WEDUC UK LIMITED

Weduc School Communications Platform & App

Running a school is complex. But your tools should be simple.

The Weduc platform brings all your engagement systems and apps into one, easy place.

Created by a team rooted in education going beyond off-the-shelf products.

Save time. Save money.
And clear your lines of communication with Weduc.

Features

  • Custom Branded School APP/Portal
  • Unlimited free messaging
  • Multi-stakeholder engagement
  • Integrate systems your want to retain
  • Two-way communications
  • Social media newsfeed
  • Automated messaging
  • Parents Evening Booking
  • Online Payments
  • Managing Meals

Benefits

  • Allowing your schools own personality to shine
  • Save money & track your recipients
  • Reach everyone who matters in your school community
  • Improves access for everyone in one central location
  • One central place to manage all school to home communications
  • Book and manage appointments with remote meetings combined
  • Payments for trips, clubs, visits, uniform and meals

Pricing

£499 a licence a year

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at richard.thomas@weduc.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 13

Service ID

1 4 3 3 8 8 4 5 8 7 4 8 0 1 1

Contact

WEDUC UK LIMITED Richard Thomas
Telephone: 01509 221 349
Email: richard.thomas@weduc.com

Service scope

Software add-on or extension
No
Cloud deployment model
Public cloud
Service constraints
The product portal and app is available 24 hours / 7 days a week with essential planned maintenance windows in school downtime such as the summer. Any such time is communicated as per our SLA.
System requirements
  • A Wonde Supported MIS
  • SIMS 7 (Self Hosted or in the cloud)
  • Either Edge, Safari, Firefox or Chrome
  • Weduc App Minimum iOS 12.0 or Android 5.0

User support

Email or online ticketing support
Email or online ticketing
Support response times
Weekdays 8am - 5:30pm - Within 2 Working hours
User can manage status and priority of support tickets
No
Phone support
Yes
Phone support availability
9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
Web chat support
Web chat
Web chat support availability
9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
Web chat support accessibility standard
WCAG 2.1 A
Web chat accessibility testing
Tested via Weduc QA Department in addition to Zendesk Support. Integrated into Weduc but part of the wider Zendesk Offering.
Onsite support
Yes, at extra cost
Support levels
As part of any initial sale Weduc includes an implementation which consists of the following stages.

Synchronise your data - With a seamless synchronisation with your MIS, setting up Weduc users and keeping them up-to-date couldn’t be any easier. We integrate with all the common MIS either direct or via Wonde

Set-up and go live - With a designated implementation manager, we will create and brand your environment based on your project plan. Either roll-out in stages or with a big bang. We’ll be with you every step of the way and help you build your content ready for launch.

Whole school training - Choose from a wide range of training programmes to fit your school timetable and ensure a successful launch to teachers and office staff alike. With access to the Weduc Knowledge Centre, you can keep up-to-date with new features, product enhancements and training materials.

This is a compulsory part of the initial purchase and is priced between £750 to £2000 dependant on type of school.
Support available to third parties
Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

Getting started
Weduc currently offers unlimited online training with a personalized implementation manager and documentation such as user guides on every section of the product.
Service documentation
Yes
Documentation formats
PDF
End-of-contract data extraction
Weduc offers the customer the option to extract all data in a CSV format. Within the product we also offer the option to run SARS requests extracting data around a data subject.
End-of-contract process
At the end of the contract term the customer has a grace period of 30 days to request or pull any data they may require. After this period Weduc will delete the data associated with the organisation and their users. This is included within the service and is not a chargeable item.

Using the service

Web browser interface
Yes
Supported browsers
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Firefox
  • Chrome
  • Safari
  • Opera
Application to install
Yes
Compatible operating systems
  • Android
  • IOS
  • Windows
Designed for use on mobile devices
Yes
Differences between the mobile and desktop service
Our mobile app is designed for parent access and interaction with the school for published content, currently available on both android and IOS.

The web portal is primarily designed for the internal school stakeholders such as the admin team and teachers with a focus around content creation to share with parents.

