Project Athena
AI administration for UK schools. From admissions to attendance to safeguarding — one platform, every role.
Athena handles the operational work that buries school office teams: admissions pipelines, attendance chasing, parent communications, consent forms, invoicing, and governor reporting. AI that works within your existing systems, respects your data boundaries, and keeps humans in the loop.
Features
What it does.
Admissions pipeline
Track every enquiry from first contact to enrolled. AI drafts responses, schedules visits, and flags stale leads — so no prospective family slips through the cracks.
Attendance & absence management
Flag persistent absence the moment patterns form. Automated follow-ups to parents, trend reports for SLT, and Ofsted-ready data — without the daily phone round.
Communications & parent letters
Generate branded, personalised parent letters, reminders, trip consent requests, and newsletters. One draft, one review, one send — not 200 individual emails.
Invoicing & fee collection
Create invoices, chase overdue balances, reconcile payments. Connected to Xero and Sage so finance doesn't live in a separate spreadsheet.
Role-based AI assistants
Every role sees a different Athena. Office staff get operational tools. SLT get dashboards. Teachers get admin relief. Students get sandboxed help. One platform, four surfaces.
GDPR-first by architecture
Pupil names and sensitive data are pseudonymised before any AI processing. The model never sees real identities. Re-hydration happens server-side, after approval, with full audit trail.
How it works
3 simple steps.
Staff sign in
Existing Microsoft 365 or Google accounts. No new passwords. Athena inherits role and permissions from your school's identity provider.
AI processes securely
Requests are evaluated against role boundaries. Sensitive data is pseudonymised before the AI model sees it — tokens, not names.
Review, approve, act
Staff review AI outputs before anything is sent or saved. Approved actions are re-linked to real records and written to the audit trail. Humans stay in the loop.
Before & After
What Athena replaces.
Schools run on manual processes that haven't changed in decades. Athena replaces the grind with AI that does the work.
Admissions tracked in spreadsheets
Automated pipeline with AI follow-ups
Attendance chasing by phone each morning
Automated alerts with trend detection
Parent letters typed individually
Generated, branded, personalised in seconds
Paper consent forms chased by hand
Digital forms with automated reminders
End-of-term reports taking weeks
AI-assisted drafts, teacher-reviewed
Governor reports compiled from spreadsheets
Auto-generated from live school data
Not theoretical
Built from a real school. Not a product lab.
Athena is being developed and tested at Vita Et Pax School, London — shaped by real staff, real workflows, and real constraints.
Live school test bed
Built at Vita Et Pax School, London. Every feature is shaped by the people who will actually use it — office staff, teachers, and senior leadership.
NeuralShield proven
The same school runs NeuralShield — our AI content filtering appliance — inline on the network for 10+ months. The security infrastructure is battle-tested.
E.D.I.T.H. already live
Our AI admissions assistant is already deployed on the school website, handling enquiries and prospectus requests. Athena builds on what's already working.
Role-based assistants
One platform. Four surfaces. Every role gets what they need.
Athena isn't a generic chatbot dropped into a school. Each role sees a different interface with different permissions, different data access, and different capabilities.
The operational engine room
Office Admin & Bursar
Admissions pipeline, email triage, visitor logs, consent forms, invoice management, attendance follow-up, and calendar coordination.
Leadership insight, not spreadsheet drag
Senior Leadership
Attendance trend analysis, safeguarding summaries, admissions visibility, staff absence tracking, and governor reporting.
Admin relief for the classroom
Teaching Staff
Parent communication drafts, report-writing support, assessment admin, cover preparation, and resource discovery.
Sandboxed and supervised
Students
Sandboxed study help, revision planning, and guided explanations — age-appropriate, auditable, and strictly controlled.
Be one of the first schools to shape Athena.
Early access partners get direct input into the platform, priority onboarding, and preferential pricing. Limited places available.
1
Live school test bed
6
AI workflow areas
4
Role-based access tiers
GDPR
First architecture
Frequently Asked Questions
When will Project Athena launch?+
Athena is in active development, shaped by a live UK school test bed. There is no fixed launch date yet. Schools and trusts can register interest now to join early access and help shape the platform.
What types of schools is Athena designed for?+
UK independent schools, academies, and multi-academy trusts. The platform covers workflows relevant to primary and secondary settings, with role-based access for office staff, leadership, teachers, and students.
How does Athena handle GDPR?+
GDPR compliance is architectural, not bolted on. Pupil names, contact details, and personal data are pseudonymised before any AI model processing. Only approved outputs are re-linked to real records, and every action is audit-logged.
Will Athena work with our existing MIS?+
Yes. Athena is designed to work alongside SIMS, Arbor, ScholarPack, iSAMS, and other school MIS platforms, plus finance tools like Xero and Sage, and communication platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
Can Athena be deployed on-premises?+
Three deployment options: UK-hosted cloud SaaS for the fastest path, on-premises for schools requiring local data control, and hybrid for those who need both. We already run on-premises AI infrastructure at our test-bed school.
What makes Athena different from other school admin tools?+
Most school software digitises paper processes. Athena uses AI to actually do the work — drafting communications, flagging patterns, generating reports. It is built from a real school, not a product lab, and has GDPR-first architecture with pseudonymisation at the core.
Help shape AI administration for UK schools.
Early access partners get direct input into the platform, priority onboarding, and preferential pricing. If you run a school or trust that wants AI that actually works, we want to hear from you.