Plus Platform

Optimising teacher-student engagement.

Teachers play a critical role in supporting students' mental health, but the challenge lies in understanding individual needs and issues that may be brewing beneath the surface especially in a world of growing class sizes and decreasing staff. Plus, driven by a mission to transform mental health support in schools, leverages key data that underscores the urgency of their work:

• "Among those aged 6 to 16 in England, one in six had a probable mental health condition" - NHS 2021
• "50% of mental health problems are established by age 14 and 75% by age 24" - Mental Health
• "54% have considered leaving the sector in the past two years due to pressures on their mental health." - Education Support 2021

These statistics highlight the limitations of traditional methods in addressing mental health in schools and Plus is committed to developing a solution that streamlines the process of monitoring student wellbeing, aiming to create a more efficient, effective, and responsive system.

Conceptualising the ideal solution.

When Plus approached us, they already had successfully completed smaller trials of their idea and were ready to build on their success with a new web app. We suggested going through a Blueprinting Phase to critically assess all of the underlying requirements and scope out the ideal solution.

Blueprinting typically takes 2 weeks and can help clients realise what and if a technology solution is suitable, before sinking time and money into design and development, where making changes can be more expensive. Planning is a must for a streamlined solution.

Our Technical Lead, Matthew Spence, took Plus through following Blueprinting steps:

• Consultation to discover underlying problems to solve
• Validate and create a solution
• Build a web app requirements list
• Identify key features
• Build a tech stack - what technologies would be used to fulfil the solution
• Design a Sitemap of the solution's pages and screens
• Design & build an interactive prototype of the web app and accompanying admin portals for teachers, schools and Plus staff
• Build schedule of deliverables
• Final quote for build

Our Blueprint solution for Plus.

We planned out a software solution of web apps that could be accessed from anywhere by students, teachers, schools and of course, Plus Staff that provided a different experience of Plus based on your user group.

• Students could access Plus to track their wellbeing through daily journaling, live tracking of their stats, access to resources and more
• Teachers and schools could access Plus to track and manage student wellbeing in their with each journal entry being monitored with AI to flag potential issues
• Plus staff needed a management portal to keep track of statistics on the platform and track business metrics
• Students could design and build an avatar of themselves to gameify the web app
• Cross-device support for mobile, tablet and desktop users
• AI must be integrated for sentiment analysis of student journal entries
• Ability to add, remove and create resources for access by by Plus users

The Web App

Although the Plus platform is accessed through the web, the final software is actually made up of 4 web apps.

• The Main Marketing Website
• The Student App – allowing access to journaling, resources and more
• The Teacher's Dashboard – allowing management control for teachers
• The Plus Dashboard – allowing management control for Plus as an organisation

These apps were then tied together using a multi-package repository configuration through PNPM, for easy repurposing of components and assets across the product.

The chosen tech stack for this was very important to provide the best experience for users and stakeholders. The entire platform made use of the following technologies.

• React + Next.js – for the frontend of the web app
• Python + FastAPI – for the backend of the web app
• MUI – Material library for the UI
• IBM Watson – AI integration for sentiment analysis of journal entries

These technologies, and more, provided a fast, scalable and seamless web app for Plus that gave a great experience to students, teachers and schools a great experience.

What's next for Plus?

The role out of Plus has been extremely successful with several schools and over 400 students having onboarded to the new web app and reporting monumental success.

Plus continues on with it's growth plans to carry on building great software for primary schools, supporting teachers and empowering wellbeing in every child.