Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
- How is this different from PowerSchool or Skoolee?
- Those are systems of record: they store what happened and show it back to you. VantaSchool reads what they hold and tells you what to do about it. Three differences matter in practice. It is a risk and intervention platform rather than a database with reports: each week it ranks named children by urgency, with the reasoning attached. It is built so that it cannot score your teachers: a burnout signal reaches only the named wellbeing lead, and what reaches management is a workload finding with an action, never a judgement about a person. And it is shaped around how a Kuwaiti school actually runs (your calendar, your structure, your reporting lines, your ministry obligations) rather than a foreign product with an Arabic toggle.
- Will this disrupt our current teaching methods?
- No. We preserve school culture and teaching autonomy. Teachers use their own pedagogical approaches; we just make grading, feedback, and coordination dramatically faster. The platform adapts to your workflows, not the other way around.
- What about our existing tools (Google Classroom, Skoolee, etc.)?
- VantaSchool replaces them rather than sitting on top of them. One system instead of five is the whole point: data spread across tools that were never asked to speak to one another is the condition that makes a school find out late, and a thin integration layer does not fix it. You do not switch everything on day one. You begin alongside what you already use, and the old system comes out at a pace agreed before the pilot starts.
- Is student data secure?
- Yes, and we will tell you exactly how rather than point at a badge. Your records sit in Abu Dhabi on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which holds CITRA permission ACC-11533 as an authorised cloud provider in Kuwait. Production sits in its own compartment that our developers cannot reach from a developer login: access to real student records is a named decision per person, granted and revoked deliberately. Every read and every share is logged, and the logging cannot be switched off. Personal information is stripped before anything is sent to an external AI service. And access is scoped by role throughout: a clinical record is held by its author and released by its author, and seniority does not grant clinical access.
- What happens after the 90-day pilot?
- You decide on evidence. The pilot carries written checkpoints at day 30, 60 and 90, each with success criteria agreed before it starts, and a written read-out at day ninety that you keep whichever way you decide. If you continue, you move onto the full platform at the pace you set, and the engine keeps sharpening on your own data each term. If you do not, you still keep the read-out.
- Can parents access this on mobile?
- It runs in the browser rather than as an app to download, so a parent reaches it from a phone the same way they reach anything else: nothing to install, nothing to keep updated. What a parent sees is deliberately narrow. Parents never see a risk score, a band, watch-list status, or any comparison with another child. They see a plain-language summary of their child’s active intervention: that one exists, what it is for, who at school owns it, and how it is going. Not the case file, and not teacher notes.
- What if we want Arabic language support?
- Yes. VantaSchool runs in Arabic: the full interface, right to left, and everything the system writes with it. Every insight, every weekly brief, every message that reaches a parent. All of it reviewed by a native speaker, because a message about someone’s child is not something we machine-translate. Arabic was designed into the platform from the start rather than added as a translation layer on top, which is why it reads as though it were written in Arabic. It was.
- How do you handle IGCSE, IB, American curriculum differences?
- One formula, not one per curriculum. Every grade is normalised to a common 0–100 scale by anchoring on curriculum-equivalent pedagogic points rather than a raw percentage, so a CBSE 33 and an American 60 are read as the similar attainment they represent. That anchor is kept strictly separate from your own pass threshold, so your grading policy stays yours. Tiered entry (Cambridge Core and Extended, IGCSE Foundation and Higher) is carried as its own signal instead of being folded into a score. IB is handled on its own terms: the per-subject mean is what the engine reads, and the 45-point total stays the reporting view your school and its universities already use; we do not force a 1–7 scale into a percentage it was never built for. Subjects carry a weight, so an IB Higher Level course counts for more than a Standard Level one. Ungraded primary years (PYP, and British KS1 and KS2) run on the other four domains re-normalised, and are never compared against a secondary score.