Veracross

05/26/2026

Barker College is a 135-year-old school in Sydney with 2,800 students, 18,500 alumni, and a staff community that had reached a breaking point with their previous SIS.

When they changed to Veracross, three key things stood out:

Letting school stakeholders lead the selection pays off. 80+ staff were involved in evaluating, testing, and co-designing the solution. When the time came, the steering committee voted unanimously for the change. When the announcement came, the reaction was "how soon can we make this happen?"

2. The time gained back is real. Confirmed-place enrolment offers went from 5-8 minutes to 30 seconds. Census reporting went from a full week to about 30 minutes. Best of all, teachers describe the new system as a breath of fresh air.

3. The technology started to disappear. Multiple leaders said the same thing, independently: the the system, once implemented, fades into the background so staff can focus on students, families, and connection. After one full term, that's already happening.

Swipe to hear from each of them: the Head of School, Head of ICT, Director of Digital Learning, Head of Curriculum, Director of Enrolments, and Director of Alumni.

🔗 Read the full series:

See how The Blake School leverages Event Registration Forms to enable families to sign up for transportation to their three separate campuses, with a variety of transportation plan options. The method involves a single registration form with multiple events, and a series of questions.

05/25/2026

When Rob Eastment talks about independent schools, he isn't speaking from the outside looking in. 🎓

Rob holds an MEd in Educational Leadership and has thirty years inside UK independent education, including at Brighton College and the Duke of Kent School. Now, as Head of Marketing for EMEA at Veracross, he has a unique view into how schools across the region are navigating one of the most complex technological moments in history.

That perspective is why his recent keynote at the Boarding Schools' Association Annual Conference for Heads in Stratford-upon-Avon resonated so deeply with the room.

His message: independent schools are not short on data. They are short on clarity.
Modern schools collect more information than ever; attendance, pastoral notes, admissions pipelines, safeguarding records, alumni engagement, medical histories. Yet leaders still find themselves asking simple questions that take hours, sometimes days, to answer. House staff know things the academic office doesn't. Admissions teams hold insights pastoral staff could use. The school exists, but the full picture of it often doesn't.

Rob calls this the "invisible school"; the version of the community that leadership cannot easily see. And he argues that the answer to this challenge is to foster alignment across the community with the help of the right kind of school MIS.

A Connected School, in his view, is defined by people, information, and decisions moving in step. Technology should sit quietly underneath all of it, protecting what independent schools have always done best: relationships.

Read Rob's full piece on what makes a Connected School:

What is a Connected School? Learn how independent schools can turn fragmented data into clarity, protect staff time, and support the whole pupil.

05/24/2026

Congratulations, Clearview Christian College on your new Digistorm website!

05/21/2026

Congratulations, Haileybury Foundation, on your new Digistorm Website!

05/21/2026

AI isn't waiting for schools to feel ready. (It isn't waiting for any of us to feel ready!)

The conversations happening in admissions offices and board meetings sound different than they did even six months ago. Families are asking AI tools about your school before they ever visit your website. Board members are asking how AI can sharpen development strategy, admissions outcomes, and reporting. Accreditation bodies are rethinking what "quality" looks like in an AI-integrated school.

We've been publishing on this from a few different angles, and wanted to put the recent pieces in one place for school leaders who are working through it.

📍 SEO vs AI: Why Search Has Changed for Schools
Ben Hare (Digistorm) on the rise of Answer Engine Optimization, and why AI tools describe schools rather than rank them.
https://www.veracross.com/resources/seo-vs-ai-why-search-has-changed-for-schools/

📍 How Independent Schools Can Make Their Websites More Visible to AI Search
Six practical website improvements that help both families and AI systems understand what your school actually offers.

https://www.veracross.com/resources/how-independent-schools-can-make-their-websites-more-visible-to-ai-search/

📍 8 Things I Learned at the Educators AI Playbook LIVE
Ashley Santana's takeaways from the event, including agentic AI, vendor vetting, cognitive offloading, and where AI can give school leaders time back.
https://www.veracross.com/resources/educators-ai-playbook-live-takeaways/

The schools moving thoughtfully now will be far better positioned than those waiting for certainty that may never come.

05/20/2026

Congratulations St. Michael's Grammar School on your Digistorm Website!

05/18/2026

What does a school look like on the other side of a full SIS replacement?

Mary-Lou O'Brien can answer that. As Director of Digital Innovation at Redlands School, she went through the whole journey alongside her team: the decision, the disruption, the change management across staff and leadership, and the outcomes that followed.

On 21 May at the ICT in Schools Summit VIC, Mary-Lou sits down with Veracross's Suzanne Pelizzari to share what they learned together: honestly, practically, and with the kind of detail that only comes from lived experience.

If you're weighing a similar move, or working to build internal support for one, this is the session to be in.

WHERE | Marvel Stadium, Melbourne | 21 May 2026
WHO | Mary-Lou O'Brien, Director of Digital Innovation, Redlands School, in conversation with Suzanne Pelizzari, Marketing Manager APAC, Veracross

05/04/2026

Inclusion is an art. It takes emotional intelligence, nuanced communication, curiosity, and even a bit of courage. To be inclusive often means stepping just outside of your own comfort areas to make a connection .

Sometimes, though, it's as simple as pushing the tables together! Last week, on two different continents, we met in-person with our colleagues. At both events we made a point of sitting down around a communal table and having a meal together.

We have a great team at Veracross and one of the reasons why is that we make time to sit down and have conversations with each other. It's what our value of "inclusion" means in real life.

Thanks team! It was great seeing so many of you together last week.

04/30/2026

This week we had the great privilege of hosting a room full of Veracross schools in our Gold Coast office for a sneak peek of VC Studio. It’s not always easy to impress IT professionals with a new tool, but we’re confident we managed to do so. With our CEO and CTO leading the session, the school leaders in attendance were able to drill in with their most pressing questions: and in the AI space, there are always plenty.

A big thank you to these customers who made the effort to be with us for both lunch and the in-office event. It was a big ask before the busy days of the ISNSW conference. There is something incredible about being together in-person and realising the incredible community we are building here in Australia. This is definitely a space to watch.

04/20/2026

Your AI is only as good as the knowledge underneath it.

That's the lesson from nearly 20 years of Knowledge-Centered Service practice at Veracross — and it's why our AI support assistant is resolving 95% of customer questions on the first try, when the industry average is 35%.

As Ian Drummond, our Director of Knowledge and Instructional Design, puts it: "AI amplifies the characteristics of the systems beneath it. In environments with disciplined knowledge practices, it extends the reach of accumulated expertise."

The knowledge base our AI draws on wasn't generic content handed to a language model. It was built by subject matter experts — many of whom have worked in schools — through the KCS practice of creating and refining knowledge in the act of answering real questions.

That discipline is what makes the difference between an AI that guesses and one that knows. Between a chatbot that frustrates and one that earns a 9.1/10 satisfaction score from 274 early adopters.

For anyone doing the hard work of building a disciplined knowledge practice: you're not just improving support. You're building the foundation for AI that actually works.
Read Ian's full breakdown of how KCS created the conditions for AI success — and the Consortium for Service Innovation methodology that made it possible.

https://www.veracross.com/resources/ai-for-independent-private-schools-why-our-approach-is-different/

AI for private schools shouldn't mean more complexity. Learn how Veracross delivers smarter automation powered by one unified student record.