Homeroom for international schools
A roster that expects the student who arrives in November.
Most school software is built on an assumption an international school cannot make: that the roster is set in August and settles. Yours does not settle. A family gets posted, a contract ends, a parent transfers, and a student joins in the middle of a term or leaves before it closes — carrying a record that has to make sense to a school you will never speak to.
Homeroom International is the edition built around that. Not a translation product — that is homeroom.global, and it is honest about its own state. This is the records spine: enrolment and withdrawal treated as continuous work rather than seasonal, a student record built to be read by the next institution, and an accreditation evidence file that fills itself from work the school already did.
Talk to us about your school- One roster, every surface
- Records, publications, the directory, picture day and school communication all read the same roster. A mid-year arrival is entered once and is present everywhere, rather than in five systems on five different days.
- Built and hosted by us
- The platform is ours end to end — we did not assemble it from other companies' products. What that means for where data physically sits is homeroom.cloud's subject, and this page does not make a regional claim.
- US K-12 is what is built
- The product was built for US K-12 and that is the shape it has. An international school running a US-style programme fits it directly. A school on a national curriculum should read the objections section before assuming it does.
- No money, no AI, no mail
- The software does not bill tuition, does not convert currency, does not generate text, and does not send mail on the school's behalf. Those are stated flatly in their own section rather than hedged.
The structural difference
Enrolment and withdrawal are not two days a year.
A neighbourhood district enrols in a season. It can afford software where "add a student" is an administrative event that happens in a batch, and where withdrawing one is a end-of-year clean-up task. An international school cannot. Postings move in January. Contracts end in March. A family arrives three weeks into a term with a child who has been taught a different sequence of the same subject.
The consequence is not philosophical, it is clerical, and it lands on one person. When a student joins in week nine, somebody has to put them into the register, into the class lists, into the seating plans, into the emergency contact sheet, into the photo day roster, and into whatever the yearbook is using — and if those are separate systems, they get it wrong in at least one of them, and the error surfaces months later in a printed book or an unanswered phone call.
What the platform actually does about it
Homeroom is built on a single roster that every other surface reads. Enrolment and registration are modelled as first-class operations rather than an import job, and a withdrawal is modelled as a transition with a record attached rather than a deletion. A student added in November is, from that moment, the same student to the records side, the directory, picture day and the publication side, because there is only one of them.
That is a smaller claim than it sounds like and it is deliberately not dressed up: it does not mean the arrival is effortless, and it does not mean the previous school's data lands automatically. It means the school enters an arrival once, and does not spend the rest of the year finding the places it did not get entered.
The honest bound. What the platform does not do is fetch a record from the school the student left. There is no inter-school transfer network here, and any vendor who tells you they have one should be asked which schools are actually on it. An arriving student's prior record is entered by your staff from what the family brings.
The departing student
A transcript only the school that issued it can read is not a transcript.
Every student who leaves your school takes a document into an institution that has never heard of you. It might be an admissions office in another country, a national system with its own grade bands, or a university that wants to know what your marks mean before it will convert them. The document has to survive that trip without you on the phone to explain it.
This is where school software quietly fails international schools. A grade is stored as a number in a table because that is what the gradebook needed, and the meaning — the scale, the weighting, the term structure, what the school's marks are out of and what a passing one is — lives in a staff member's head or in a paragraph somebody retypes each June.
What the platform actually does about it
Homeroom separates the academic record from its presentation. The record is the source of truth; the transcript is a projection of it, laid out deliberately, with the school's own explanation of its marking travelling attached to the marks rather than beside them in a separate letter. Term closes are modelled as events that produce a settled record, so what a transcript says about a completed term does not drift when somebody edits a gradebook eight months later.
The same spine carries the leaving credential. A diploma or certificate the school issues can be checked by whoever receives it — the point of a verifiable credential is precisely that the receiving institution does not have to trust an emailed PDF or telephone your registrar in a different time zone.
| The moment | What the school needs | What the platform holds |
|---|---|---|
| Student leaves mid-term | A record of work completed to that date, not a blank term | Term-close projection over the record as it stands |
| Receiving school asks "what is this mark out of?" | The marking scheme travelling with the marks | Academic record layout carries the school's own scheme |
| University verifies a leaving credential | Something checkable without ringing the registrar | Issued credentials can be verified by the receiver |
| Family asks for their own child's data | A complete, exportable copy | Subject data export, consent-scoped |
The honest bound. The platform produces a clear, verifiable record of what your school taught and what the student earned. It does not convert your marks into another country's scale, and it does not certify equivalence to IB, A-Level or any national qualification. Equivalence is a judgement the receiving institution makes, and software that claimed to make it for them would be selling you a liability.
