An education-technology company. Built carefully, around one problem.
Cover My Class is a UK-incorporated education-technology company. We studied the cover moment carefully, listened to the teachers, heads, and cover coordinators who live it daily — and ran out of patience with the way it's currently handled.
A gap the whole sector agrees exists.
No serious actor disputes the facts. The government has acknowledged the supply-cover market is structurally inefficient. [5] The unions have named cover as a primary workload and wellbeing burden. [95] The research community has demonstrated that absence has measurable, sustained and unequal effects on attainment. [46, 47] Ofsted has documented the lost teaching time that poorly-briefed cover produces. [33, 35] What has been missing is a tool designed end-to-end for the cover moment. Cover My Class is that tool.
The business case behind this platform draws on 165 sources: UK statutory guidance, official statistics, peer-reviewed journals, and established research institutes. Every figure is sourced. Every claim is hedged conservatively. The aim is not to oversell a product; it is to present the most accurate possible account of a problem that schools face every day.
Why we built this.
We’re not teachers, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Neither of us has had to teach a class we’d never met, from a plan that wasn’t ours. What we could do was listen — and the same story kept coming back.
A teacher is off sick. Someone covers. They walk in without the seating plan, without the behaviour notes, without knowing which child needs which adjustment. The lesson gets managed, not taught. The class comes back unsettled, and the teacher returns to repair work instead of progress.
Nobody had built the thing that carries what the absent teacher knows to the adult standing in for them. So we read everything we could find — 165 sources — talked to the people who live it, and built carefully around that single moment. No grand claims. Just the handover, done properly.
We’d rather earn your trust with evidence than with adjectives.
Six commitments.
These are not brand values. They are operational constraints we have placed on ourselves — each one traceable to a decision in the product or the evidence base.
Evidence-first.
Every feature traces to one of 165 referenced sources. If the evidence does not support a claim, we do not make it. The same standard applies to our marketing as to our product documentation.
The 6.15am test.
If an absent teacher with a sick child and only a phone cannot submit a plan in two minutes, the feature has failed. Every design decision is stress-tested against this scenario before release.
Conservative claims.
Where a saving could be modelled high or low, we model it low. Our ROI figure is a floor, not a forecast — and we show our workings so any school can adjust the inputs to its own context.
UK-hosted.
Pupil, SEND and safeguarding data hosted in the UK, ICO-compliant by design, with a DPIA template provided as part of onboarding. No data routing through US infrastructure.
KCSIE-aligned.
Induction content is re-aligned to KCSIE annually. Default templates are updated within 30 days of any statutory change. Schools are notified before each academic year.
Risk-free trial.
60 days free across a half-term, and a money-back position for any school whose own dashboard cannot show we saved at least the licence cost. If the platform does not deliver measurable value, the school does not pay.
Three phases. Roughly seven weeks to whole-school use.
The onboarding sequence is designed around the school calendar — not our delivery schedule. A single 45-minute training session for the designated lead; no IT project required.
The registrations and accreditations behind the claims.
Procurement teams: the full Trust Pack — DPA, ISMS summary, subprocessor list, business-continuity outline — is on /security.html.
Not because the technology is novel.
Teachers will continue to be ill, pregnant, on training, on bereavement leave, in court as witnesses, and required to leave the classroom for any of a hundred legitimate reasons. Pupils will continue to need taught lessons in the meantime.
The case for Cover My Class is not that the technology is new. It is that no school can afford not to make the next cover lesson better than the last one — and that, on the evidence of the past decade, this is a problem schools have not solved alone.