This said, we also offer a parent view on the web portal for accessibility and inclusion purposes for content viewing.
Service interface
No
User support accessibility
WCAG 2.1 A
API
No
Customisation available
Yes
Description of customisation
- personalized app within app store
- logos, colour scheme, branding, login page

- users with correct permissions can change this within the portal.

Scaling

Independence of resources
Weduc is a containerised, horizontally scaled platform which uses Amazon ECS and auto-scaling groups to provide scaling for our compute requirements.

Files are stored using Amazon EFS which allows throughput bursting to allow Weduc to remain responsive during spikes and surges in usage.

Our data storage backend uses Amazon Aurora Postgres with a Redis cache to for performance.

Each component can be scaled individually without downtime or disruption to service.

Our cloud infrastructure is split across 3 availability zones within Amazon London to provide high-availability.

We use CloudFront for edge distribution to provide the fastest delivery possible for cacheable resources.

Analytics

Service usage metrics
Yes
Metrics types
User uptake and Engagement dashboards
Message Reporting
Newsfeed Reporting
Meal ordering reports
SMS / Billing reports
Reporting types
  • Real-time dashboards
  • Reports on request

Resellers

Supplier type
Not a reseller

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Other security clearance
Government security clearance
None

Asset protection

Knowledge of data storage and processing locations
Yes
Data storage and processing locations
United Kingdom
User control over data storage and processing locations
No
Datacentre security standards
Managed by a third party
Penetration testing frequency
At least once a year
Penetration testing approach
Another external penetration testing organisation
Protecting data at rest
  • Physical access control, complying with CSA CCM v3.0
  • Physical access control, complying with SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
  • Encryption of all physical media
Data sanitisation process
Yes
Data sanitisation type
  • Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
  • Deleted data can’t be directly accessed
Equipment disposal approach
Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v.30, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001

Data importing and exporting

Data export approach
Most features, for example forms, offer a built-in data export tools which will export the data in a number of formats such as CSV, Excel, PDF. Outside of this data can be exported by Weduc and provided to the customer in a CSV or Excel format.

Additionally, within the product we also offer the option to run SARS requests extracting data around a data subject.
Data export formats
  • CSV
  • Other
Other data export formats
  • Excel (Feature specific)
  • PDF (Feature specific)
  • Word (Feature specific)
Data import formats
CSV

Data-in-transit protection

Data protection between buyer and supplier networks
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
Data protection within supplier network
IPsec or TLS VPN gateway

Availability and resilience

Guaranteed availability
As per our SLA , our target uptime is 99.9% inside Working Hours (Monday – Friday excluding English Bank Holidays).
Our software updates are typically every 2-4 weeks and for the majority of software updates, we are able to keep the users running whilst the update occurs, but on occasions it is necessary to take the system offline when making fundamental database and architectural changes.
Approach to resilience
Availability Data centres are built in clusters in various global regions. All data centres are online and serving customers; no data centre is “cold.” In case of failure, automated processes move customer data traffic away from the affected area. Core applications are deployed in an N+1 configuration, so that in the event of a data centre failure, there is sufficient capacity to enable traffic to be load-balanced to the remaining sites.

More information is available upon request.

Weduc is hosted in the London data centre and split across 3 availability zones. Each availability zone is designed as an independent failure zone. This means that availability zones are physically separated within a typical metropolitan region and are located in lower risk flood plains (specific flood zone categorization varies by Region).

In addition to discrete uninterruptable power supply (UPS) and onsite backup generation facilities, they are each fed via different grids from independent utilities to further reduce single points of failure.

Availability zones are all redundantly connected to multiple tier-1 transit providers. Distributing applications across multiple availability zones provides the ability to remain resilient in the face of most failure modes, including natural disasters or system failures.
Outage reporting
The Weduc platform uses a number of infrastructure and application monitoring tools. These tools notify the infrastructure team by email and push notification if response times, error rates or throughput breach upper or lower thresholds or move out of their normal ranges or there are reachability failures.

In the event of a interruption to service customers are informed by the following methods; Email / The Weduc Website / Social Media

Identity and authentication

User authentication needed
Yes
User authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Username or password
Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
Weduc implements a role-based access control system.

