Synchronised load
Concurrency is not spread across the day. It is a spike at the top of each period, and your capacity plan has to be built for that shape.
Education & EdTech
Everyone logs in at nine o’clock on Monday.
Education platforms have the least forgiving load profile in software. Usage is not distributed. It arrives in a wall at the start of a lesson, from devices that are older than the students using them, over bandwidth the school cannot upgrade, and if it fails the failure happens to thirty children at once in front of a teacher who now has no lesson. Education software development has to start from that morning, not from an average day.
The question to answer first
“Will it work on a school laptop, on school wifi, at the start of a lesson?”
0
Lost answers we design for when a connection drops mid-lesson
The pressure
Four constraints that are specific to this sector.
Constrained devices
Chromebooks with four gigabytes of memory, tablets two operating systems behind, and a network shared with the whole building.
Two sets of users
Learners and administrators want opposite things. One needs a system that gets out of the way, the other needs reporting, permissions and oversight.
Procurement reality
The person who buys it is not the person who uses it, budgets are annual, and accessibility and data protection are gating questions rather than nice-to-haves.
The work
What we build for education
Four systems, all of which have to work on the worst device in the building.
Learning platforms
Course delivery, assessment and progress that work offline-tolerant and resume cleanly when a connection drops mid-lesson.
Assessment and marking
Timed assessments that survive a dropped connection without losing a student’s work, and marking tools that give teachers time back.
Administration systems
Enrolment, timetabling, attendance and reporting, including the returns you are statutorily required to file.
Parent and guardian portals
A different audience again, on personal devices, checking one thing quickly.
This refresh effectively reflected our shift from in-person to online training services. … We saw notable increases in conversion rates and user satisfaction, and the design reflected our mission to empower educators through the highest quality digital experiences.
Read the full review
The device floor
The hardware we test against, not the hardware we would like you to have.
Every performance budget needs a worst case that is real. This is the kind of floor we propose at the start of a project. The figures are illustrative: the real ones come from your estate, and we write them into the acceptance criteria so you can hold us to them.
| Target | What it is | Budget | Why this one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline laptop | Chromebook, 4GB RAM, 2019 class silicon | < 2.5s to interactive | A common device in state schools, and the one that will still be in the cupboard in three years. |
| Baseline tablet | iPad 7th generation, two OS versions behind | < 3.0s to interactive | Shared trolley devices are rarely current and almost never charged. |
| Network | 4 Mbps shared, 120ms latency, 2% packet loss | < 400KB initial payload | A whole year group on one connection at nine in the morning. |
| Concurrency | 2,500 sessions arriving inside 20 seconds | 0 dropped sessions | The bell is the load test. There is no gradual ramp. |
| Interruption | Connection lost for 90 seconds mid-assessment | 0 lost answers | A student who loses work once will not trust the platform again, and neither will their teacher. |
| Accessibility | WCAG 2.2 AA, keyboard and screen reader | Pass before release | A procurement gate in this sector, checked rather than asserted. |
Non-negotiable
What we will not ship without
- Accessibility is a gate
- WCAG 2.2 AA is not a polish item in this sector. It is a procurement requirement and it is checked.
- Children’s data
- FERPA, COPPA and GDPR where relevant, with a clear answer to what is collected, why, and how long it is kept.
- Works on the worst device
- The performance budget is set by the oldest supported device on the slowest supported network, not by the developer’s laptop.
- Data loss is unacceptable
- A student who loses forty minutes of work to a connection drop will not use the platform again, and neither will their teacher.
Where AI actually lands
Four places it earns its cost, and one line we do not cross.
Worth doing
- Formative feedback on drafts and practice work, where fast imperfect feedback beats slow perfect feedback that arrives after the topic moved on.
- Lesson and resource preparation, giving teachers back the hours currently spent adapting materials.
- Early identification of students falling behind, surfaced to a teacher rather than acted on automatically.
- Accessibility support, including live captioning, reading support and translation.
Where we stop
Summative grading that affects a student’s record without a human deciding. The accuracy argument is beside the point; the accountability question is who answers to the parent, and it cannot be a model.
Evidence
We have no education case study to publish yet. The Doers Company, who sell online training to educators, have published a review of the website and platform refresh we delivered for them.
How we deliver it
The services this work draws on.
SaaS Development
Multi-tenant architecture, metering and billing designed in from the first sprint.
Web App Development
Fast, accessible applications that behave correctly on a bad connection.
UX and UI Design
Interface design grounded in how the work actually gets done, not how it demos.
Other sectors we work in
Next step
Tell us what nine o’clock on Monday looks like for you.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and replies within one business day with an honest view of what it will take, including how the platform behaves on the oldest device in the building.
