AI family operations for UK schools — 2026 pilots

Every absence tells a story.
We help you close the loop.

Lyceum Labs turns family communication and staff knowledge into structured, human-approved support workflows for attendance and inclusion. Around the MIS, not instead of it.

Connects toArborBromcomSIMSCPOMSProvision Map

MIS-agnostic by design — built for trusts with mixed systems.

Built for "Working together…" (Aug 2024)Human-approved AINo training on your data
Casework loop — live
v1
The loopAbsence detected
Signal
Capture
Understand
Route
Evidence

Barriers, actions, and evidence in one continuous loop — staff approve every step.

Scroll to close the loop

Designed for UK school teams

Attendance Officers
DSLs
Heads of Year
Cover Managers
Trust IT Leads

The attendance and inclusion challenge is not a marginal issue

18.14%

persistent absence rate in England

DfE 2024/25

1.7M

pupils identified with SEN in England

DfE 2024/25

5.3%

of pupils have an EHC plan

DfE 2024/25

[01] The gap

The MIS stores the record.
We run the work around it.

Schools don’t lack attendance data. They lack time, coordination and clean evidence around the pupils who need support. The questions that matter live between the systems.

Questions schools can’t easily answer today

Who contacted the family?
Which adult is allowed to be contacted?
What did the family actually say?
Was the barrier illness, anxiety, transport, bullying, or unmet SEND?
Who needs to act next?
What evidence exists for the attendance lead, SENCO, or Ofsted?
Before — scattered context
Voicemail
SMS
Email
Sticky note
Staff memory
MIS comment
CPOMS entry

Voicemail · SMS · email · sticky notes · staff memory · CPOMS · MIS

[02] The platform

Five capabilities.
One continuous loop.

Lyceum Labs is the family-operations layer around your MIS — capturing context, coordinating support and evidencing action without adding another admin burden.

[01]

Family Inbox

Every channel, one queue.

Voicemail, SMS, email, web forms, parent app, staff mobile notes — captured, transcribed, translated, and triaged in one unified workspace.

  • Multilingual transcription & translation
  • Absence reason & barrier extraction
  • Urgency and risk classification
  • Suggested reply drafted for staff approval
  • Routing to attendance, pastoral, SEND or safeguarding
[02]

Identity & Contact Guard

The right person, safely.

A policy-aware layer that checks every contact against your school’s rules — before a single message goes out.

  • Sibling disambiguation
  • Separated-family & court-order flags
  • Do-not-contact enforcement
  • Preferred language & channel
[03]

Attendance Case Queue

From unexplained to understood.

The operational heart of attendance work — every case in one place, with the right escalation path attached.

  • Unexplained absence queue
  • PA / SA threshold alerts
  • Vulnerable-pupil queue
  • Needs SENCO / DSL review
[04]

Inclusion Lens

Attendance is the first signal.

A cross-cutting layer that connects attendance to support — turning every case into structured barrier evidence and ISP-ready drafts.

  • SEN · EHCP · FSM · EAL overlays
  • Barrier history & interventions tried
  • Reasonable adjustments captured
  • Parent / carer voice
  • Draft support-plan evidence
[05]

Case Timeline

One chronology for the work around the pupil.

A single, time-ordered view of every contact, intervention, note, meeting, draft and approval — linked to MIS, CPOMS, and Provision Map records.

  • Family contact & attendance events
  • Interventions & staff notes
  • Drafts, approvals, tasks & owners
  • External-system links

Mobile Staff App

Capture corridor notes, home-visit summaries and meeting actions on the move — synced to the case timeline.

AI Evidence Packs

Generate staff-approved packs for attendance meetings, SEND reviews, governor reports and trust oversight — drawn from the work already done.

[03] See the system think

From a single voicemail
to a full support plan.

Watch one parent message travel through capture, understanding, routing and evidence — with staff approving every consequential step. No autonomous safeguarding. No automatic MIS write-back.

Scenario

A morning voicemail

A parent leaves a voicemail in Arabic saying her son Yusuf is refusing school because he feels anxious and has been crying every morning. She mentions older boys won’t leave him alone. He’s on SEN support.

Casework loop
Capture
Understand
Route
Evidence
Step 1 / 10
Capture
Capture · step 1
Yusuf Khaled · Y7
Voicemail · 0:42ar-EG → en-GB

“لا يريد أن يذهب إلى المدرسة…”

“He doesn’t want to go to school. He says the older boys won’t leave him alone. He’s been crying every morning.”

Human-approved AI · staff sign off every consequential action

[04] For schools

One platform,
six perspectives.

Lyceum Labs is built around the people who do the work — not just the leaders who buy the software. Every role gets the view they need.