The standing obligation
The self-study is not a document. It is five years of evidence you already produced.
International schools carry an accreditation cycle as a recurring institutional load: a self-study against a set of standards, an evidence file behind each one, and a visiting team that reads both. Schools describe the same failure every cycle — the evidence existed all along, in minutes, in rosters, in programme records, in the publications the school actually produced, and the last four months before the visit are spent hunting for it and re-typing it into a binder.
What the platform actually does about it
Homeroom holds a self-study workspace organised the way the cycle is organised: by standard, with an evidence file attached to each one, ordered so the school works down it rather than around it. Because the platform already holds the roster, the programme record, the co-curricular record and the school's own publications, the evidence is being generated continuously by ordinary school operation, and the self-study points at it rather than duplicating it.
The practical effect is a change of shape, not a shortcut: the work moves from a four-month scramble into a standing file. The visiting team still visits. The standards are still met by the school, not by the software.
The honest bound, and it matters. We hold no relationship with any accrediting body. Homeroom is not endorsed, approved, certified or partnered with CIS, NEASC, WASC, IB, COBIS or anyone else, and we are naming them only as the bodies schools answer to. The workspace is a place to organise your own evidence against your own standards. Any vendor implying an accreditor has blessed their software is describing a relationship that, in this sector, almost never exists.
One institution, more than one site
The early-years site and the upper site are one school, and the software should agree.
A great many international schools run more than one physical site under one legal institution — an early-years campus a few streets away, an upper school on the other side of a city, sometimes a site that was a separate school before an amalgamation. Software that models this as two schools makes every cross-site fact into a reconciliation problem: siblings split across sites, a teacher who covers both, a single graduating cohort assembled from two registers.
What the platform actually does about it
Homeroom models campuses within one institution. Sites, rooms and the physical estate are held as structure under the school rather than as separate tenancies, so a family with children on two campuses is one family, and a school-wide publication or directory can be assembled without merging two exports by hand.
The honest bound. If you are a genuine multi-school group — separate institutions under a central office, each with its own head and its own accreditation — that is a different shape, and it is homeroom.solutions's subject, not this page's. Do not read multi-campus as multi-school; they are not the same problem and we are not going to blur them to make this page sound bigger.
Stated plainly, in the present tense
What this software does not do.
This is not a roadmap and it is not a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. It is a description of the product as it is, put where a person deciding about it will read it. Every item here is something an international school will ask for, so the useful thing is to answer before you ask.
Tuition, currency and payment
The software does not bill tuition, does not hold fee schedules, does not convert between currencies and does not take payment. For an international school this is the largest single gap on the page and we are putting it first rather than at the bottom: schools charging fees in more than one currency run that on their finance system, and Homeroom does not integrate with it. If billing is the problem you are trying to solve, Homeroom is not the purchase.
Translation of anything
The software does not translate notices, reports, publications or parent communication, into any language. Our work on private translation lives at homeroom.global and that page states its own status; this page does not restate it, soften it or borrow it. A school that needs translated parent communication today does it the way it does it today.
Generated text of any kind
The software does not write report-card comments, does not summarise a student, does not draft parent messages and does not describe a photograph. Nothing on a student record is machine-authored. Where you read a comment about a child, a member of your staff wrote it.
Sending mail on the school's behalf
The platform does not operate as your outbound mail system. School communication is composed and held here; it is not dispatched from here as your school's mail.
Non-US statutory reporting
The reporting the platform holds is built to US K-12 shapes. It does not produce a return for a host-country ministry of education, a national census, or an inspectorate outside the US. A school with a statutory return in its host country keeps producing it the way it does now.
What the current arrangement costs
The price of a split roster is paid in the wrong places.
Schools rarely decide to run a fragmented roster. They arrive at one: a records system chosen by a business manager, a communication tool chosen by a head, a photography and yearbook arrangement chosen by whoever ran it last, and a directory kept in a spreadsheet because none of the three would produce one. Each choice was reasonable. The cost is in the seams.
A child is missed
The February arrival is in the register and not in the yearbook roster. The book prints without them. In a school where a family may only be with you for eighteen months, that book is a substantial part of what they keep from the experience, and it cannot be reprinted.
A leaver's record is assembled by hand
A student leaves in March and a member of staff spends a day rebuilding a partial-year record from a gradebook, a comment file and their own memory, at the point in the year when they have least time and the family is least reachable.
