Shishya: how a group of schools replaced six apps, three spreadsheets and a lot of paper diaries with one platform

Shishya's director asked us to meet a class teacher before meeting anyone else. She showed us her phone: an attendance app, a homework app, a fee reminder app, two WhatsApp groups per class and a spreadsheet for marks that she emailed to the office each term. She spent close to an hour a day on administration before teaching anything.

Parents were just as confused. Different information arrived through different apps, notices were lost in busy WhatsApp groups, and fee receipts lived in yet another place. The school group was about to add more campuses, and the director did not want to multiply the chaos.

We followed a school day from the first bus in the morning to the last parent call in the evening. The biggest time sinks for teachers were attendance, homework communication, marks entry and answering parents' questions that the school could have answered automatically — "did my child reach school?", "what is the homework?", "when is the fee due?"

The admin office had its own pain: fee collection across instalment plans and siblings, admissions in the busy season and producing report cards that took the whole staff a week each term.

We designed Shishya as one platform with three deliberately different faces. The teacher app does the few things teachers do many times a day, fast: attendance in one tap per student, homework with a photo, marks entry by class. The parent app answers parents' questions before they call. The admin portal handles the heavier work of admissions, fees, timetables and report cards.

For the school group's leadership, a dashboard compares campuses on attendance, fee collection and academic results without anyone compiling reports.

With a fixed deadline — the start of the academic year — we ran two parallel pods, apps and admin, under one engagement lead.

Several of these came directly from teachers during prototype testing.

Everything that shipped for the new academic year.

We migrated student records, fee structures and staff over the summer break and trained teachers in the week before school reopened. Parents were onboarded at the first parent-teacher meeting, with volunteers helping them install the app and link their children.

The WhatsApp class groups were not banned, but they quietly became less busy as notices, homework and fee reminders moved into Shishya.

Consolidation is a feature. Replacing six apps with one was worth more to teachers and parents than any individual capability.

Deadlines in education are real. Launching with the academic year meant planning backwards from the first day of school and protecting that date.