Education and training

The buyer and the learner are often different people

A parent enquires, a parent pays, and a child attends. An employer books, a finance department pays, and four members of staff turn up. In both cases the relationship your marketing speaks to, the relationship your invoice goes to and the relationship your teaching actually concerns are three different records, and a system built around one contact per deal cannot hold that without somebody lying to it.

What providers do instead is well known. They record the payer and put the learner's name in a notes field, which means the learner is invisible to search and cannot have a history. Or they record the learner and put the payer's email address on the record, which means the invoice reminder goes to a fifteen year old. Neither is a discipline failure. Both are what happens when the model has one slot and the world has three.

Holding people and organisations as one family solves this without anybody having to be clever. The parent is a relationship. The learner is a relationship. They are connected, with a role on the connection. Marketing speaks to whoever consented, the invoice goes to whoever is paying, and the course history sits on the person who attended.

Demand is seasonal, and the pipeline is not linear

Enquiries for a September start arrive in March and again in August, and the ones in August are a different kind of enquiry from the ones in March. A lead that goes quiet in May is not lost, it is waiting. A stage model borrowed from business to business software, where a deal moves forward or dies, describes almost none of this and produces a forecast that is confidently wrong twice a year.

What you need instead is a pipeline whose stages describe your admissions or booking process, a record of how long an enquiry has been sitting where, and the ability to see the ones that have gone quiet without treating them as failures. All three exist here because the stages are yours to name and the stage history is kept rather than overwritten.

The practical benefit shows up in June. A saved view of enquiries sitting at offer made with no activity for thirty days is a call list, and it is the most valuable list a provider owns in the run up to an intake. It is only possible because nothing was deleted when it went quiet.

The same person returns, in a different role

A learner completes a course and comes back three years later for the advanced one. A parent enrols a second child. A delegate changes employer and books for their new team. In each case the valuable thing is the history, and in each case a system that treats the new enquiry as a new contact has thrown it away at exactly the moment it became useful.

Connections that carry dates are what makes this work. The person is the person. Their connection to the first employer ended in June. Their connection to the second began in September. Both are in the record, and the enquiry that arrives in 2027 lands on someone you already know, with what they studied and who paid last time already visible.

March, when the enquiries start

Enquiries arrive from the website form, the telephone and an open evening. Each one is captured with its source, which is the part everyone skips and the part that pays for itself. In September, when you are deciding where next year's budget goes, the question is not which source produced enquiries but which produced enrolments, and only one of those numbers is worth anything.

Each enquiry becomes a relationship with a type you named. Where a parent is enquiring on behalf of a child, both records exist and are connected from the start, which takes fifteen seconds and saves the whole year.

May, when half of them go quiet

This is where a linear pipeline lies to you. In business to business software, an opportunity that has not moved in six weeks is dying. In admissions, an enquiry from March that has not moved by May is entirely normal and will convert in August.

The stage history is what lets you tell the difference between the ones that are waiting and the ones that are gone. Nothing was deleted when it went quiet, so the list is still there when you need it.

August, when it all happens at once

The daily view is doing the work now: what is due, what is late, who has not returned a form. Tasks sit against the relationship rather than in somebody's head, so when the admissions lead is on leave the work is visible to whoever is covering rather than arriving as a surprise in September.

Appointments for taster sessions and inductions are in the same calendar as everything else, attached to the people they concern, so a learner's record includes the fact that they came in on the twelfth and what happened when they did.

October, and the year after

Enrolments have closed. The reporting question now is which sources produced learners, what the conversion rate was at each stage, and how long the process actually took compared with what everybody believed it took. All three are measures rather than opinions, and the third one is usually the surprise.

The people who enquired and did not enrol are still there, with a timeline saying what they asked about and consent saying how you may contact them. Next March, that is the warmest list you own, and it exists because nothing was thrown away when it was marked lost.

