Services · Mobile app development · School apps
Codeeo handles school app development Manchester schools and Greater Manchester trusts can shape around attendance, inclusion and family contact. We build a parent app, a staff app and an admin panel that work with your MIS, so absence is reported early, support plans are followed up and messages reach families in the language they read best. It runs on iPhone and Android.
Many trusts here run schools in more than one of Greater Manchester's ten local authorities. Each council has its own attendance and early help teams, and the app keeps those routes straight for every school while giving families one familiar place to go.
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What we build
Attendance is the issue Manchester heads raise first, and it rarely has a single cause. A child may miss school because of a health condition, a caring role at home, anxiety, a missed bus or a family that did not understand a letter. An app cannot fix those causes, but it can make the first contact faster, the follow-up more consistent and the information staff hold more complete. We therefore start with absence and engagement, then add inclusion features, travel information and everyday parent tools. Each feature reads from and writes to the MIS you already use, so nothing is recorded twice. The order below reflects the attendance-led projects we plan most often, though every school sets its own priorities in discovery.
Unreported absences trigger a message to parents, then a task for the attendance officer if there is no reply. Each step is logged against the pupil, so when a case moves to the local authority attendance team, the school already has a dated record of every contact attempt. Reason codes match those in your MIS, so the attendance officer confirms a mark rather than retyping it.
A clear, dated trail behind every attendance conversation.
The admin panel shows which families have not opened messages, not reported absences or not signed recent forms. Heads of year use this as an early prompt to phone home, long before attendance falls far enough to trigger formal action. The signals are prompts for a human conversation, never automatic labels attached to a family.
Pastoral teams act on quiet signs, not only on absence figures.
Parents of pupils with an education, health and care plan receive review invitations, can submit their views before the meeting and see agreed actions afterwards. The SENCO tracks review dates across the school, and sensitive documents stay in your existing records system. Reminders go out well ahead of each review so parents have time to gather reports from therapists or doctors.
Families of pupils with SEND feel included between reviews.
Manchester is home to a very wide mix of languages, and many schools serve families who read Urdu, Arabic, Polish, Somali or other languages more easily than English. Parents set their language once, routine notices are translated, and sensitive letters are flagged for human translation. Staff see each family's language next to their name, so a phone call can be planned with the right interpreter.
Families understand what the school is asking of them.
Secondary pupils across Greater Manchester travel on Bee Network buses. The app reminds Year 6 families about the igo card that 11 to 16 year olds need for child fares, and tells sixth formers about Our Pass. Schools update this content themselves as TfGM changes its youth travel offers. Where a school runs its own dedicated buses, routes and stop times can be published in the same section.
Fewer pupils stuck at the stop without the right pass.
Teachers take registers on a tablet during practical lessons, sports fixtures or off-site learning, with marks sent to the MIS as soon as there is signal. Staff supervising fire drills can see the live register for their area. Offline marks are queued safely and never overwrite a later correction made in the office.
Accurate registers wherever lessons happen.
Any adult in school can record a concern in seconds and route it to the designated safeguarding lead. The flow reflects Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, in force from 1 September 2026, and hands the note to your recording system rather than storing it separately. Body map and photo options are switched off unless your safeguarding lead decides they are needed.
Concerns logged quickly, held in one place.
Primary families log reading at home and see weekly spellings, while secondary pupils and parents see homework deadlines pulled from the timetable. Teachers spot gaps in home learning early and can follow up gently. Teachers set work once in the platform they already use, and the app simply shows it to families.
Home learning that parents can actually support.
Sports, music and holiday activity places are booked inside the app, with waiting lists and consent collected at the same time. Schools offering funded holiday activities can record attendance for their reports. Pupils eligible for free school meals can be offered places first where the school chooses to prioritise them.
Enrichment places filled fairly and recorded properly.
Snow on the Pennine edges of Greater Manchester can close schools in one borough while those in another stay open, so alerts are sent per school, not per trust. Priority alerts reach every family by push notification first, then by SMS for anyone who has not opened the message, and the office sees in real time who has been reached.
Families know before they set off that the school is shut.
Who this is for
The strongest cases in Greater Manchester share a pattern: a clear problem the current tools are not solving, usually attendance or family contact, and a leadership team ready to change how the office works. These four profiles cover most of the schools and trusts that approach us from the city region. Schools outside these profiles may still benefit, and discovery is where we test whether a custom app is justified for your situation.
Persistent absence is high, the attendance team spends hours on phone calls and evidence for local authority meetings is pieced together from emails. An attendance-led app gives structure to first contact, follow-up and record keeping, and frees officers to spend time with the families who need it most. Officers also see at a glance which families have been contacted this week, which avoids two staff members calling the same parent. The app does not replace the relationship between officer and family; it gives officers more time for it.
Attendance workflow and engagement signals first.
A trust with schools in Manchester, Salford, Oldham or Stockport deals with different council teams and referral routes for each site. One app with per-school settings means parents and staff see the right contacts, while the trust sees comparable engagement figures across all its schools. Shared modules such as consent and closures are configured once at trust level and inherited by every school. New schools joining the trust keep their MIS until a planned switch.
Per-borough contacts, one trust app.
Families need daily updates on how a pupil has been, transport arrangements, therapy notes and review dates. Staff need quick ways to share a photo or note at the end of the day. We build a careful, consent-led communication flow designed with your SENCO and leadership. Every update can be marked private so only named staff and the family see it. Transport changes, such as a new driver or route, can be shared with families the same afternoon.
Daily home contact built around consent.
Many families speak a language other than English at home and some are new to the UK school system. A visual, translated parent app explains term dates, uniform, meals and absence rules simply, and cuts the number of questions the office fields at the gate each morning. The school can add a short welcome guide that families revisit whenever a new term begins. Uniform and meal information is explained with photos, which helps families new to UK schools.
Plain language and translation from day one.
How we work together
Some Manchester schools commission a fixed first release and then a small support plan. Trusts more often agree a retainer covering new schools, integrations and termly releases. Codeeo has no office in Manchester or elsewhere in the UK; our team of 80+ is based in Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi, has delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US, and works remotely with UK schools by video call. Google reviewers rate us 4.7 from 23 reviews.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
We build in Flutter or React Native, with a web admin panel for office and pastoral staff. Data can be hosted in a UK cloud region, and staff sign in with the Microsoft or Google accounts your school already manages. Translation runs through a service named in your DPIA, and SMS is used only as a fallback for urgent messages.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
A project led by your attendance and communication problems, not by a feature list.
We begin with how your school or trust works today: who reports absence, how families are contacted, which council teams you deal with and where staff time goes. From that we agree a first release, usually attendance follow-up, translated messages and consent, and plan the rest in termly steps. Everything is written down before design starts so governors know what they are approving. Pilot feedback then decides the order of later features.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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