Case Study · Toddle · 2024–2026 · 20 months
Context
Behaviour Management is Toddle's pastoral care system — where schools log, track, manage, and analyse student behaviour events. The module name itself is configurable: "Behaviour Management" in UAE, "Pastoral Care" in UK, "Wellbeing" in schools using restorative approaches. A school practising restorative approaches actively rejects the "Behaviour Management" framing. This naming layer is a precondition for adoption in several markets.
A missed notification in a consumer product is an inconvenience. A missed referral in a pastoral context can mean a coordinator doesn't act on a situation involving a student's welfare. That difference shaped every single design decision in this module.
28 beta schools across
The Problems
01 — Adoption blocker
Behaviour incidents were shared with the entire "school administrators" role group — IT staff, librarians, nurses, finance staff. None of these people should see sensitive pastoral records. Schools refused to go live until this was fixed. A safeguarding system schools won't switch on is a failed product.
02 — Notification noise
A coordinator with broad role-based visibility was receiving a push notification every time any teacher logged any incident. In active schools: dozens per day. Within a week, coordinators were muting the app entirely. Indirect access and direct sharing were treated identically. They are not the same thing.
03 — Teacher friction
A classroom disruption involving 6 students required 6 separate incident creations. Teachers either skipped logging or batched records at the end of the week from memory, losing accuracy. Every major competitor supported bulk creation. Toddle didn't.
04 — Safeguarding gap
A teacher could refer an incident to a coordinator — but there was no accept/reject/close lifecycle. Referrals disappeared with no review trigger. Coordinators didn't know what was pending. Teachers didn't know if their referral had been acted on. This is a safeguarding accountability gap, not a workflow gap.
05 — Scale
CEWA (40+ Catholic schools in Western Australia) couldn't define central Wellbeing Framework categories and push them to all schools. Every school configured independently. Category names proliferated. Behaviour data couldn't be meaningfully aggregated across a network.
"Indirect access and direct sharing were treated identically. They are not the same thing. This single distinction rebuilt the notification model."
Key Decisions
If a coordinator's role grants "view all incidents," they have permission to see every incident — but they don't get notified about every one. Indirect access (passive, role-based) is ambient availability. Direct sharing (a teacher specifically adding someone) fires a notification. The permission model and the notification model intentionally diverge. This deliberate inconsistency is what makes the system usable.
Publishing is the conscious institutional commitment: "this happened to this student." Once published, the student field is locked permanently. The case for unpublish: error recovery. The case against: it undermines the audit trail's meaning. A pastoral record that can be unpublished is a pastoral record that can be made to not have happened. In a safeguarding context, that's the wrong affordance.
Standard incidents: identical records per student, fast, one action. Counter-bullying category only: role-based participants (aggressor, victim, witness), because points should apply only to the aggressor. Schools either use Counter-bullying or archive it — they never encounter both models in the same flow.
When a teacher selects a sub-category, a footer previews exactly what will be auto-applied: "This incident will be shared with the student, family members, 5 staff members and 4 actions will be automatically applied." In a system where notifications have real consequences — parent calls, student records, staff escalations — the person triggering the action should never be surprised by what it does.
AI in this project
AI showed up in three specific and distinct ways — not as a tagline, but as infrastructure.
What I Learned