SchoolBridge · Simulation lab

The Lab

Practise on a school that cannot be broken.

A complete, working copy of SchoolBridge — seeded with schools that do not exist, carrying pupils who were never born, running on money that was never real. Make every mistake here. By morning, there will be no trace of it.

Request lab access

In preparation — access opens with the next pilot cohort

Why it exists

Nobody should learn a school system on a real school.

The first term on a new system is the worst possible time to be learning it. Term is running, fees are due, parents are asking questions — and the person holding it all together is also the person still working out which button does what.

So we built somewhere else to do that. The lab is the same software, down to the last screen, but nothing in it is real. A register marked wrongly here costs nothing. A fee posted to the wrong pupil costs nothing. A whole term closed badly, twice, costs nothing.

Confidence is not built by reading a manual. It is built by doing the thing, getting it wrong, and doing it again — which is exactly what a live school cannot afford to let you do.

SeparateIts own server and its own database — no path to any live school

02:00Wiped and reseeded nightly, so every session starts clean

3Fictional schools, each with a term of history already behind it

ZeroReal pupils, real parents, real cedis — none of it, ever

What is inside

A school with a past, not an empty shell.

An empty system teaches nothing. Every lab school arrives with a term already behind it: pupils enrolled across every class, a register with real gaps in it, assessments part-marked, fees part-paid, and a handful of families quietly in arrears.

That history is what makes the practice worth doing. Chasing an arrears list that has awkward cases in it is a different exercise from chasing an empty one.

All three surfaces are open — the administrator's desktop, the teacher's app, the parent's app — so a team can sit together and watch one action travel from the office to a parent's phone.

Try, among other things

A full term, start to finish

Enrol a pupil, place them in a class, print the admission slip
Mark a register, then correct yesterday's
Enter continuous assessment and close a terminal report
Raise a fee invoice and receipt a Mobile Money payment
Send an announcement to one class, then to one family
Run the arrears list and work down it

Who it is for

Two rooms, the same sandbox.

The lab serves two groups who need the same safety for different reasons — the schools who will run the system, and the people who put it in their hands.

For schools

Train the whole staff before go-live

Bring the head teacher, the bursar and the teaching staff into one afternoon. Everyone practises their own part on their own screen, at the same time, before a single real pupil is entered.

No risk to your records — you are not on your own system yet
Staff arrive at go-live having already done the work once
Come back any time a new teacher joins

For Akarmis field agents

Rehearse the demo until it is boring

Agents onboarding schools need to move through the system without hesitating, and to answer the hard question a head teacher asks in the middle of it. That fluency is rehearsed, not improvised.

Run the full demonstration end to end, repeatedly
Practise onboarding without touching a client's live data
New agents get competent before they get in front of a school

The wall between the lab and a real school.

A separate machine, a separate database The lab runs on its own host at sb-lab.akarmis.uk with its own store. There is no query, no job and no path by which anything in it can read or reach a live school.

No real person is in it Every pupil, parent and teacher in the lab is invented. No real child's name, mark or attendance record is ever loaded into it — not to make a demo more convincing, not for any reason.

No money moves Mobile Money in the lab is simulated end to end. No till is connected, no payment is initiated, and no real cedi can be moved by anything done here.

It forgets you every night At 02:00 the lab is wiped and reseeded from a fixed script. Yesterday's mistakes are gone, and every session starts from the same known state.

Learn it here.
Get it right there.

Lab access comes with onboarding, and pairs with the training library — watch the lesson, then do it yourself in the lab while it is still fresh.