CASE STUDY: STRIDE 360

Reclaiming 1 hour every day through automation

"Building student and staff timetables used to take me up to an hour a day. There are more than twenty variables to balance and no two days are the same.

Meral ran an audit first, which found scheduling was costing us more than anything else in the business. She then built us a system designed around exactly how we work, because nothing off the shelf came close.

Now I map out the week I want and a full schedule comes back in under ten seconds. I review and approve it, which takes about ten minutes, and that's the job done. An hour a day has become ten minutes, and I've put that time straight into growing the business and improving what we offer our students.

The audit is what made the difference. Without it we'd probably have fixed the wrong thing. It’s made a real impact on the business."

Simone Lyons, Head of Operations, Stride 360

Staff were losing 1 hour every day to repetitive scheduling tasks. Now it's completed in seconds

1 hour back every day

What we built

Before building anything, we ran a diagnostic across the business to find where time and money were actually going. Scheduling came out as the single biggest drain.

Nothing off the shelf could handle it, because the logic was specific to how Stride 360 works. So we took the twenty-plus variables Simone was carrying mentally and turned them into structured data, then fed that into a custom-built AI-powered scheduler.

Simone now maps out the weekly class structure she wants. The system assigns every student to the right class, with the right teacher, at the right time, against all of their individual needs and preferences.

Nothing goes live on its own. Simone reviews and approves every schedule before it's used. The AI does the heavy lifting, and a human keeps the final say.

What Stride 360 does

Stride 360 delivers alternative provision and mentoring for schools across the UK. Young people who aren't in mainstream education attend Stride 360 instead, taught in small groups for a set number of hours and days each week, with teaching and pastoral support built around each individual student.

The problem

At any one time there are around twenty students on roll, and no two have the same timetable.

Each attends for a different number of hours, on different days, on a programme that starts and ends at a different point in the term. Each has a different tolerance for group size, different interests, and different teachers they respond to. Some can't be placed alongside certain other students at all. Where a student lives determines who collects them and when. Layered on top is every teacher's availability and what each one is qualified to teach.

So no two days look the same, and every timetable is a fresh problem to solve. Simone, Head of Operations, was solving it by hand, holding more than twenty variables in her head at once, every single time.

It took up to an hour of planning for every day of provision.

The result

A full schedule generates in under ten seconds. Including the review, planning has gone from an hour a day to about ten minutes.

Those ten minutes are Simone checking and approving the output, which is exactly where her judgment is worth having. What's gone is the hour of mental arithmetic that came before it.

Across a school year that's roughly four working weeks returned, and Simone now spends it on growing the business and improving the support they offer students rather than rebuilding timetables.