Each role is granted a collection of ACLs (which govern which actions a user can perform) Users are then assigned to one or more roles.
Access restriction testing frequency
At least every 6 months
Management access authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Username or password

Audit information for users

Access to user activity audit information
Users have access to real-time audit information
How long user audit data is stored for
User-defined
Access to supplier activity audit information
Users have access to real-time audit information
How long supplier audit data is stored for
User-defined
How long system logs are stored for
At least 12 months

Standards and certifications

ISO/IEC 27001 certification
No
ISO 28000:2007 certification
No
CSA STAR certification
No
PCI certification
No
Cyber essentials
Yes
Cyber essentials plus
No
Other security certifications
Yes
Any other security certifications
Annual penetration testing by a CREST supplier

Security governance

Named board-level person responsible for service security
Yes
Security governance certified
No
Security governance approach
Internal Group policies and procedures are followed.
All staff are trained in data management and security matters and all staff are DBS checked as a matter of standard.
Information security policies and processes
Weduc has a full set of internal policies and procedures covering the processes for managing systems containing personal data.

As part of this all staff must undergo data protection law training annually and access to data is restricted to staff who require access as part of their role, also assessed annually

All staff must provide a satisfactory DBS Enhanced disclosure before privileged accounts are granted.

Operational security

Configuration and change management standard
Supplier-defined controls
Configuration and change management approach
The Weduc platform is maintained and developed in the UK by Weduc employees and we follow industry best practice change management processes.

All changes to the source code and infrastructure are documented by tickets in our issue tracking platform and we use AWS CodeCommit for source code control allowing us to track the full history of the codebase.

All changes are tested by our QA team prior to a release being signed off.
We use AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline to deploy changes to the platform.
Vulnerability management type
Supplier-defined controls
Vulnerability management approach
Weduc takes a proactive approach to vulnerability management.

Our processes ensure that dependencies and operating system images are kept up to date and deprecated packages are factored out. Additionally we use automated scanning tools such as AWS Inspector to scan our deployment images for vulnerable packages.

Our application is pen-tested by external testers annually. In the case where a vulnerability is discovered on our live infrastructure, we aim to have a patch pushed to live within 24 hours.
Protective monitoring type
Supplier-defined controls
Protective monitoring approach
Weduc uses a number of infrastructure and application monitoring tools alerting us to abnormal traffic or requests that match likely attack vectors or probes. Additionally, users who discover a vulnerability may report this to us.

In the event of a suspected attack or breach, our development and infrastructure team will work with our DPO and communicate with the relevant parties.

We have a number of tools that allow us to mitigate vulnerability such as Web Application Firewall rules, IP address range blocking and deploying changes to the platform if required.

We treat potential data security issues with the highest priority.
Incident management type
Supplier-defined controls
Incident management approach
Users may report incidents by any of our support channels or external users may report incidents to support@weduc.com.

Our support staff will document the report in a ticket that is picked up and investigated by the development or infrastructure team.

Where required, incident reports will be delivered by email.

Secure development

Approach to secure software development best practice
Supplier-defined process

Public sector networks

Connection to public sector networks
No

Social Value

Covid-19 recovery

Covid-19 recovery

The Covid-19 pandemic created an unprecedented situation for businesses, schools, and individuals.

During the school closures, Weduc provided a vital communication channel between the school and the parents. We saw a significant increase in user uptake and engagement during this time. Our users began to explore new ways they could use Weduc to keep parents informed of arrangements made by the schools and to keep children in touch with their class. Features like our home learning module allowed schools to manage the remote learning process.

To help schools during this period, we offered all schools free use of our product for 3 months combined with an expeditated implementation process.

During this time, the Weduc team moved to a remote-working model. During the lockdown periods, we were able to provide full service to our customers and produce development continued uninterrupted.

We able to continue to provide secure employment for all our staff during this period.

Weduc is a growing company. We are proud to be creating well-renumerated, skilled jobs in the Ed-Tech sector during a time when many people have lost their roles.
https://www.weduc.com/careers

Pricing

Price
£499 a licence a year
Discount for educational organisations
No
Free trial available
No

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at richard.thomas@weduc.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.