The durable record is the learner, and the cohort is not

Other trades have a record that outlives everybody: a building, a site, a membership. This one does not. Cohorts end, courses get withdrawn and replaced by one with a different number on the certificate, and the venue changes hands. The only thing still standing in three years is the person, and everything you will want by then is a fact about a person: what they studied, who paid, what they asked about before they enrolled and what they came back for.

So anything you would be sorry to lose belongs on the learner. The cohort is the shape of a period instead of a filing cabinet, and a provider who files the valuable facts inside the cohort discovers two intakes later that the facts retired with it.

There is no record called a cohort, so you decide which thing carries the word

Consonas does not have a cohort. It has relationships, connections with roles and periods, pipelines with stages you name, and on Standard and above a catalogue of the courses you run. One of those has to carry the meaning, and the choice is yours to make once rather than ours to make for everyone.

For most providers the useful answer is a catalogue entry for each run rather than for each course, because the questions people actually ask are about runs. No one asks how many learners have ever taken the level three. They ask who is on March, whether March is full, and who moved from March to September. Name them with the course first and the date after, so that a list sorted by name puts the runs of one course together, which is the list you will read most often and the one someone covering for you will read first.

Which connections need periods, and which are simply true

A parent is the parent of a child and will not stop being so. That connection needs a role and no end date. A payer is different: an employer paid for the course that ran last spring and has not agreed to pay for anything since, and recording that as a permanent fact means somebody eventually invoices a company that never authorised it.

The test is one sentence. Ask whether the statement will still be true in two years or whether it will only have been true then. A delegate at an employer, a tutor on a run, a learner in a cohort and a funded place all fail that test and need periods. Once they have them, a learner who changes employer between the introduction and the advanced course reads correctly instead of appearing to work in two places at once.

The two or three fields worth adding, and the dozen that came from your old system

Funding source earns its place, because it decides who is invoiced and what evidence you keep. Accessibility requirement earns its place, because it is needed before the first session rather than after it. Prior attainment earns its place if you have entry criteria and someone has to check them.

What does not earn a field: the course name, which belongs in the catalogue; the cohort, which you have just decided how to hold; a status that duplicates a pipeline stage and will disagree with it by June; and any field whose only reader is a report no one has asked for twice. A field that exists so somebody can type see email into it has already failed and is now costing everyone four seconds a record.

What the modelling buys, stated as questions

Everybody on the March run and who paid for each. Everybody whose employer paid, so that one invoice conversation replaces four. Everyone who enquired for March, did not start, and might take September. Every learner one agent introduced last year. Every learner with an accessibility requirement starting in the next month, before rather than after the room is booked.

With the model right, those are questions. With it wrong, every one of them is an afternoon, a spreadsheet and someone reading four hundred records looking for a word that was spelled three ways.

Registration and certification live in the awarding organisation's portal

You register learners there, you claim certificates there, and Consonas does not speak to it. There is no integration, none is being built, and we would rather say that on the page than let you find out in month two. The rules for that portal come from the awarding organisation and its regulator, Ofqual in England, rather than from us.

What belongs here is everything around it. Who was registered and when. Who did it. The evidence held as files against the person it concerns. The enquiry that came before the enrolment, which is the part no one keeps and the part that answers the question an external verifier actually asks, which is how this learner came to be on this programme. A timeline answers that. A memory of a conversation in July does not.

Funding is a contract with an organisation, not a property of a learner

Hold the funding body or the levy paying employer as an organisation you have a relationship with. Hold the agreement as files against it. Connect the learners it covers with periods, so that someone funded one year and paying for themselves the next reads as two facts rather than one fact overwritten.

Consonas submits nothing to anyone and models no particular scheme. That is deliberate rather than unfinished. Those rules change on their own timetable, and a system with one of them built into its structure is wrong the following April, at which point the provider is the one paying to correct it.