The self-study consumes a term
Evidence that existed all along is hunted, re-formatted and re-typed, and the hunting is done by exactly the senior staff whose ordinary work is what the accreditation is meant to be evaluating.
The directory is quietly wrong
Contact details drift out of date between systems. On a mobile roster this happens faster than anywhere else, and it is discovered on the day somebody needs to reach a parent urgently.
None of these is a catastrophe on the day. They are the reason a small administrative team in an international school is permanently at capacity, and they compound with mobility, which is why they land harder here than in a settled district.
Where this sits
This is one facet of Homeroom, and the others are not this one.
Homeroom is one platform with a number of front doors, each answering a different question. We keep them genuinely separate rather than printing the same page under several names — if this page were a copy of its neighbours it would be wasting your time, and you would find out after a call.
| Page | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| homeroom.software | The flagship. What the platform is, for any school. Start here if you are not specifically an international school. |
| homeroom.global | Families who do not all speak the same language. The language axis, and our private translation work, with its own honest account of its state. If translation is your question, that is the page, not this one. |
| homeroom.solutions | Separate institutions under one central office. Multi-SCHOOL, as distinct from the multi-CAMPUS case above. |
| homeroom.cloud | Where the data physically lives and on whose infrastructure. The right page for a data-residency question, which this page deliberately does not answer. |
| homeroom.support | Onboarding and help. The right page for “what does moving onto this actually involve”. |
The questions that decide it
Objections, including the ones where the answer is no.
Answered as we would answer them on a call. Three of these end in “then this may not be the right purchase”, and they are here because you would find that out eventually and it costs you less to find out now.
You say the product was built for US K-12. We are not a US school. Why would this fit?
Sometimes it does not, and that is the honest answer. It fits directly if you run a US-style programme with US-style transcripts, which a large number of international schools do. It fits partially if you run a national or IB programme and want the roster, directory, publications and picture-day spine while keeping your academic reporting where it is. It fits badly if your core need is a national curriculum's own assessment and reporting shapes — the platform does not hold those, and configuring around it would be a project you should not want. Ask us and we will tell you which of the three you are.
Do you have offices, staff or servers in our country?
This page makes no claim of a presence in any country, and you should be suspicious of one that does without naming an address. We build and host the platform ourselves; the specifics of where data sits are homeroom.cloud's subject and you should take that question there rather than accept a reassuring sentence here.
We charge fees in two currencies. Does this handle that?
No. The software does not bill, does not hold a fee schedule and does not convert currency, and there is no integration with your finance system. This is stated at the top of the “what this does not do” section rather than buried, because for a fee-charging international school it is the most likely reason to walk away, and finding it out on a demo call would waste a morning of your time.
Can it translate reports for parents who do not read English?
This software does not translate anything. Our translation work is described at homeroom.global, on its own page, with its own statement of where it stands. We are not going to describe it here as though it were part of this edition.
Our whole roster changes by a fifth every year. Is that going to break something?
That is the case this edition is built around rather than an edge case it tolerates. The relevant design decision is that there is one roster underneath every surface, so an arrival or a departure is entered once. What it does not do is retrieve anything from the school the student came from or is going to.
Who owns the data, and what happens if we leave?
The school's data is the school's. There is a complete export, and it is consent-scoped rather than a raw dump, because student data on this platform is gated by design. A vendor's answer to this question is worth more than most of its feature list, and we would rather you asked it early.
Is any of this using AI on student records?
No. Nothing on a student record is machine-generated: not comments, not summaries, not photo descriptions. Where there is text about a child, a person at your school wrote it.
We are mid-accreditation-cycle. Is it a bad time to move?
Possibly, and the honest sequencing advice is that moving platforms during the final year of a cycle adds risk for no benefit, because the evidence you need is already assembled. The value of the self-study workspace is realised over a cycle, not in its last months. Take that to homeroom.support, which is the page for what a move actually involves.
The next concrete step
Tell us the shape of your school, and we will tell you whether this fits.
The useful first conversation is short and specific, and it is about three facts: the programme you teach, roughly how much of your roster turns over in a year, and where your accreditation cycle currently sits. Those three determine almost entirely whether Homeroom is a good purchase for you, and we can answer it in one exchange rather than a sequence of calls.
If the answer is that it does not fit — because your core need is billing, or a national curriculum's own reporting — we will say so. We would rather not sell you something you will resent in a year, particularly in a sector where heads talk to each other.
Start that conversationIf you want the platform in general rather than this edition specifically, homeroom.software is the front door. If your question is really about language, it is homeroom.global.