Executive Head

Headteacher

Their reality

Attendance is a leadership issue — but the operational mess sits below the dashboard.

What we deliver

A safer operating system for the family-contact and evidence work that happens before a register mark becomes an intervention.

Director of Operations

MAT COO

Their reality

Cross-school inconsistency, duplicated systems, no real visibility into action.

What we deliver

Standardise attendance and inclusion casework across schools without forcing everyone into a new MIS.

SENCO

Inclusion / SEND Lead

Their reality

Rising SEND demand, fragmented evidence, support-plan workload.

What we deliver

Turn attendance concerns and family conversations into structured barrier evidence and support-plan drafts.

Attendance Officer

Attendance Lead

Their reality

Morning chaos, missed calls, repeat chasing, incomplete reasons, manual spreadsheets.

What we deliver

A single work queue for family contact, absence reasons, call summaries and escalation — with AI doing the tedious capture.

Family Support

Pastoral Staff

Their reality

Mobile work, home visits, meetings — notes scattered across systems.

What we deliver

Capture notes on mobile, see the full family-contact timeline, and hand off safely to attendance, SEND or safeguarding.

Trust Risk Lead

DPO / Safeguarding

Their reality

AI safety, data protection, auditability, safeguarding handoff.

What we deliver

Human-approved AI with role-based access, retention controls, audit trails and DPIA support. No unsupervised pupil-facing assistant.

[05] What changes

We don’t promise reduced absence.
We promise the work gets done.

Persistent absence has many external causes. What schools can control is the operational response — and that’s what we measure.

[01]

Less leakage

Family contact stops falling through the cracks

Untriagedfamily messages drop sharply

Voicemail, SMS, email and parent-app responses all land in one inbox — none missed, none forgotten on a sticky note.

Same-dayresponse capture, every time

AI captures the conversation as it happens. Staff approve a draft instead of starting from a blank page.

No-onehas to remember what was tried

Every contact, attempt, note and decision is on the case timeline — automatically, in chronological order.

[02]

Earlier, better intervention

Barriers identified before they harden into PA

Barrierscaptured, not just codes

Illness, anxiety, transport, bullying, unmet SEND, caring responsibilities — extracted from what families actually say.

Vulnerablepupils surface earlier

SEN · EHCP · FSM · EAL overlays mean attendance officers see the cohort context the moment a case opens.

Right team,right time

Cases are routed to attendance, pastoral, SEND or safeguarding based on your school’s policy — not on who happens to pick up the phone.

[03]

Evidence without extra admin

Audit trails that build themselves

PA / SAreviews are pre-assembled

Barrier patterns, family voice, interventions tried and outcomes — already drawn from the work.

SENDsupport drafts, ready to edit

Attendance and inclusion data become a draft Individual Support Plan brief, clearly marked for staff approval.

Trustand Ofsted scrutiny

A standardised evidence trail across schools — visible to the central team without chasing emails.

Pilot offers

Three ways to design a pilot

We price for learning velocity, not maximum revenue. Annual contracts follow once we have proof together.

Single-school design pilot

6–8 weeks

£2,500–£5,000

One attendance workflow plus the inclusion lens. Prove daily value, capture testimonial.

MAT mini-pilot

Recommended

2–3 schools

£8,000–£15,000

Central dashboard, shared configuration, cross-school visibility. Prove trust-wide standardisation.

Strategic design partner

5–10 schools

£20,000–£40,000

Roadmap influence, integration support, central reporting. Prove MAT platform potential.

Annual contracts after pilot proof: primary school £4k–£8k, secondary £8k–£15k, MAT £30k–£100k+ depending on school count and modules. Pricing is benchmarked against staff time, evidence quality and trust-wide standardisation — not voicemail transcription.

[06] Trust & safety

Human-approved AI.
By design, not by exception.

We took a deliberate position: schools — and the families they serve — deserve AI that is governed, scoped and accountable. Here’s what that means in practice.

[01]

The school remains in control.

AI drafts, summarises, routes and recommends. Staff approve. Every consequential action passes through a human before it happens.

[02]

The MIS remains the source of truth.

Lyceum Labs sits around your MIS as the system of work. We read what we need; we write nothing without explicit staff approval.

[03]

The family voice matters.

We capture what parents and carers actually say — including in their preferred language — not just the absence code that gets ticked.

[04]

Evidence should be effortless.

If staff are doing the work, the evidence trail should build itself. No double-entry, no scramble before a meeting.

Operational safeguards

Boring, on purpose.

Data Protection Act 2018

No training on your data

Customer data is not used to train foundation models. Encrypted in transit and at rest. Granular retention policies. Full DPIA support pack included.

