About Us
A Foreword from our Founders
Back in 2005, we were the team that established the Keep Kids Safe Project, a collaboration between education professionals and young, talented web-based software developers. We were full of passion to make a difference, and to do things differently in the exciting new world of internet and mobile technology.
Our core, defining principle was to be different from the big software companies, to work in genuine partnership with schools, to understand their priorities and the day-to-day challenges they faced, then apply our knowledge to equip them to tackle those challenges, in new and innovative ways.
In 2006, Keep Kids Safe at School – a web-based absence management and school communication system, focused on improving attendance, safeguarding children, and increasing parental engagement – was launched. This software was innovative and highly successful in achieving its objectives, revolutionising the way schools communicate with parents.
Keep Kids Safe was superseded in 2015 by our second-generation parental engagement platform, PS Connect, which was the Winner of the Teach Secondary 2020 award for Best Business Product.
In 2010, in response to rapid academisation, we started developing School Asset Manager (now known as IRIS Assets), a system designed to help the newly established Academies manage their assets. Combining the emerging technologies of the smartphone app and QR codes, with a flexible online database and reporting tool, the system was launched in 2011.
As we embraced partnerships with Multi-Academy Trusts, we continued to develop the asset management platform to work across multiple sites and the focus gradually shifted towards Statutory Compliance.
By 2016, School Asset Manager was being used by many of the largest MATs in the country, had been adopted by over 1000 individual academies, over 500 LA maintained schools and had even been successfully launched in over 700 educational establishments in the USA and Europe.
In short, in the Education Technology world, we were becoming a bit of a big deal, and our business, Results Squared Ltd, started to attract attention.
In early 2017, IRIS Software Group, who were developing an education software division to consolidate and integrate leading solutions in the sector, bought PS Financials and in May 2017, Results Squared also joined IRIS. As members of the IRIS Education Division board, over the following 18 months, we also welcomed Parentmail, Contact Group and Biostore to the Group.
Whilst our time at IRIS was educational, the focus on integration and consolidation of existing products took us away from what we truly love – and what we do best – working with schools to develop new software and innovative ways of working. As such, in the Spring of 2019, we left IRIS and took some time out to regroup and consider our next project.
School Asset Manager had opened our eyes to the world of operational compliance within education and the challenges faced by the sector in remaining compliant, particularly across multiple sites.
There are many systems managing elements of compliance in education, some very well in their sphere of operation, but in our view, nothing comes close to an all-encompassing, integrated solution, managing all compliance workflows efficiently and effectively.
We wondered if this problem had been solved in other, highly regulated sectors and industries. Over the following months, we approached care homes, dental practices, the pharmaceutical industry, charities, haulage firms, manufacturing and agricultural businesses.
The first thing we learned was that the fundamentals are the same, regardless of the sector, there is a significant commonality to the challenges faced, and the underlying needs of those operating in highly regulated environments.
We found lots of software systems, some very innovative, doing very clever things, but nothing bringing it all together.
Given that nobody else has yet solved the problem of managing all aspects of compliance within a single integrated platform, we decided we were well equipped to take on the challenge.
In September 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic – which made the need even more pressing – we launched Compliance Pod, our next generation Operational Compliance Platform for Schools, MATs and Colleges.
We are no longer quite so young, but we are still as excited by technology as ever and our core principles remain the same. Now reinforced by 15 years’ experience in education technology, we believe that Compliance Pod is the most powerful solution we have ever created, and we are very proud of it.
This is just the beginning for Compliance Pod, and we are excited about the potential to grow both our partnerships and the scope of the project over the coming years.