Tenant isolation
Each school is a first-class tenant with its own scoped data and its own administrators, under a group that can be granted a view across them.
Cohort
One system from the application form to the parent’s phone.
Cohort runs the connected spine of a school: tenant setup, staff authentication with MFA, scoped custom roles, the admissions pipeline from application through offer and acceptance, conversion of an applicant into a pupil, guardian linking, and the parent portal where a family sees their own child’s record — and nobody else’s.
- Multi-tenant
- British curriculum
- MFA & scoped roles
- Admissions pipeline
- Parent portal
Built, pre-launch First release complete. Launching in Kenya, built for international expansion.
Multitenant
school groups with per-school data isolation
MFAenforced
on every staff account, with custom scoped roles
PG 16+
PostgreSQL with database-level role separation
Specfirst
architecture, data model and security posture documented up front
01 / The problem
School software usually fails on the boundary, not the feature.
Schools do not lack systems. They lack systems that agree with each other. Admissions lives in one place, the register in another, fees in a third, and the parent gets a login to none of them.
The moment a school becomes a group, it gets worse: head office wants a view across every campus, each campus needs its own data kept separate, and most products answer that with a shared database and a hopeful filter.
Cohort starts from the boundary. Tenancy, role scoping and access control are the first thing modelled, not the thing retrofitted after the first data-protection incident.
02 / In operation
What the team actually looks at.
The shape below is true to the real product. The numbers are not — these are illustrative values, never customer data.
Cohort admissions / september intake live
Applications 184
Offers made 96
Accepted 71 +9 this week
Converted 68
- Year 7 application · reviewed Assigned to admissions lead · 2 documents verified offer
- Year 9 application · accepted Guardian linked · parent access issued enrolled
- Sixth form application · awaiting reference Reminder sent to referee pending
- Year 7 application · withdrawn Family relocated · reason recorded closed
Illustrative interface with sample data — no pupil information is shown.
03 / Capabilities
What it does, in detail.
8 capability areas, each built because the operation breaks without it.
Authentication and MFA
Multi-factor authentication on staff accounts as standard, with session control and login-attempt monitoring.
Custom scoped roles
Roles are defined per tenant rather than chosen from a fixed list, so a school’s actual job titles map to actual permissions.
Admissions pipeline
Staff-created applications move through review, offer and acceptance with every decision recorded and attributed.
Applicant to pupil
Accepted applicants convert into pupil records without re-keying, carrying their documents and history with them.
Guardian linking
Guardians are linked to pupils with explicit relationships and permissions — which is what makes safe parent access possible at all.
Parent access
A parent signs in and sees their own child’s record. The access model makes seeing anything else structurally impossible, not merely unlikely.
Documented security posture
A written security posture states exactly what is implemented and what is not — the discipline that makes an audit survivable.
04 / Surface area
14 modules, one system.
Breadth is only an asset when the parts share a data model. Every module here reads and writes the same records — there is no export step between them.
- Tenant setup
- Staff authentication
- MFA
- Custom roles
- Permission scoping
- Applications
- Application review
- Offers
- Acceptance
- Pupil records
- Guardian linking
- Parent portal
- Document store
- Audit log
05 / Architecture
A modular monolith with the boundaries drawn before the code.
A Laravel API on PHP 8.3 organised as a modular monolith with background workers, a React and TypeScript portal, and PostgreSQL 16 with database-level role and privilege separation — so an application bug cannot become a whole-database compromise.
- L1 Portal React + TypeScript client for staff, administration and parents.
- L2 API Laravel modular monolith on PHP 8.3 with queued workers for anything slow.
- L3 Data PostgreSQL 16+ with bootstrapped database roles and least-privilege grants.
- L4 Cache & queue Redis for sessions, caching and background job processing.
- L5 Specification Product, architecture, data-model, security and UX documents as the authoritative source.
06 / Integrations
Built to connect, not to be a silo.
Third parties are first-class parts of the architecture, isolated behind stable internal contracts so any one of them can be replaced without touching the core.
Identity
Multi-factor authenticator apps and recovery flows for staff accounts.
Communications
Email and SMS to guardians on admissions and account events.
Documents
Secure storage for application evidence, certificates and pupil records.
Education
Want Cohort for your operation?
We can walk you through the live platform, talk about how it maps onto how you work today, and be honest about where it does not fit.