Hive Classroom

Overview

Hive Classroom is the private digital hub of Learning Hive Christian Academy. Students, parents and staff each sign in to see what is relevant to them, on the web or in a mobile app. It is private to the school, so there is no link here, and I have left out screenshots and any school data on purpose.

The challenge

A standard school management system covered the basics: students, classes and attendance. What it did not cover was the way this particular school works: three different learning pathways with their own report formats, a careful pick-up routine, individual support plans, and parents who expect clear, timely information. Hive Classroom fills those gaps with modules built for the school rather than asking the school to bend to generic software.

Modules

• Gradebook. Teachers record classwork, homework, tests and projects per class and subject, and scores save as they are entered. At the end of each term the weighting of each part is adjusted (it must total 100%) and final grades calculate automatically. Students see their own grades on a “My Grades” page, and teachers are limited to their own classes.
• Report cards. Full-term reports, a project-based progress report for the second term and half-term reports, each with its own layout. Scores are read live from the gradebook, so nothing is typed twice. Teachers add strengths, areas for growth and next steps, plus attendance, conduct and development tables and signatures. Class position appears only for the older year groups. Reports move from draft to published, staff can preview exactly what a parent will see, and parents choose the term and report type from a simple picker.
• Early Years report cards. A separate report system for the Early Years classes, where each class has its own rubric the school can configure.
• Pick-up and drop-off kiosk. Each guardian gets a personal PIN that covers all of their children, and a tablet kiosk at the gate lets them check children in and out. A morning check-in marks the child present (or late after the cutoff), and the pick-up is logged separately as a record of who collected which child and when. If a child has not arrived by a set time, the day is marked absent automatically. A teacher’s own attendance entry is never overwritten. Staff get a live activity feed, records they can export, printable PIN slips and control over which tablets are allowed to act as kiosks, which they can switch off instantly.
• Special needs support. Individual education plans and weekly reports are written, tracked and delivered to families from a dashboard.
• Achievement awards. A live end-of-term leaderboard for each class, with smart statistics, calculated directly from the gradebook.
• Academic calendar. Holidays, exam periods and deadlines in one place for staff, with PDF export.
• Class timetables. Staff upload each class’s timetable and students see the one for their own class.
• Behaviour records. A structured way for staff to record and follow up on behaviour, restricted to the people who need it.
• Staff access control. One settings screen decides, for each staff role at the school, which modules they can open and what they can change.
• Homework search. A fast search and filter for homework on the student dashboard.
• Data migration. One-off import tools that brought years of historical grades and parent contact details across from spreadsheets, so the school did not start from zero.

The mobile app

Students and staff open the app, pick their role, sign in and land on a grid of module tiles. The grid, its tabs, icons and branding are all managed from the school’s admin area, so a module can be added, reordered or renamed without publishing a new version of the app. Push notifications keep families informed. A tablet app runs the gate kiosk, and a desktop companion app is in early development.

How it is built to behave

• Reads, never overwrites. New modules read from the school’s core data and keep their own records, so the core system stays clean and the modules keep working through updates.
• Draft before publish. Anything that parents will see, such as reports, can be reviewed first.
• Least access. Every module follows the same role-based rules.
• One source of truth. Scores and attendance are entered once and reused everywhere.

What I did

I designed and built the modules, the mobile and kiosk apps and the admin tools end to end, and I keep them running for the school.