Consent, and the day the learner becomes the person who owns it

Where a parent consented on behalf of a child, that arrangement has an end somewhere, and where it falls is a matter for your policy and the rules you work under rather than for us. Consent is recorded per person, per channel, with a date and a source. It will not notice a birthday for you and we are not going to imply that it does.

The honest way to handle it is a dated task on the learner's record for the term in which the question falls, and then a conversation with the family rather than an assumption made by software. That is less impressive than an automatic rule and considerably more likely to be right, which is the trade the whole product tends to make.

Anything typed about a learner is a record, and records get read

Record sensitivity is a grant held separately from the role, so a safeguarding concern does not become visible to somebody as a side effect of a promotion. The audit trail cannot be edited by anybody including us. Subject access tooling is on every plan including the free one, permanently, because an obligation is not a feature to be sold back to you at a higher tier. The right itself comes from the Data Protection Act 2018 rather than from a price list.

The discipline that follows is a staff room one rather than a software one. Write every note as though the learner and the parent will read it, because a subject access request means they may. Nothing here softens what was written; it only proves what it was and when. Providers who take that seriously usually find the notes improve, because a note written for an audience contains a fact instead of an impression.

Retention is a policy decision and no product will make it for you

Your awarding organisation and your funding agreement set a floor under how long learner records must be kept. Data protection pushes in the other direction, and the guidance that describes it is published by the Information Commissioner's Office rather than by a supplier. Between those two there is a period that is yours to choose, and choosing it is an afternoon with the agreements in front of you instead of a setting.

What the product gives you is complete export and erasure that removes a person from every place they appear, both on every plan including free, and a retention rule that deletes or anonymises enquiries, matters and conversations after a period you set. What it does not do is apply that rule to the learner record itself, or know what your awarding organisation requires. Decide the period, write it down, and put the review in the calendar as work, because the alternative is keeping everything forever and calling it caution.

If you have a roll rather than a pipeline, buy the management information system

A school with registers, timetables, reports to parents and statutory returns needs the system built for that, and Consonas is not it. No attendance, no timetabling, no assessment, no returns, and none of those are on their way. If somebody tells you an admissions product will grow into a management information system, ask them for the module list and then ask when it shipped.

Some independent schools do run something like this alongside the roll, for admissions enquiries, open evenings, feeder school relationships and alumni. That is a real and useful job. It is also a much smaller job than the one the management information system is doing, and it should be bought second.

If the teaching happens inside software, buy the learning platform first

Where your product is content, marking and progress, your bottleneck is delivery. Consonas holds no coursework, marks nothing and knows nothing about whether a learner completed a unit. Buy the learning platform, run enquiries in a spreadsheet for one season, and come back at the point where the thing going wrong is enquiries rather than assignments. That order costs you less and it is the order we would choose.

If your hardest problem is fitting tutors to rooms

Clashes here are reported rather than prevented, which is a deliberate choice and the wrong one for a provider whose central difficulty is a timetable with several hundred constraints in it. If the sentence that describes your worst week is about rooms, tutors and availability rather than about enquiries and money, buy a scheduling product. It will be better at it than this and you will not have to be clever about it.

If your intake is a number somebody else decides

Some providers take every learner through one funding allocation or one employer contract, and market to nobody. If that is you, the enquiry pipeline is the largest part of what this does and you will not use it. The parts you would use, records with connections that carry periods and an audit trail no one can edit, are genuinely there and genuinely useful, but you would be paying for a whole half you never open. Be clear with yourself that this is what you are buying before you buy it.

One tutor, thirty learners, and the honest test

Two questions settle it. Can you answer any question about a learner from one place without opening a second thing. Can somebody else answer it while you are away for a fortnight in August, which is the fortnight the question will be asked in.

If both answers are yes, your spreadsheet is doing the job and you should keep it. If the first is yes and the second is no, you do not have a system, you have a person, and the cost of that arrives the first time they are ill in the week before an intake.