-campus schools, school bodies, and school networks. “EdSmart sits at the nexus of these pain points to digitize administration and communication in schools. We deliver robust workflow and permission controls around critical information so that schools gain more confidence in their compliance with stringent regulations,” shares Eedle.

EdSmart was founded by Eedle and Fiona Boyd, the CEO of the company, who grew tired of filling out endless school paperwork for their three children. Eedle’s technology background, mostly around online management systems, became extremely applicable to what is now EdSmart, which at its heart is online forms, designed, built, and shaped to suit K-12 schools. “When we started out, we primarily targeted paper forms— typically, permission slips—sent home to parents by schools,” he says. By talking to schools to understand their workflows and identifying more use cases for how digitization could improve school administration, the company has been building on its platform to suit and serve schools’ diverse needs.

Following a modular approach, EdSmart groups the functionalities of its platform into modules, which allows it to present different product levels to schools.

The basic product level deals with forms sent out to parents and communication and engagement with them. On the other hand, the higher product tiers enable schools to address internal administrative processes like HR tasks, professional development, tracking applications, and more. “We present multiple price-points to schools because not all schools are ready to transform their enterprise from top to bottom. So, we act as an enterprise layer across the school,” underscores Eedle. Unlike a single monolithic product that often makes onboarding, change management, and training more difficult, EdSmart allows schools to get gradually introduced to its platform and scale up over time.

From small beginnings with modest ambitions, EdSmart has today emerged as a market leader by tackling one targeted problem in a unique way. “When we built the platform, we took a pretty generic approach. When we say online forms, they're whatever the school wants them to be; they can have as many as they like and can be as detailed as they like,” says Eedle. By staying generic and highly configurable, EdSmart allows schools to accomplish various tasks that other targeted products don’t.

To illustrate the capabilities of EdSmart, Eedle recalls their engagement with The Cairns Diocese of the Catholic Education Department, which covers an extraordinary amount of Queensland—29 schools, 15,000 students, and 2,200 parents. Mostly managing ‘conventional’ schools, the Cairns Diocese also has campuses in remote parts of North Queensland, whose needs differ considerably from other schools. EdSmart built a system for them to manage parental communications and forms for excursions, media consent, and other purposes. This helped the Cairns Diocese streamline digital processes, improve consistency and compliance, and increase parent engagement even in remote locations. At the same time, the teachers and parents at the Cairns Diocese have really embraced the system because it has eliminated the time-consuming, paper-based processes that were frustrating to fill out and complete.

Eedle mentions that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools to leap forward from technology, administration, and organizational perspectives. Schools understand that what’s normal today is subject to change in the immediate future. On this note, flexible work arrangements, solid and remote-accessible online systems have become essential for schools. With this in mind, EdSmart will continue to meet the incredibly specific requirements of clients, and at the same time, ensure that its product is generic, flexible, and configurable. EdSmart aims to implement different ideas from schools into a flexible solution and customize it by turning certain features on and off depending on clients’ requirements and price constraints. With customers in nine countries, including Canada, the U.S., and the UK, EdSmart aims to responsibly manage the geographical expansion plan. “We’ve been taking mindful steps in scaling up overseas because we want to be able to look after the schools in those regions with the same care as we do for Australian and New Zealand schools,” concludes Eedle.