New Business looks at Classlist a great new tool for teachers, for  parents and pupils creating communities and enabling an efficient sharing of information and communication for the benefit of all parties.

Where did the concept come from?

It was the armed guards patrolling the school gate in Bangalore in 2007 that prompted me to look for a better way of finding potential school friends for my children, at the beginning of a four year stint in India's Silicon Valley.

 Since parents were not welcome on the premises, there was no way to contact children and parents in my three children's classes. After arrangements for my nine year old's birthday party went disastrously wrong - 50 very active boys showed up unexpectedly - I registered the domain name schoolclasslist.com, with the idea of creating a parent community that could help facilitate birthday party invitations, play dates, homework and such like. 

Moving to the UK four years later, the problem wasn't armed guards but privacy and data protection regulations, that prevented schools from sharing parent details. The only way of finding who was in my children's classes was through volunteers, whose thankless task was to harry other parents to complete a spreadsheet once a year.

We launched Classlist - a belt and braces system - at our school through the class reps. It was embraced in an instant and has taken off since then. 

How does it work?

Classlist started enabling parents to share contact information securely with other parents at their school. Since then it has evolved to allow parents to communicate with each other; find others to lift-share with on a map; buy, sell exchange items, and organise and pay for events ranging from fundraisers to children's birthday parties. Parent teacher associations use it constantly to communicate with parents and help develop their parent community.

Benefits?

At high level, it helps parents and parent teacher associations to build stronger communities through contacting each other easily and arranging things far more quickly. At parent level, it makes it far easier to know who is who at school. For class reps and parent teacher associations, it can save them literally weeks of work each year as much of what they need to do has been automated. 

Why would parents sign up?

Parents sign up to get to know each other, find out what's going on and help their children make friends. Classlist provides a virtual school gate, where parents can connect and ultimately meet up in real life via our easy to use event management tools. 

How secure?

Core to our service is that every parent is verified before they can become a member. Our site is structured to enable class reps and parent teacher associations to manage this easily and securely. Regarding our infrastructure, we have custom coded our application using the latest container technology on Google Cloud, which is one of the most secure environments in the world, and all the access and penetration controls you would expect. 

When did you decide that outside funding was necessary?

We met all the initial development costs ourselves, but to grow Classlist fast, using a secure, scaleable infrastructure, we needed a different level of investment. We took a high profile route by opting for crowdfunding, not least because it allowed many parents who are system users themselves to invest in the company, a great vote of confidence.

How will the financial backing help over the next two years?

We started only eighteen months ago working with one single school in the UK. We now have hundreds of schools across the UK and beyond using Classlist. We need a sophisticated infrastructure and operations team to deal with this growth.