SchoolDeck runs a preschool without pretending it is a small school: enquiry and admission, attendance with authorised pick-up, fees and instalments, and a daily record of what a child did — meals, sleep, mood, milestones — sent to the parent. There are no marks, no report cards and no rank.
It is not curriculum software and carries no lesson content. What it holds is the record and the communication.
The reason school software fits a preschool badly is that its central object is a mark, and a preschool does not produce marks. What a preschool produces is a day: the child ate, slept, played, had a difficult twenty minutes after drop-off, and went home with a different jumper.
The parent of a three-year-old wants that day, not a percentage. And they want it the same afternoon, because the child cannot tell them.
Everything else in a preschool can be corrected tomorrow. A child released to the wrong adult cannot. The authorised-collector list is therefore not a note in a file — it is enforced at the gate, with a photograph, and a one-off change requires a named approval from a parent rather than a phone call someone remembers.
The daily record covers meals, sleep, nappies or toileting, mood and anything the staff want the parent to know. It goes out the same afternoon because that is when it is useful.
Developmental observations are recorded against milestones as observations, with a date and the name of whoever observed them. They are not scored, not averaged and not compared between children. A preschool that ranks three-year-olds has made a category error, and we are not going to build the tool that helps.
Preschool fees move differently — monthly or termly more often than annually, frequently with a sibling concession, sometimes with an extended-hours charge that varies by month. Withdrawal is common and mid-month.
So the ledger is built for proration and for concessions that follow a family rather than a child, and a withdrawal computes the refund position rather than leaving it to be worked out on paper.
Phrased the way they arrive, answered so each one stands on its own.
No, and that is deliberate. It records observations against developmental milestones with the observer’s name and date. It does not score them, average them or rank children against each other.
Yes, attached to the daily record and visible only to that child’s authorised parents. Photographs are not shared to a group feed, because consent for one family is not consent for another.
One. The preschool runs as its own section with its own age bands, its own fee cadence and no assessment, while sharing the roll and the ledger with the main school — so a child moving up in April is a progression rather than a fresh admission.
Checked by the Implementations desk on 7 September 2026. Corrections go in the page, dated, rather than quietly.
Pricing is on the page, in the open, with the counting rule written next to it. Nobody has to book a call to find out what it costs.
See pricingForty minutes with an implementation engineer — your classes, your fee heads, your grading scheme, entered as we go. No slides, no sample school.