24 Hours with Complete Education Solutions

A brief overview of your role and company

I am Jamie Cooper, the Operations Manager here at Complete Education Solutions. We are a relatively new and rapidly growing software provider for the education and childcare sectors. Our main two products, designed, built and sold by us are; iPAL a booking, payment and management software for children’s clubs, schools and sports clubs. iPEP a PE lesson planning and assessment tool to provide every primary school teacher with the tools to teach PE lessons to a specialist standard.

My role as Operations Manager isn’t your standard role, as being part of a start-up business your roles are always a lot more diverse than average, which for me, is one of the biggest attractions to working here. I can go from discussing new software feature layouts one minute to helping train up a customer who can’t understand the system the next. This we see as a major advantage for us as it means we can improve our software from genuine customer feedback (meaning we don’t just update things and move everything about like Facebook!).

Can you tell us a short overview of an average day at work?

It would be a well-used trope to say that there is no such thing as an average day at work with us but it’s true, the saying “every day is a school day” sums up your average day at Complete Education Solutions. Due to the nature of the childcare industry and government budgets for schools, our software has to be flexible and adaptable to each change that gets thrown our way. Little things that most people won’t pay a second thought to, we need to be aware of and update before the thousands of parents using the system spot. The latest example of this is the Universal Credit changes meant that we needed to completely redesign the information on our invoices to ensure these would be accepted by every local council in the UK.

Jamie Cooper, Operations Manager at Complete Education Solutions

How has the company grown in recent years?

Since Covid, we have seen a huge increase in sales and subsequently, we’ve been able to see all our customers growing. We pride ourselves on supporting our customer’s growth as the larger they get the better it is for us. As a result, since 2021 we’ve gone from four full-time staff to 10 with our own in-house team of developers working on upgrading the system on a daily basis.

Have you faced any particular challenges recently?

Our biggest challenge is recruitment, we have resorted to directly hiring developers outside the UK to ensure that we have people with the skills we need. Until schools in the UK see technology jobs as the future and start teaching children the basics at high school, the salaries for these roles will remain unaffordable for most SMEs.

What are your plans for the future?

Within the next 12 months, our plans focus on targeting new markets to help ensure our resilience against any economic shocks. We will soon be launching an upgrade to iPAL to allow nurseries to use it more effectively reducing their admin around the government funded places. We’re in the process of auditing and upgrading our PE software to ensure that it includes accessibility tips for children with SEND and new lessons like Quidditch and Olympic modules. Our longterm plan is to branch out into the pet care industry providing them a digital solution instead of relying on the old paper diaries they currently use. So, pet owners can book their cats and dogs into kennels themselves with the certainty that a place will definitely be there when they need it.

If there was an extra hour in the day, how would you spend it?

With an extra hour a day, I’d spend it on learning more about CSS and React.js to allow me to have a better understanding of a lot of general developer conversations and to be able to offer more practical help and quick fixes on UI / UX designs and the limitations and possibilities to help find solutions to customers suggestions for software upgrades.