The classroom I almost stood in
Three school placements. Kingsbury High. Queen's Park Community School. John Kelly Girls Technology College. London comprehensives, big classes, real behaviour. Enough time on placement to see what the job looked like beneath the lesson plan. The after-school marking. The 10pm printing. The constant context switch across thirty students with thirty different needs.
I got pregnant before I finished the PGCE. The teaching career stopped before it started. I went into building software systems for businesses instead.
I thought I'd left it behind.
Six years in systems, then back to the same problem
For six years I built CRMs, automated workflows, and AI tools for businesses. Unglamorous infrastructure that lets work flow without humans firefighting every step. The pattern repeated itself across industries. People stuck doing what the system should do. Senior staff buried in admin. Whole afternoons lost to copy-paste. The biggest hit was always attention. Real work disappeared into busywork.
My three children attend a Catholic college in the Parramatta Diocese. I got close to the school. Started talking to teachers again. Heard the same workload story I'd heard on placement in 2013, only worse. Australian teachers now work 50 to 60 hours a week against an OECD average of 40. Most of the unpaid hours sit on lesson planning and admin.
I asked the obvious question. Why is there no proper software for this? Generic ChatGPT doesn't cut it. Teachers spend their evenings retooling its output. What they needed was something built for the NSW syllabus, that knew how they actually plan, that treated differentiation as built-in.
Nobody had built it. So I started building it.
Twelve months with teachers in the room
I've spent the last year building Smart Syllabus Assistant consultatively. The product has been shaped by:
- Working teachers in NSW Catholic and public secondary schools, planning lessons every week, telling me what's broken in the tools they already have.
- A senior pedagogy leader inside a Catholic diocese, who pushed me to rebuild SSA around explicit instruction because that's where the wider sector is heading. We rebuilt around it.
- School principals and heads of department who keep me honest on what schools actually buy versus what teachers wish for.
- Business advisors with deep operations experience, watching for the leaks a solo founder would otherwise miss.
Plus dozens of working teachers who've given me an hour of their tired evenings to react to a screen.
What's in the product now exists because they told me to put it there.
What I'm not, since schools should know
I'm not a teacher. I never finished the PGCE. I have six years of building business systems, twelve months of building this product with real teachers in the room, and the discipline that comes from running a software business where nobody pays for theory.
The people who've shaped the product are the classroom. I'm the build.
That's the honest split. It's also why SSA gets the pedagogy right when generic AI tools don't. The pedagogy comes from teachers and diocese leadership. The product comes from someone who builds systems for a living.
What I'm building toward
A version of teaching where a full term of planning takes fifteen minutes per lesson, not five hours. Where a new teacher walking into a Year 8 maths class has the same scaffolding a veteran has. Where a diocese-wide pedagogical shift doesn't require every teacher to rebuild their resources from scratch.
The shorter version. Teachers shouldn't be firefighting. The fire's already too big to fight without help.
Built with teachers, for teachers.