When we first introduced the Cambridge programme in our school, there was no blueprint to follow and no neighbouring school to compare notes with. We had to build our systems from scratch – and needed everyone moving in the same direction to do it.
Two challenges stood in the way of this. The first was that none of our platforms were built for Cambridge, which made it difficult to map our programme the way we needed to. The second was that we were running three platforms at once – ManageBac, Seesaw, and Google Classroom – which meant teachers, coordinators, and parents were never quite looking at the same thing.
Everyone in our school community needed to be working from the same map. We needed a single, shared picture of our Cambridge programme. One that the whole community could see and move from together. That’s what Toddle gave us.
Cambridge planners built from scratch
Cambridge offers over 70 IGCSE syllabuses and 55 at A level. Each comes with its own learning objectives, assessment criteria, and specification updates that Cambridge revises on a rolling cycle. For a school teaching across that range, keeping pace with those changes is a job in itself – one that fell to our Cambridge coordinator. Two hours every week, carved out of an already full schedule, before the actual work of coordinating had even begun.
So when we started evaluating platforms, Cambridge support wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the first question we asked. Toddle, at the time, hadn’t been built for Cambridge yet – no syllabuses and nothing mapped to the way our teachers planned. On paper, it shouldn’t have made the shortlist.
But the people behind it did. The Toddle team were genuinely curious about our school – asking the right questions, wanting to understand how we worked rather than telling us how their platform worked. That conversation led to another. We shared our syllabuses, explained our context, and waited to see what would happen.
What happened was Aayushi. Our Toddle Buddy – an experienced educator assigned to guide us through every step of the transition – she and her team took our documentation, committed to a deadline, and delivered every Cambridge syllabus we needed before the school year began.
Our teachers now open a unit planner and find live Cambridge objectives, learner attributes and assessment criteria already mapped and waiting. When Cambridge updates a syllabus, the planner reflects it automatically. Every teacher, in every subject, can walk into a classroom knowing their unit is aligned to current Cambridge standards.
An engaged family community
On Seesaw, parents could see their child’s work. What they couldn’t see was the world around it – what the class was exploring that term, what learning goals a piece of work connected to, how one moment of learning built on the last. They had evidence without context.
With Toddle, a parent opening the app doesn’t just see a piece of work. They see what learning goal it connects to, what the class was working towards that term, how this moment fits into a bigger picture that’s been building all year.
Seeing their child’s learning unfold was one thing. Being able to respond to it was another. A parent who noticed something at home could message a teacher directly, in the same app they used to follow their child’s learning. Announcements reached the right people instantly – a class, a year group, the whole school. For the first time, our parents weren’t waiting to be told how their child was doing – they already knew. That’s the shared language we were looking for.
A shared picture isn’t built overnight. It’s built through the systems a school relies on every day – the way teachers plan, the way students submit work, the way parents follow along, the way coordinators hold it all together. Toddle brought all those systems into one place.
For the first time, everyone in our school community was looking at the same thing, at the same time.
