Schools Plus
Founded in 2004, Schools Plus has been transforming community lettings across the UK for around 18 years. As one of the longest-running school lettings companies, they help schools generate flexible income by renting out their facilities outside school hours.
Schools Plus provides a fully managed service, handling every aspect of community lettings. They manage everything—from staffing, sales, and marketing to revenue collection and safeguarding—ensuring a seamless and comprehensive service.
The Problem
Schools Plus came to us requiring support and maintenance for a booking platform they had developed in-house. However, this engagement quickly evolved as they recognised significant system limitations and performance issues that threatened their long-term growth.
Their unique operational requirements meant that off-the-shelf solutions were inadequate for their needs and their existing infrastructure was not equipped to support their long-term growth plans, growing user base and future updates, for example:
- Requirement to handle a growing number of users, manage large volumes of data,
and provide a high level of security—all while being flexible enough to adapt to future demands. - Inadequate level of security
- Inadequate availability and scalability
The Solution
Our solution for this was to move them on to Amazon’s AWS Cloud Service. Hosting on a cloud environment such as AWS, allows a much more resilient and scalable environment in comparison to the virtual machine their system was previously hosted from.
Using AWS as the hosting environment allowed for the testing and production environment to become separate entities at the infrastructure level which would allow fundamental updates and development changes such as software version updates to be made to one without affecting the other.
The new web application now handles the entire booking process, from customers searching for and booking a facility, to third-party operators adding venues and managing their bookings. This provides a much more simple and seamless experience for users making the task of booking spaces easier for both customers and the Schools Plus support team.
There is now also a more robust way of reporting key data and information that can be used by the Schools Plus team to tailor results to customers’ needs, activities and preferences for a quicker checkout experience in the future.
One of the main challenges faced with the older system was due to the need for Schools Plus operators to manually book activities on behalf of the customer since the system had no customer-facing front end. The new system built by The Curve allows customers to create accounts, manage bookings themselves, and subsequently allow Schools Plus to focus on expanding their service and engaging with more Schools so they can continue to provide a unique service to users.
Creating a bespoke system tailored to their business operations has provided features such as:
a calendar Interface that supports viewing and creating bookings at customisable intervals, specific to the customer and user.
unique booking flows designed to handle different safeguarding requirements and VAT circumstances, providing a seamless check-out experience.
a payment system designed to support various customer payment methods including instalments and upfront payment options. This payment system also needed to be able to support payouts for operators and provide financial data for each type of user on the platform.
With the new infrastructure in place, Schools Plus can now effortlessly scale its operations to accommodate a growing user base without fearing performance degradation. They can also roll out updates and new features with minimal disruption to their live services. The platform’s enhanced security features allow them to protect sensitive data more effectively, and the use of a CDN means faster load times for their users, leading to a better overall user experience.
The improvements led to a significant reduction in downtime and enhanced the overall reliability of the platform, ensuring that users could access the system whenever needed. The faster load times and improved security boosted customer satisfaction and trust. The scalability of the new system allowed Schools Plus to expand its services, increasing revenue through higher user engagement and more efficient use of resources.
Their Thoughts
James Woods – Founder of Schools Plus
“We were impressed with The Curve’s commitment to getting everything right for us. Flexing on several key matters to invest in the relationship, and valuable contributions to our overall design thinking to help us create something even better than we had originally hoped for. The team has set realistic milestones, and their receptiveness to client input and feedback makes them stand out. Their dedication and valuable insights make for a fruitful partnership”.