A Lesson From Trains: The London Underground Before Harry Beck

The London Underground was once a chaotic mess. In the early 1900s, every Tube line was owned by a different company, each with its own rules, tickets, and maps. If you needed to get across the city, you weren’t just planning a route—you were deciphering an entire system.

The maps were technically correct but fiendishly complex to use. The best of the bad bunch was Fred Stingemore’s 1928 effort to plot different tube lines on one map. Even at first, it was pretty difficult to decipher. The stations and lines became harder and harder to read the closer you got to central London. Given that Stingemore’s map contained less than half the stations we now have, you can imagine how quickly this became unreadable and useless.

Then came Harry Beck. Not a railway expert. Not a cartographer. A nobody. An electrical draughtsman. But he saw things differently.

Where others had seen only a map he saw connections. Connections between tube lines. Connections between stations. He didn’t see a map, he saw a circuit board. Radically, he ignored geography entirely and focused on usability. He turned the tangled web of train lines into a simple circuit board of connections. At first, people scoffed. Too radical. Too different. Then they used it.

And suddenly, London made sense.

In fact, Beck’s insight was so transformative that it became the global standard for metro systems worldwide.

Schools Are Stuck in a Pre-Beck World

Schools today are navigating their own version of London’s old, fragmented Tube system. New lines being built by different companies with different maps to navigate.

Schools are increasingly more than just places of learning. Each news cycle seems to bring a new line of responsibility to weave into their maze of maps. They manage pastoral care, safeguarding, co-curricular activities, breakfast clubs, afterschool clubs, SEND provision, wellbeing, parent engagement, reporting, behaviour, learning support, careers guidance—and more.

And every one of these has spawned its own system. We even contributed to this maze ourselves with Practice Pal for music lessons.

Each system was built for a good reason. But like London’s pre-Beck Tube, they weren’t designed to work together. Schools are like early-London commuters juggling different train companies, different rules, different maps—constantly connecting the dots themselves.

The Cost of Chaos

Imagine navigating the London Underground without a unified map. Now imagine running a school like that every single day.

The cost of a disjointed system is enormous. Schools are spending over £500,000 per year on admin staff, much of which is just managing disconnected systems. They’re paying for an average of 20 different platforms, with software subscriptions alone costing £100,000 per year—plus another £50,000 on IT training and support just to keep the machine running.

And time? That’s the real drain. Teachers spend up to half their working hours on admin, with three to five hours a week just copying data between different systems.

Schools aren’t just burning money. They’re burning time, energy, and effort—resources that could and should be spent on teaching.

The Breakthrough: Seeing Schools Like Beck Saw the Tube

We had a choice.

Keep adding to the problem, and build yet another disconnected platform. Or find a way to unify everything, the way Beck did.

We started with a simple question: What would it actually take to bring everything together?

The answer? Features and modules cannot get you there. It’s about connections.

Just as Beck saw connections between Tube lines and stations, we saw the rich tapestry of interconnected and overlapping relationships in schools—teachers, students, and parents constantly engaging in different groupings.

Most platforms try to organise school life by manually assigning individuals to events. That’s like listing every single commuter on the Tube map.

We took a different approach.

A one-to-one lesson? That’s a connection.

A class? A connection.

A year group? A connection.

A sports team, a music ensemble, a subject department, the staff team—even the entire school itself? All dynamic connections.

These connections form Pods—the groups that move through the system, shaping and reshaping as needed. They are not static lists of names. They are the relationships that define school life, and they are what tie everything together.

The School’s Tube Map: A Calendar That Connects Everything

At the heart of every school is movement—lessons, meetings, rehearsals, events, activities. Everything runs on time and place. The real backbone of a school? The calendar.

But most systems treat the calendar as an afterthought—a bolted-on feature. We realised it needed to be the centre of everything.

Once we mapped out every school interaction as an event, the next part became obvious.

Instead of scattered, siloed modules, every tool needed by schools lives inside the event itself, automatically connected to the right Pods.

Just like Beck’s map, you don’t need to understand the theory to feel the clarity. You just use it—and suddenly, school management makes sense.

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Watch the full launch keynote featuring product demos:

https://youtu.be/gBJCuSkDSvU