More than one school: who decides, and who pays
Two questions decide whether school software ever gets bought, and they are not always answered by the same body. Who signs off the decision, and whose budget does it come out of? In England, an academy is funded directly by government through its trust, and in a multi-academy trust the trust board's scheme of delegation may put the choice above the individual school entirely, while a maintained school runs through its local authority. In the United States it is normally the district and its board. In Germany the split is unusually sharp: the municipality as school authority (Schulträger) pays for buildings and equipment while the federal state employs the teachers, so budget and users sit with two different bodies. Whatever the arrangement is called where you are, the practical consequence is identical – once one body oversees several schools, most platforms stop being able to help, because they know exactly one school. SchuleVernetzt is built from the other side.
Coming soon
- GDPR-compliant
- Hosted in Germany
- Free for teachers
A product of SavePaper.work
What a body running several schools gets from it
Cover across school boundaries
If a lesson is uncovered at one school and nobody there is free, a neighbouring school in the network can take it. Whether that is permitted is your ruling, not the software's – the technology is there either way.
Small subjects together
A course that never fills at one school fills across three. Joint courses and shared material are part of the same network.
One overview instead of enquiries
Absences, utilisation and cancelled lessons across every school you oversee – without anyone collecting figures by email and merging them into a spreadsheet.
One contract, one data package
A single data processing agreement for the network rather than one per school. Hosted inside the EU, roles down to the individual teacher, deletion periods configurable per school so that different rules can sit side by side.
How a school network comes about
Four steps, and the first is the smallest – two schools are enough to see whether the pool holds up in daily use.
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1
Connect two schools
Two schools that already help each other out form the first network. Both keep their own class register, their own classes and their own parent communication.
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2
Set the rules
Whoever holds the authority determines which lessons may enter the pool at all, who may accept them and how far apart the sites may be. That is a governance decision, and it is worth writing down before the first cover lesson rather than after.
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3
Cover in daily use
An open lesson appears in the pool, a teacher from the neighbouring school takes it, and both schools see the same thing in the plan. How the hours are accounted for between the schools is settled by whoever employs and pays the staff.
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4
Extend the network
Further schools join without the existing ones being reconfigured. Joint courses and shared material follow as soon as more than two sites are involved.
A network or separate schools side by side
What the network actually solves
The cover problem does not end at the school gate
The lost teaching time that shows up in a group's statistics rarely arises because nobody in the whole area had time. It arises because the search stops at the school boundary. A school looks through its own staff, finds nobody and reports a cancellation – while two kilometres away a teacher of the same subject has a free period nobody knows about. That is exactly the information missing today, and no platform that knows only one school can supply it. A shared pool makes it visible. Whether it then turns into an actual cover lesson is an employment and organisational question, and the answer depends on who the employer is: a trust that employs staff across all its schools clears that hurdle in a sentence, while a system in which each school's staff are employed elsewhere has more to negotiate. Either way, the question can only be asked once the information exists.
Small subjects and the question of minimum size
Every school group knows courses that fail at a single school on participant numbers: a third foreign language, an elective, an advanced course in a minor subject. Across three schools the group would be large enough, but there is no way to form it – the systems do not know each other, enrolment runs per school, and nobody sees the sum. SchuleVernetzt runs courses that may contain learners from several schools, and shows where a joint group would come together on the numbers. Whether it comes together in practice depends on timetables and travel, not on software – but here too: only once the number is visible does it become a decision.
What the group level sees and what it does not
A network view showing everything would be easy to build and wrong under data protection law almost anywhere. Educational responsibility for individual learners sits with the school, and so does access to the class register, grades and parent communication. What the level above sees are indicators across schools: how many lessons were cancelled, how many were caught by the pool, how utilisation compares between sites. That is enough for steering and budgeting and needs not a single pupil's name – which is also the cleanest answer to the controller question, because a body that never sees personal data has far less to argue about. The role model separates the two levels technically, not merely organisationally: a network account cannot open the detail level, not even by accident.
A network does not appear all at once
Nobody switches fifty schools on one date, and nobody needs to. The network works from the second school onwards: two neighbouring schools that already help each other out are the most reliable first step. Further schools join later without the first ones changing anything. A school can also join an existing network even where the body above it does not run one – which matters in systems where schools group themselves rather than being grouped from above.
Common questions from bodies running several schools
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