What three spreadsheets actually cost a school

Most pitches for school software open with a number about wasted admin time, and most of those numbers are invented.

Here is one that is not. In the OECD's TALIS 2024 survey, full-time teachers reported spending about 3 hours a week on administrative work, which is roughly 6 per cent of their working time. It reaches about 9 per cent in Japan and about 12 per cent in Korea. Marking and correcting student work takes another 4.6 hours a week on the OECD average.

Three hours. That is not a catastrophe, and any vendor telling you spreadsheets are eating half of your teaching week is guessing.

So the honest question is not how much time a spreadsheet wastes. It is why the same three hours produce so much more friction in some schools than in others.

Spreadsheets are better than most vendors admit

A spreadsheet is the most successful piece of school software ever written. It is free or nearly free, everybody already knows how to use it, it needs no training budget, and it does not require anyone's permission to start.

It also does more than software companies like to say. A free mail-merge add-on will take a sheet of marks and produce a personalised report card for every student, then email each one to the right parent. Schools have been doing exactly that for years. Version history will tell you which cell changed, when, and who changed it. Conditional formatting will flag a run of Monday absences as clearly as any dashboard.

If someone tells you a spreadsheet cannot generate a report card, they have not tried, and you should discount everything else they say.

The cost is not the hours, it is the reconciling

What a spreadsheet cannot do is be the same document in two places at once.

The moment a second person needs their own copy, or a second department needs a different set of columns, or last year's file gets duplicated to start this year, you have two versions of the truth. Neither is wrong. They just disagree, and finding out which one is current is now a job.

That job has no name and nobody is timetabled for it. It usually lands on one person in the office who is good with computers, and it gets done in the evening because it cannot be done while the phone is ringing.

The three hours in the OECD figure are the marking of the register. The reconciling sits on top, it is invisible to any survey, and it scales with the number of files rather than with the number of students.

What actually helps

You do not need to replace anything this term to make this better. Three things help immediately, whatever you run on.

Decide which file is authoritative, in writing. Not which is best. Which one wins when two disagree. Most schools have never said this out loud, and it is free to fix.

Stop duplicating files to start a new period. A copy made in September is a fork, and it will drift by October. Add a term column instead.

Count your copies once. Ask how many separate files contain a student's name. If the answer is more than three, the reconciling is already a permanent job and somebody is quietly doing it.

If, after that, the answer is still that four files have to agree before you can answer a parent's question about Tuesday, that is the point where one set of records earns its cost. Not because spreadsheets are bad. Because you have outgrown having more than one of them.

Where we are honest about this

First IMS puts attendance, assessment, reporting, safeguarding, HR and invoicing on one student record, and Core is $0.75 per student per month. What it does not do is make the decision easy for a school that is coping. If your files agree with each other, your office is not drowning, and nobody is staying late in report week, then you do not have this problem yet and we would rather say so than sell you something.

If you want a straight answer instead, send us a sample export of what you keep today. We will tell you which parts map cleanly into one record and which parts do not, before you have agreed to anything.