Software for online English schools

An online English school carries a kind of complexity that schools for other languages usually do not. The student volume is higher, the competition with off-the-shelf products like Cambly and Preply is direct, students arrive with a declared level that rarely matches reality, and the path from A1 to C2 is long enough to demand real continuity between classes and teachers. Without a system for English schools that centralizes all of this, the operation turns into a patchwork of spreadsheets, WhatsApp, Drive, and video calls that leaks information every time a student switches teachers.

This article is about what changes when a school starts operating inside a single English school system, instead of around five separate tools.

Why an English school is harder to run than private tutoring

A small online English school with five to ten teachers and a hundred students faces three problems specific to the language that one-off private tutoring does not feel with the same force.

The first is the diversity of levels. In a Spanish class for English speakers, the useful range of levels is narrow. In English, a school typically serves A1, A2, B1, B2, and sometimes C1 and C2 in parallel, with very different profiles: an A1 student who has never spoken English, a B1 student preparing for an interview, a C1 student wanting to maintain fluency. Each level calls for a different lesson plan, different materials, and even a different kind of teacher.

The second is continuity across teachers. An English student rarely stays for years with the same teacher at a school. They switch as schedules change, as a teacher leaves, or as their level advances. Without a centralized record of what was covered, recurring vocabulary, specific difficulties, and the lesson plan, the next teacher starts from scratch and the student notices.

The third is competitive pressure. The English student compares the school's price with Cambly and Preply all the time. They know there are options at a low per-class price with a native speaker. To justify school tuition, the school has to deliver something a marketplace does not: continuity, progress tracking by level, communication with the coordination team, the feeling of belonging to an institution. All of that falls apart when the operation lives in a spreadsheet.

How most English schools operate today

The typical operation of a small to mid-sized online English school follows a repeated pattern. The coordination team keeps a master spreadsheet with students, declared level, assigned teacher, day of the week, time, and payment status. Each teacher keeps their own parallel spreadsheet with class notes. Classes happen on Zoom or Google Meet, with a link generated by each teacher. The course materials live in Drive folders, with no clear organization by level. The school's WhatsApp group is used to announce cancellations, send exercises, and chase tuition payments. Finances are yet another spreadsheet: who paid, who owes, how many classes are left in the package.

Each piece solves part of the problem. The trouble is what happens at the seams. When an A2 student finishes the level and needs to move up to B1, the information about which content was covered lives in the previous teacher's head, not anywhere you can look it up. When an English teacher leaves the school, the history of each of their students is partly lost. When coordination needs to know how many active B1 students the school has, nobody knows without cross-referencing three spreadsheets. When a student complains that the school does not track their progress, coordination has no way to show evidence to the contrary.

What standalone tools are missing

Some English schools try to solve this with traditional school software, the kind built for in-person courses. It works poorly because the focus is on semester enrollment, attendance in a physical classroom, quarterly report cards, and heavy front-office modules. None of that makes sense for a school operating 100% online with one-on-one or small-group classes, monthly packages, recurring schedules, and a classroom inside the browser.

Others try to build the system on top of Notion. It works up to fifteen or twenty students. Beyond that, keeping the database updated by hand eats up as much of coordination's time as teaching a class. And the student still has a fragmented experience: a Meet link by email, materials in Drive, billing over WhatsApp, with no school brand tying it all together.

What is missing is an English school system designed for online operation: a single student record with level and history, plan and tuition control in the same place as operations, a live class embedded with the school's brand, an automatic record of what happened in each class so the next teacher does not start from zero, and a view for coordination of the entire school instead of one spreadsheet per teacher.

What software for an English school needs to do

Serious software for an online English school needs to cover five fronts with equal seriousness.

Student records by level. Each student has a current declared level and a target level, and the school can list how many students sit in each band. Changing level is a recorded event, not a WhatsApp conversation.

A teaching team with clear roles. Coordination sees the entire school. Each teacher sees only their own students and their own schedule. When a teacher leaves, access is cut but the history stays.

A shared schedule across coordination, teachers, and students. Coordination sees the full schedule. The teacher sees their own. The student sees only available times to book. A cancellation becomes an event in the system, not a lost message.

Tuition and package control. Who has an active plan, who has an outstanding balance, how many classes are left in each package, all in the same place as operations. Coordination records what was received without needing a parallel spreadsheet.

A live class with the school's brand. The class happens inside the system itself, on the school's own address, without the student landing on a generic Meet or Zoom call. The school stays visible in every interaction.

How Noladi solves this for English schools

Noladi was designed for small and mid-sized online language schools, and it serves English schools specifically as one of its main profiles.

The school gets its own address (something like yourschool.noladi.app), with its visual identity applied across the student dashboard and the live class. Coordination adds each teacher as a member with their own access, sees the entire school, and each teacher sees only the students under their responsibility. Each student has a single record at the school, with a recorded level, class history, and package status, no matter how many teachers have come and gone. The schedule is shared across coordination, teachers, and students, with clear rules about who books what. Plan control defines how many classes a student is entitled to per month and deducts a credit automatically when the class happens, without anyone updating a spreadsheet. Noladi handles tuition control (who paid, who owes, how many classes are left) without processing the charge on the student's card: that part stays with the school, through whatever method the school already uses.

The post-class layer generates, shortly after each class, the lesson review with transcription, vocabulary used, and basic speaking stats. For an English school this is particularly useful: coordination can track each student's real progress by level, and the next teacher who picks up that student starts with context on what was covered in the last class, instead of starting by asking.

The school plan starts at R$ 499 per month, with class hours shared across every teacher in the operation. There is no charge per registered teacher or per registered student.

Get to know Noladi

If you coordinate an online English school and feel the operation has outgrown what a spreadsheet can handle, it is worth seeing how Noladi consolidates everything into a single system, with your school's brand. Visit the page for teachers at noladi.app/teacher and create your account to try it.