£30 a month. £360 a year. Roughly one supply day.
No per-user metering, no premium-feature wall, no implementation fee. A school subscribes; every adult on its safeguarding register has access. On conservative, fully-sourced assumptions, the licence returns about nineteen times its cost in the first year.
Two tiers. One half-term to decide.
A 60-day free trial spans a full half-term — the natural decision unit for school leaders. Annual prepayment receives a 15% discount on either tier.
£30 / school / month
Billed annually at £360 · or monthly with 14-day cancellation
For single schools and colleges. Up to 100 staff licences.
£50 / school / month
For trusts and college groups · volume discounts from school 2
Everything in Standard, plus trust-level oversight.
60 days, full functionality, 30-licence cap. Designed to span one half-term — the natural decision unit for school leaders.
15% discount on either tier when billed annually. Monthly option available with a 14-day cancellation window.
School 1 at full price · schools 2–5 at 95% · schools 6–10 at 90% · schools 11+ at 80%.
The price is less than 0.05% of the average secondary school's annual supply spend — less than one afternoon of one supply teacher.
£6,845 net benefit, year one. Here is the arithmetic.
The model estimates the annual operational saving for a typical 980-pupil, 70-FTE-teacher secondary after one full academic year. Five savings levers, each independently sourced. Each lever, taken alone, recovers the £360 licence in full.
| Saving lever | Annual £ | How calculated | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Senior-leader cover-coordination time | £1,755 | 1 hr/week × 39 weeks × £45/hr | Cover coordination is a 60–90-minute daily routine; SLT fully-loaded cost. [6, 23] |
| 2. Teacher handover-preparation time | £1,750 | 50 absent days × 1 hr saved × £35/hr | Absent teachers preparing cover work; teacher fully-loaded cost. [1, 23] |
| 3. Agency mark-up redirection | £2,000 | 5% of £40,000 agency spend redirected to internal cover | Internal cover becomes viable when the absent teacher's prep is shared. [12, 111] |
| 4. Behaviour-incident time recovery | £1,200 | 10% reduction in cover-day lost teaching time, valued at teacher rate | EEF behaviour evidence; Cook et al. greetings study. [33, 35, 151] |
| 5. Compliance / risk-weighted benefit | £500 | Lower bound of a £500–£2,000 risk-mitigation range | Value of avoiding a KCSIE / Ofsted safeguarding finding. [7, 154] |
| Sub-total: conservative annual saving | £7,205 | ||
| Less: Standard-tier licence | −£360 | £30 × 12 months | |
| Net first-year benefit per school | £6,845 | ||
| First-year ROI | 1,801% | £6,845 ÷ £360 × 100 | |
We deliberately under-claimed. Here is the proof.
Each input was chosen at its low or lower-bound estimate. The conclusion — roughly 19× return in a single year — is therefore not a best case. It is a floor.
The case holds even in the low scenario.
A robust business case must survive unfavourable inputs. The low scenario halves the savings-driving assumptions; the high scenario doubles the plausibly-doubleable ones.
| Driver | Low | Base | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| SLT hours saved per week | 0.5 | 1.0 | 2.0 |
| SLT hourly cost (£) | 40 | 45 | 60 |
| Teacher handover hrs saved / absent day | 0.5 | 1.0 | 1.5 |
| Absent days / year needing cover prep | 40 | 50 | 70 |
| Agency mark-up redirection rate | 2% | 5% | 10% |
| Agency base spend (£/yr) | £30,000 | £40,000 | £60,000 |
| Behaviour-time recovery (£) | £600 | £1,200 | £2,400 |
| Compliance benefit (£) | £200 | £500 | £2,000 |
| Total annual saving (£) | £3,470 | £7,205 | £15,500 |
| Less licence (£) | −£360 | −£360 | −£360 |
| Net first-year benefit (£) | £3,110 | £6,845 | £15,140 |
| First-year ROI | 864% | 1,801% | 4,206% |
To find a scenario in which the platform fails to recover its annual cost within a single year, every assumption would have to fall to roughly one-fifth of the base case — a scenario inconsistent with any source reviewed.
£39,988 cumulative net benefit over five years.
Second- and third-year savings rise as adoption deepens, lesson-template libraries grow, and analytics enable smarter deployment. The benefit compounds.
| Year | Annual saving | Cumulative net benefit | Cumulative ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | £7,205 | £6,845 | 1,801% |
| Year 2 (+10%) | £7,925 | £14,410 | 2,001% |
| Year 3 (+20%) | £8,646 | £22,696 | 2,101% |
| Year 4 (+25%) | £9,006 | £31,342 | 2,176% |
| Year 5 (+25%) | £9,006 | £39,988 | 2,221% |
Over five years the cumulative net benefit per school is £39,988 — equivalent to retaining a classroom teacher for about three months at fully-loaded cost, or half a year of the school's entire agency-supply spend.
Operational saving returned for every £1 spent on Cover My Class in year one — the average ROI per school, on conservative and fully-sourced assumptions. The same ~£20-per-£1 ratio holds at sector scale.
Schools are cash-poor. We have priced for that.
94% of secondary schools cannot afford their projected costs in 2025–26; 65% of secondary leaders expect to end the year in deficit. [29, 96, 120] Any pricing model has to satisfy a strict test: the monthly fee must be unambiguously recoverable from documented operational savings within the same financial year, with the saving estimate biased conservative.
Cover My Class meets that test by a wide margin. The 60-day free trial, the money-back position for any school whose own dashboard cannot show it saved at least its licence cost, and a price set below 0.05% of supply spend remove the procurement risk.
A school declining to invest at this ratio is, in effect, declining to make 1% of its cover budget more effective in order to save 1% of its cover budget.