Running a supplementary school: the tech toolkit
A supplementary school needs four things from one app: a private space per class, each child's progress tracked against an individual goal, weekly assignments, and parent updates that do not require chasing every family. The National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education estimates that several thousand of these schools run across the UK, teaching heritage languages, faith, and core subjects to children outside mainstream school hours — almost all of them on WhatsApp, a spreadsheet, and a paper register.
TL;DR
The default supplementary-school toolkit — a WhatsApp group per class, a shared spreadsheet, and a paper register — is what loses progress cards and buries the same parent questions every week. Schools that move off it land on one private group per class, with each child tracked against an individual goal only their parent can see, weekly assignments, attendance, and a short parent check-in in the same place. Bitir runs this for free to start, with each teacher managing their own class. The one rule that matters most: one group per class, not one group for the whole school.
What does a supplementary school actually need from software?
Four things, and a typical school is currently using four different tools to get three of them done badly.
The first is a private space per class — somewhere parents and the teacher can communicate that is not the teacher's personal phone number and is not visible to other classes. The second is per-child progress: a reading level, a number of memorised verses, a grade target, updated weekly and visible only to that child's parent. The third is weekly assignments with a deadline, ideally able to accept a photo or an audio recording of work done at home. The fourth is parent updates that go out once and are seen by the right families, instead of being typed out forty times in reply to forty WhatsApp messages.
None of these is exotic. The problem is that the off-the-shelf school management systems built for them assume a full-time office, a per-pupil annual licence, and an administrator to run it — none of which a Saturday school of 90 children staffed by volunteers actually has. So schools fall back to the free tools and hold the rest together by hand.
Consider Magda Kowalska, who runs a Polish Saturday school of 70 children across four classes in Ealing, west London. The school meets for three hours every Saturday morning, charges £8 a session, and is staffed by two paid teachers and three volunteer parents. Her old setup was one WhatsApp group per class, a register on a clipboard, and a Google Sheet of reading levels that only she could update. The teaching worked. The administration leaked.
Why does one group per class beat one group for the whole school?
Because a whole-school group makes every message everyone's problem and no child's progress private.
It is tempting, when a school is small, to put all 70 families in one space. Do not. The moment the beginners' class teacher posts about Saturday's phonics homework, the parents of the GCSE group get a notification that is not for them — and after a fortnight of irrelevant pings, everyone mutes the group and the genuinely important closure notice is missed too. A whole-school group also has nowhere to put a single child's progress, because anything posted there is read by all 70 families.
We would argue for one private group per class as the firm default, with one exception: a single, manager-only broadcast channel for the three or four things a term that the whole school genuinely needs — term dates, a snow closure, the summer concert. Everything else belongs in the class. This is the same logic set out in our guide to private versus public groups: the default is private and specific, and you open something wider only for the rare message that earns it.
In Bitir this maps cleanly. Each class is its own private group with its own teacher as manager, so the Saturday phonics teacher controls her register, goals, and assignments without ever seeing the GCSE class, and the head of school can hold an overview across all of them.
How do supplementary schools track each child's progress?
With an individual goal per child, not a shared spreadsheet.
The paper progress card is the thing that fails on the worst possible day. It lives in a teacher's bag, it gets ruled by hand, and when it goes missing during a hall move a child can end up repeating a fortnight of work because nobody can confirm where they had got to. We have seen exactly that happen at a Birmingham Quran centre — the lost card, not the lost message, was what finally pushed the school to change.
The fix is to give every child a goal that lives in the app: a reading level for a language school, a memorisation target for a faith school, a grade band for a tuition class. The teacher updates it weekly. Only that child's parent can see it. It cannot be lost, and the parent can open it on their phone whenever they want without seeing any other child's progress — which both reassures the family and protects the child who happens to be behind from having that broadcast to the class.
For schools that want to be deliberate about what they record and how often, the framework in progress tracking for coaching groups applies almost unchanged: track behaviour weekly, individual progress every few weeks, and the group outcome once a term.
How do you keep parents informed without chasing them?
Make the update flow one way by default, and let parents pull progress rather than asking for it.
The reason a supplementary-school head ends up answering forty messages on a Sunday night is structural: the only way a parent can find out how their child is doing is to ask, and the only place to ask is the group chat. Remove that bottleneck and the messages stop. When the progress already lives in the app and the parent can already see it, "how is she getting on?" becomes a question they answer themselves.
A short weekly check-in does the rest. A three-question Thursday pulse on practice at home — did they read this week, for how long, any problems — keeps parents engaged and, in practice, lifts Saturday attendance: a parent who answered a question about their child on Thursday is far more likely to bring them in on Saturday. The reminder is implicit, not nagging.
Heads of supplementary schools we speak to often say things like: "I didn't realise how much of my week was spent typing the same answer until the week I stopped having to. The progress was there, the parents could see it, and my phone went quiet."
What about safeguarding, volunteers, and cost?
These are the three things that make a supplementary school different from a coaching group, and the toolkit has to respect all three.
Safeguarding. Supplementary schools sit outside Ofsted because they run fewer hours than registration requires, so the school's own records are the only evidence that exists. That raises the bar on record-keeping, not lowers it. Run DBS checks on every member of staff and every volunteer, keep a written safeguarding policy, and make sure messaging happens in a school space rather than on a teacher's personal number — a private group per class does exactly that, and keeps a record if anything ever needs reviewing.
Volunteers. Most of these schools run on parent volunteers who are not technical and are not paid to learn a system. The tool has to be usable by someone who does it for two hours on a Saturday. That is why a per-capability role model matters: a volunteer can be given a helper role that lets them mark the register and welcome families without touching settings, goals, or fees. The detail of that sits in our guide to roles in a group: leader, helper, member.
Cost. A school charging £8 a session cannot pay a per-pupil annual licence. Bitir is free for managers running small private groups, so a school can put one group per class in place at no cost and add paid features only if it grows to need multi-manager institutional tools. For a volunteer-run Saturday school, free to start is not a nice-to-have; it is the difference between adopting a tool and not.
Questions we're asked about supplementary school management
What app do supplementary schools use?
Most run on a mix of WhatsApp, a spreadsheet, and paper registers — the setup that loses progress cards and buries parent questions. Schools that move off it tend to land on one private group per class, with each child tracked against an individual goal, weekly assignments, attendance, and parent updates in the same place. Bitir is built for this: a Saturday school of 90 children across five classes can run five private groups at no cost to start, with each teacher managing their own class.
Should a supplementary school have one group for everyone or one per class?
One group per class, almost always. A single whole-school group means every announcement reaches every parent whether it concerns them or not, and a child's individual progress cannot be shown privately. One private group per class keeps each teacher in control of their own register, goals, and assignments, while a short manager-only broadcast handles the handful of things the whole school genuinely needs to hear.
How do supplementary schools track each child's progress?
By giving every child an individual goal — a reading level, a number of memorised verses, a grade target — that the teacher updates each week and only that child's parent can see. This replaces the hand-ruled progress card that goes missing during a hall move. In Bitir the goal lives in the app, so it cannot be lost and the parent can open it on their phone at any moment, without seeing any other child's progress.
Are supplementary schools inspected by Ofsted?
No. Supplementary schools in England sit outside Ofsted inspection because they operate fewer than the hours that trigger registration as a school. That makes the school's own record-keeping the only evidence of progress and safeguarding, which is why a durable, parent-visible record matters here. Schools should still run DBS checks on staff and volunteers and keep a clear safeguarding policy.
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