Working together to improve school attendance · Aug 2024

Statutory expectations, operationalised

Same-day multi-channel follow-up, supportive scripts that uncover barriers, weekly attendance-band tracking, and FSM/SEND/EHCP cohort analysis — exactly what DfE, Ofsted and RISE hub leads expect to see.

KCSIE alignment

Safeguarding stays with humans

The AI never makes a safeguarding judgement. Any KCSIE keyword, ambiguous response or disclosure is flagged immediately to the DSL. Out-of-hours concerns trigger a clear escalation path, not an automated reply.

Identity & Contact Guard

Policy-aware contact rules

Sibling disambiguation, separated-family flags, do-not-contact enforcement, voicemail-safe mode for shared numbers, and language preference — checked before a single message goes out.

[07] Evidence pack

Evidence that builds itself
while staff do the work.

Every contact, decision, intervention and family reply becomes part of an exportable, staff-approved evidence pack — for the meetings that matter most.

Evidence pack

Individual Support Plan brief — draft

Staff approved

Pupil

Yusuf Khaled

Year 7 · SEN support

Period

Autumn term, weeks 1–14

14 family contacts · 8 unique barriers

§ Barriers identified

Anxiety / EBSA×6Bullying concern×3Sensory / unmet SEND×2Transport×2Family circumstance×1

§ Family voice (verbatim)

“He doesn’t want to go to school. The older boys won’t leave him alone. He’s been crying every morning.” — Mrs Khaled, voicemail · 08:42

“If you can meet me at reception with him, he says he can do it tomorrow.” — Mrs Khaled, follow-up call · 11:42

§ Provision tried this term

  • Wk 8Pastoral conversation — Mrs Patel
  • Wk 9Quiet break-time space (sensory) — agreed by SENCO
  • Wk 13Anti-bullying referral opened — investigation ongoing

§ Suggested next steps · editable

  • Reasonable adjustment: meet-at-reception arrival route for two weeks.
  • Weekly pastoral check-in (Mrs Patel) until end of term.
  • Anti-bullying investigation outcome shared with family by Wk 16.
  • Review at next ISP meeting — barriers and provision aligned to outcomes.

Generated automatically · staff signed off · audit trail attached

3 / 3

Attendance & PA reviews

Persistent and severe absence breakdowns by cohort — FSM, SEN, EHCP, year group — pre-assembled with the family contact and barrier history behind every case.

RISE-style improvement work

A coherent picture of what was tried, when, by whom, and what families actually said. The exact narrative RISE leads ask for.

Trust oversight & governor reports

Cross-school casework patterns, unresolved family contact, vulnerable cohort signals — exportable for trust boards and governing bodies.

SEND support reviews

Barriers identified, provision tried, parent voice captured, intended outcomes — drafted as an editable Individual Support Plan brief, ready for staff approval.

EHCP annual review prep

Attendance and inclusion evidence consolidated against the pupil’s plan, with timelines and family input clearly attributed.

Local authority escalation

A clean, structured timeline of contact attempts, responses, interventions and routing decisions when cases need to leave the school.

[08] Pilot rollout

Four stages.
No big bang.

We’d rather earn trust slowly than launch fast. Each stage adds capability only after the previous one has been validated by your team.

Stage 0Week 1–2

Discovery

MIS connection, contact policy setup, attendance workflow configuration, role mapping. Governance and DPIA pack delivered before any live work.

Stage 1Week 3–4

Family Inbox + Case Queue

A single year group goes live. Family contact arrives in one inbox. Staff approve every AI draft, route and code suggestion — full human-in-the-loop.

Stage 2Week 5–8

Inclusion lens activated

Barrier capture, SEN/EHCP overlays, pastoral routing and ISP-ready evidence packs go live. SENCO and DSL sign off on the workflows that touch their teams.

Stage 3Term 2+

Trust-wide scale

All year groups, mobile staff app rollout, central trust reporting and cross-school casework visibility. The system becomes the operational backbone.

FAQ

Questions you should ask

We expect schools and trusts to scrutinise AI vendors. Here are the answers to the hard questions.

Get started

Request a pilot

We’re onboarding a select group of UK schools and multi-academy trusts for our 2026 pilot programme — single-school designs through to strategic MAT partnerships.

What the pilot includes

  • Family Inbox — all channels in one queue
  • Identity & Contact Guard configured to your policy
  • Attendance Case Queue with cohort overlays
  • Inclusion Lens — barriers, provision, parent voice
  • Mobile staff app for pastoral & SEN teams
  • AI Evidence Packs (PA reviews, ISP, governor reports)
  • DPIA, governance pack and staff training

Limited pilot slots available. We typically respond within 48 hours.