The progress record that lives on paper — and dies in June

Here is a thing that happens in schools everywhere, and almost nobody designs for it: a child spends a year making real, hard-won progress — books read, words mastered, targets met, strategies that finally clicked — and the record of that year is a few bullet points on paper, a stack of books in a box, and whatever lives in one teacher's memory.

Then June comes. The teacher changes. The box goes on a shelf.

The handover that isn't

When we interviewed principals and special education teachers in Irish primary schools, the persistent record came up again and again — described not as a nice-to-have but as a structural gap. One principal described wanting exactly this: a way for what a child accomplished to carry forward to next year's teacher, so September starts from knowledge instead of from scratch.

The current reality is workarounds: notes passed on paper, conversations in corridors, messaging apps that were never meant to hold information about children — and a lot of well-intentioned reconstruction from memory at review-writing time.

Why standardised scores don't cover it

Primary schools do keep standardised test results, and they matter. But a percentile in reading tells next year's teacher almost nothing about how this child learns: which prompts work, which formats overwhelm, what the child was reading in March, which target took four months and finally landed.

For children with additional needs, that texture is not decoration — it is the knowledge. And it is exactly the part that evaporates each summer.

What a persistent record would change

Imagine the day-to-day evidence collecting itself: an activity completed, a book finished, a target reviewed — each landing on the child's profile as it happens, without anyone writing anything twice. By June the record already exists. By September it is the new teacher's starting point rather than a mystery to be reassembled.

That persistent, longitudinal progress profile is the spine of what we are building at Tuto. If you have ever inherited a class in September and wished you knew what actually happened last year — or handed one over and watched your year of knowledge vanish — we want to hear how it looks from your side.