For schools
The operating system for a school you are still building.
First IMS gives international and bilingual schools a starting structure for attendance, assessment, reporting, safeguarding and the daily work around them. Adapt it to your school before improvised processes become permanent.
See your school running before it opens, or standardise the next campus before it starts.
Schools and partners we work with
Why schools move
The hardest part is deciding how the school should run
A new school has to make dozens of operating decisions before it has a habit for any of them.
Start with decisions already made
Assessment categories, reporting stages, role access and safeguarding routes should not be invented in a rush before the first term.
Make practice visible
A dashboard, a reporting cycle and a clear role structure give an owner a way to see whether the school is being run properly.
Give the next campus a starting point
When the operating model is explicit, a second site can adapt the structure instead of rebuilding the school from memory.
What is inside
The modules, and what each one actually does
Switch on the modules your school uses, so each role sees a focused workspace. Module availability depends on the selected plan.
Attendance
A register that takes seconds, and a pattern you can see
Mark a class period by period, or set everyone present in one click and correct the exceptions. Each student carries a strip of the day's eight periods, so a Monday-morning pattern is visible without running a report.
- Filter by date, period, section or classroom
- All present, all absent or all late in one action
- Per-student term totals for presence, absence, lateness and unrecorded
Assessment
A gradebook you define, not one you inherit
You create the assessment categories and set their weights. It will not save until the weights total 100 per cent, which is a small rule that prevents a whole genre of end-of-term argument.
- Custom categories with their own names, colours and weights
- Split by trimester, with a highest-possible-score reference row
- Percentage and weighted score per student, per category
Reporting
Report cycles that show you who has actually finished
Set a cycle with separate deadlines for teachers and senior leadership, then watch completion by teacher rather than asking in a meeting. Comments draw on a reusable statement bank, and attendance appears next to the box you are writing in.
- Teacher draft, leadership review and issued to parents tracked separately
- Statement bank so common phrasing is written once
- Parent-facing preview before anything is issued
NEST safeguarding
Safeguarding that a shared folder cannot do
Log an incident against a student, group related incidents into a case, and route alerts by category to the roles that need them. Every note records who has read it. This is the part where a folder genuinely cannot substitute, because a folder permission is open or closed and has no idea who a designated safeguarding lead is.
- Incidents, cases and category management in one module
- Notification rules per category, routed to roles and named staff
- A read-by count on every note, so you can prove it was seen
Timetable and calendar
One school calendar, not one per department
A weekly grid per section, colour coded by subject, with teacher and room in every slot. The yearly calendar puts August to July on a single screen, and semesters are set up once for the whole year.
- Look up any teacher's, section's or classroom's timetable
- Event types for holidays, deadlines, meetings and professional development
- Divisions tracked separately where terms differ
Invoicing
School-branded invoices and a payment ledger
Build an invoice from reusable billable products, apply discounts per line, and keep the payment record against the same student everything else hangs off. The bank transfer statement block is editable, because every school words it differently.
- Line items with quantity, unit price and discount
- Payment ledger with method, currency and validation status
- Reusable products so termly fees are defined once
HR portal
Staff records and leave, without a second system
A staff directory with documents and dependents, plus leave that staff request themselves and managers approve from a queue. Teachers stop emailing the office to ask how many days they have left.
- Per-staff document library
- Leave requests with optional attachment, up to 5MB
- Approval queue and full leave history by department
Reception
Who is in the building, right now
Give reception a live view of who is on site, planned absences, linked parent contacts and the actions needed at the front desk.
- Filter by year group or section, navigate by date
- Send a notice to parents in bulk
- Report an absence ahead of time
Seating plan
Generate a room, then drag students into it
Pick a section, room and seat count and it builds the layout, including the teacher's desk and where the door is. Assign students by dragging them from the roster. Save it and print it, so whoever covers the lesson knows who is meant to be where.
Roles and permissions
Four roles that see genuinely different things
A super admin sees everything. Senior leadership is configurable and usually close to it. A head of department can adjust assessment categories and see submission analytics for their own department, not anyone else's. A designated safeguarding lead has full access to NEST. Because the platform is modular, what a role can see also depends on what your school has switched on.
Worth knowing before you ask
How does First IMS use AI?
First IMS does not currently use generative AI in student-data workflows. Any future AI feature will be introduced transparently, with clear data-handling controls and school approval.
$0.75 or $1.00 per student, per month
Core covers attendance, records, portals and assessment. Growth adds HR, NEST safeguarding and invoicing. Multi-campus and white label are quoted on Custom, which also includes FirstEnroll by First IMS.
Standard onboarding and agreed data import are included. We assess your exports first and confirm what can be migrated before you commit. Unusual data recovery or bespoke transformation is scoped separately.