Everything SEN School Manager does
Features
Everything a special needs school needs — pupils, attendance, safeguarding, parent messaging and the staff app — in one place. Fill this page with your own screenshots, or leave the built-in feature list below.
📋 Pupils & records
- A profile for every pupil — UPN, SEN status (EHCP / SEN support) and key details
- Guardians and family links, with contact preferences
- Classes and intervention groups
- Import pupils and guardians from CSV or Excel
📅 Attendance
- Take registers using the DfE-standard codes
- Mark from the office or on the staff app
- Reports and per-user RAG dashboard thresholds
- Shared write logic, so the app and admin never diverge
🗓️ Timetable
- A visual drag-and-drop weekly planner — or import from CSV/Excel
- Reusable classes for one or several groups, with a default room
- Managed sites & rooms — every session shows both
- Assign staff and leads, with required-skill warnings
- Per term, with optional two-week A/B rotas
- Draft, review and publish to families and staff; print any teacher’s or pupil’s week
- Check the whole term in one click — 18+ clash & gap checks (staff/room/pupil double-bookings, room capacity, adult:pupil ratio, PPA, specialist rooms and more), with CSV/PDF/print and click-straight-to-the-problem
🛡️ Safeguarding & events
- Log incidents and events with categories and follow-ups
- Safeguarding entries visible only to your DSLs
- A pupil timeline that pulls it together
- An audit trail for accountability
💬 Parent messaging
- Message guardians by SMS or WhatsApp
- Twilio, a custom webhook, or a free Android-phone gateway
- Per-guardian channel preferences
- Two-way in-app messages with photos, plus retention and photo-storage controls
- Parents can report an absence from the app — the office is notified and reviews it before the register is marked
- Optional remote photo archive (S3-compatible) and serve-from-storage
- A guided comms setup wizard
📱 Offline staff app
- Add-to-home-screen app — no app store needed
- Log attendance and events even with no signal
- Syncs automatically when back online
- Scan or paste a sign-in code; optional PIN lock
- Unlock with a fingerprint or Face ID — the PIN stays as a backup
- Saved logins are held encrypted on the device, never in plain text
- Tag evidence against outcomes and shared measures as you log it, with search
- Report an absence from the app (a day or a range) — the office is notified (Complete)
🧩 Skills & cover
- A skills library with multi-level groups
- A skills matrix to assign staff in one screen
- Timetabled and recurring weekly sessions
- Find cover for an absent staff member, ranked by matching skills
- Assign cover for the day in one click — it appears on the covering staff’s app, with a notification
- A staff absence register — staff can report an absence from the app, and leadership is notified so cover can be arranged (Complete)
- An uncovered-absence check that flags any session still needing cover (Complete)
🎨 Your branding
- Your school name, logo and colours across both apps and the sign-in screens
- Upload one square app icon — every size both apps need is generated for you
- Rename each app — the family app doesn’t have to be called Willow
- Separate home-screen labels so long school names aren’t truncated
- Shades and text colours are worked out for you, so nothing ends up unreadable
- One switch to turn it all off again, without losing your settings
🔐 Security on staff phones
- Optional app lock — the saved login is encrypted with the staff member’s PIN
- Fingerprint / Face ID unlock, opt-in per device
- On supported phones the key is produced by the device’s own security chip and never stored
- Where a phone can’t do that, the app says so plainly rather than overstating it
- Nothing extra is sent to your site — it all stays on the phone
- Reconnecting or removing the lock clears the stored login
🧰 Setup & data
- Import pupils, guardians and staff from a spreadsheet
- Import a whole timetable from a CSV or Excel file
- Create WordPress accounts for imported staff, deduped by email
- Built-in demo data with optional 2-hourly auto-reset
- Contextual help on every screen
🎫 Support & peace of mind
- Log bugs, enhancements and questions inside the plugin
- Track each ticket Open → In progress → Resolved
- Roles and capabilities, DSL-gated safeguarding
- Self-hosted — your data stays on your own site
Try all of it in the live demo
A full sample school, ready to click around. No sign-up.