An Australian company is expanding into the Irish market with its online booking system for substitute teachers.
ClassCover enables schools to book substitute teachers and SNAs through its real-time booking platform.
The company is investing 3 million euro and creating 20 new jobs in the process of setting up the programme here.
The platform will officially launch later this month, with the initial pilot programme set to take place across Dublin.
ClassCover CEO and founder Ben Grozier said the company has been operating in Australia for over 15 years and supports over 5,500 schools and 200,000 teachers.
“It helps them save huge amounts of time finding and booking substitute teachers and SNAs.
“The platform works by schools curating their list of subs and then sending an invite to a short list of teachers booking teachers in seconds,” he explained.
The company has a target of onboarding 2,000 schools here over the next three years – which would be around half the schools in the country.
“We decided to launch in Ireland because our Irish teacher community here in Australia had used the platform here and thought it would be the perfect fit for Irish education,” said Mr Grozier.
ClassCover said demand for this type of solution has risen across the Irish market, noting that most schools rely on manual phone calls or social media messaging apps to secure cover.
The company said that approach has proven to be both inefficient and risky.
It highlighted that ClassCover’s platform was built by an experienced team of engineers to ensure data is secure, safe and compliant with EU data laws.
Having secured several state contracts, ClassCover has facilitated over 500,000 bookings on the platform per year in Australia alone and following the addition of 1,300 new schools earlier this year, is projected to reach 650,000 annual bookings over the next 12 months.
With its expansion into the Irish market, the company is now looking to replicate similar traction here.
