How a Sheffield karate sensei made belt progress visible to every parent for the first time

Marcus Adeyemi has run Sheffield Steel Karate Academy out of a converted scout hall in Hillsborough since 2014. Thirty-four students, four belt bands, one paper grading log that nobody but Marcus could read. After moving to a Bitir cohort per band, first-attempt grading pass rates went from 78% to 96%, and the WhatsApp groups his parents tolerated were closed by Christmas.

Where the dojo started

Marcus grew up in Sheffield, started karate at his secondary school at twelve, and graded to shodan at twenty-three. He opened Sheffield Steel in 2014 in a hired scout hall a ten-minute walk from Hillsborough Park, taking Tuesday and Thursday evening sessions plus a Saturday morning. By 2024 he had thirty-four students grouped into four belt bands: white-to-orange, green-to-blue, purple-to-brown, and the small handful of black-belt seniors.

The English Karate Federation syllabus he teaches has roughly forty distinct items per belt — kihon (basics), kata (forms), kumite (sparring), self-defence, and theory questions. A student grades when their sensei is confident they can perform all of them. The decision to put a child forward is the most stressful one Marcus makes, because a failed grading dents a nine-year-old in a way no adult walking out of a job interview really equates to.

The old system, and why it broke

His record-keeping, until 2024, was a hardback A4 book. One page per student, syllabus items down the left, dates and ticks across the right. He carried it home every evening and updated it from memory.

Three problems compounded.

The first was attendance memory. Across thirty-four students, three sessions a week, and the rolling churn of school trips and stomach bugs, Marcus could not actually remember in February who had been there for a particular kihon drill in October. He would put a student forward for a grading and discover at the dress rehearsal that they had not, in fact, ever done their first three kicks under his eye.

The second was parent communication. Parents wanted to know two things: when is the next grading, and is my child ready. Marcus answered both questions, badly, across three WhatsApp groups — one per training night plus a senior chat — which between them produced about ninety messages in a busy week. Useful answers got buried under reminders about water bottles and lost gi.

The third was the grading day itself. Sheffield Steel runs internal gradings each term for kyu grades up to brown belt. Across the four gradings in 2024 he failed five students on first attempt, including a ten-year-old who burst into tears in front of forty parents. Marcus says that grading is the one he replays. "I knew before she walked on the mat that I had not drilled her enough on her sanbon-kumite. I just had not held myself to noticing."

What he tried first

Marcus tried a dojo-management SaaS in late 2024. It was built around the things he did not need help with — billing, sign-ups, contract renewals — and had a syllabus tracker that lived behind three taps and required a parent login most families never used. He cancelled after eight weeks.

A black-belt parent of one of his green-belts, a project manager at a Sheffield engineering firm, suggested Bitir. She used it for her own team's onboarding programme and pointed out that the structure — one private group, individual goals per member, weekly assignments visible to the right people — was almost exactly what a dojo needed.

How he set the dojo up in Bitir

Marcus made four decisions in the first week and has not changed any of them since.

1. One cohort per belt band. White-to-orange, green-to-blue, purple-to-brown, and a small senior group. Each cohort is a private Bitir group; the students' parents are members; Marcus is the manager.
2. Per-student belt goal. Each student's next belt is the individual goal. Underneath sits the EKF syllabus for that grade, with each item tickable from the dojo floor on Marcus's phone.
3. Attendance from the door. Students tap in at the door on Marcus's tablet when they arrive. Attendance is a one-tap action and feeds the cohort's attendance card automatically.
4. Weekly home-practice assignment. Each Sunday evening Marcus posts a short three-line drill for the week — "kihon: 20 oi-zuki each side, kata: heian sandan twice through, watch this 90-second clip on chudan-uke" — with a tick-off for each student. Parents see the assignment; students tick it.

Parents do not post in the cohort by default. Marcus made that call deliberately after week two, when a couple of well-meaning parents started chiming in on technique. The group is now a window into the dojo's record, not a chat. Parents who want to talk to Marcus do so by private message.

What grading day looks like now

Two weeks before a grading, Marcus reviews the syllabus tracker for every student in the band. Each row shows green for items he has personally seen the student perform to the required standard, amber for items they are close on, and red for items not yet evidenced. The pre-grading conversation with the parent then takes about ninety seconds: "Layla has all of her kihon green except mae-geri; one more good session and we are clear. Kata is solid. Sparring rounds are the one I want her to do two more of. I am putting her forward and I am confident."

That sentence used to be vibes. It is now a record.

Across the four gradings since Marcus moved to Bitir, two of them now in his second year, he has put forward twenty-six students. Twenty-five of them have passed on first attempt. The one who did not had concussed himself on a school football pitch the Wednesday before and Marcus would have pulled him in hindsight.

Results after one year on Bitir

The grading number is the one Marcus watches. The retention number is the one that pays the rent on the scout hall. The WhatsApp number is the one his evenings noticed first.

A small surprise: home-practice tick-off rates landed at 68% in the first term and have stayed there. Marcus expected lower. He thinks the credit is the assignment being short — three lines, never more — and the fact that a parent and a student see the same task in the same place. The Bitir team's seven assignment-design patterns guide reads, he says, like a description of what already started working in his dojo.

What he would tell another martial arts instructor

• Do not try to digitise the whole syllabus before term one. Start with one belt band and three items, tick them off live on the dojo floor, and add the rest only when the habit holds.
• Hide the chat. A dojo cohort with parent chat enabled becomes a coaching seminar within a fortnight, and that is not what the cohort is for.
• Take attendance at the door, not at the end. A tap as the student walks in costs you four seconds; doing it from memory costs you a grading.
• Send the pre-grading note two weeks out, not the night before. A parent who knows on a Tuesday that their child is on track sleeps fine through grading week.

What Marcus does in Bitir

• One private cohort per belt band — white-to-orange, green-to-blue, purple-to-brown, and a senior group.
• Per-student belt goal with the EKF syllabus — tickable item-by-item from the dojo floor.
• Door attendance scan — one tap per student on arrival.
• Weekly three-line home-practice assignment — same shape every Sunday, posted before tea.
• Pre-grading readiness note — per student, sent two weeks before each internal grading.
• Private parent messages — for everything that does not belong in the cohort wall.

Related reading: why post moderation matters and how to do it well in a coaching group, and progress tracking for coaching groups: what to measure and how.