A group of schools is not one school repeated.
Every school has its own name, domain, head and way of saying things. The group still needs one directory, one set of standards and one place where marking gets done. A K-12 publisher runs 114 schools on Lurno.
How a group of schools runs on Lurno
A school group runs on Lurno as a tree. The group is one tenant; each school is a sub-organisation inside it with its own branding, its own domain and its own administrators. Inside a school, campuses and divisions are branches — a tree up to ten levels deep — and a role granted at a branch cascades down that branch and stops at its edge. Classes and sections are groups: named, typed rosters that can nest, each with a lead who gets extra rights over their own group and nothing else.
- Branch
- The tree inside a single school — campuses, key stages, faculties. A branch is not a separate tenant: members stay in one directory, attached to a branch. A head of primary granted a permission at the Primary branch acts on the primary school only, and a sub-branch added under it months later inherits that grant without anybody re-issuing it. Ten levels deep, no loops.
Two things deliberately do not cascade. A set of roster-management permissions stops at the school boundary, so a group administrator can appoint a school's head of learning without inheriting standing power over that school's pupils. And a guardianship belongs to the school it was verified in — it never reaches a sibling school. How guardian access works.
The rest is shared where it helps: one competency framework, one library, one marking workbench, one definition of completion. The same tree serves a company training its clients — that version is here.
How a school year actually runs
Classes and sections are groups, not spreadsheets
A group is a named container of people inside one school — typed as a class, a cohort, a department or a programme group, and it can nest. Its lead gets extra permissions over that group and nothing beyond it.
- September load: run the CSV import as a dry run. It reports what it would create and what it would collide with, and only then do you commit.
- The directory masks personal fields row by row, and a branch-scoped administrator opens it pre-filtered to their branch.
One school, several sites, one set of rules
Branches are the organisation chart as it really is: primary and secondary, three campuses, six departments. Attach a member to a branch and every permission granted there reaches them. Move a pupil between campuses and it stays one record with a different branch, not a second account.
Content that opens on the day it should
A programme carries a schedule: no dates, fixed, rolling, drip or cohort. Under drip, each module, lesson or assessment section gets an unlock day, an optional lock day and an optional due day — offsets from the learner's start, or fixed dates.
- Reach something early and the gate answers with a reason: not yet open, locked, prerequisites not met, not enrolled.
One queue for every class in the group
Work from assessments, programmes, lessons and resources lands in one workbench, with tabs for everything, what is assigned to you, what awaits moderation and what is done. Scoring happens against the rubric, in a drawer beside the work.
- Ordered passes, any of which can be blind, settled by a rule you chose: first, last, highest, average, unanimous, or a moderator decides.
- Two teachers opening the same attempt is handled — the second is told.
Parents see what somebody decided they see
A guardian's access comes from a verified relationship, not a role, and carries data categories. Verification happens in a queue with custody documents attached, and the reviewer narrows the categories before approving. Two parents of one child can hold different access — after a separation, the ordinary case.
How the guardian portal worksFour levels, and it matters which one a setting sits at
Set the brand at the group and every school inherits it. Set it at a school and that school departs from the group.
| Capability | What it is | What is set here |
|---|---|---|
| Group | The tenant. One publisher, one contract, one audit log. | Branding the schools inherit, competency frameworks, which curriculums are enabled, the shared library, custom roles. |
| School | A sub-organisation, with its own head. | Its logo, its domain with TLS issued automatically, its administrators, its words for teacher and section. |
| Campus or division | A branch inside one school. | Who may do what, here and everywhere beneath — including sub-branches added months later. |
| Class or section | A group inside one school. Can nest. | Who is in it, who leads it, and what that lead may do — over that group only. |
One record per person, seen differently depending on where you stand.
Curriculum, terminology, Arabic
Cycles, grades, domains, standards
A curriculum is a named framework with a country attached. Cycles group grades. Domains are subject-scoped. Standards are code-keyed outcomes tied to a grade, a subject and optionally a domain. Each organisation enables the ones it actually teaches, so a group can run more than one.
- Competency frameworks sit alongside as a subject, grade and domain tree, with mastery awarded from evidence in real work.
Call things what your schools call them
The glossary carries eleven terms — teacher, student, parent, guardian, class, section, subject, curriculum, classroom, school, and the name of the pupil's own area. Nine are overridable per organisation, singular and plural, separately in each language. Change teacher to tutor and the sidebar, page titles and empty states follow.
Right to left, not a layer bolted on
Arabic is a product language in its own right, not a translation layer over an English interface. Direction belongs to the language rather than a stylesheet patch, so choosing Arabic turns the interface around instead of mirroring a few labels. The Arabic strings track the English ones across the product, to WCAG 2.1 AA.
The questions that stop a purchase
Short answers, all true today. Procurement is welcome to check every one.
A student-data-privacy addendum
A FERPA and COPPA addendum naming Augmental a school official with a legitimate educational interest under 34 CFR 99.31(a)(1).
Student data does not train models
The addendum forbids using student data to train, fine-tune or develop machine-learning models for anything but running the service for you — and forbids selling it, advertising against it, or profiling outside education.
A data-processing agreement
A DPA for GDPR, with consent recorded against a published policy version rather than a checkbox, and subject-access export in machine-readable form.
Erasure needs two people
Anonymising or hard-deleting a person waits in a queue for a second approver — or forty-eight hours, where none arrives. The delete scrubs personal fields and rewrites authorship references to a placeholder.
Isolation lives in the database
separation enforced underneath the platform. One school's data stays unreachable from a sibling school, even if something above asks for it wrongly.
An audit log nobody can edit
Every consequential change appends to an audit log that cannot be quietly edited — who, when, to what. Rows are appended, never updated, and the chain verifies on demand.
Questions school groups ask
Bring your real structure and we will build it on the call.
Two schools, three campuses, the sections you actually run. Watch a role granted at one campus stop at its edge.