Built in Lancashire.
Over a thousand school websites launched.
Schudio builds school website software and compliance tools. We have been doing it since 2011, still from the same place, still owner-run, still small enough that Ian answers the phone.
That combination is rarer than it should be in this sector. This page explains how it happened.
How a problem for two sixth form colleges became a thousand school websites.
Two colleges, one problem.
Two sixth form colleges came to Ian with the same situation: WordPress sites they could not manage and hosting that kept failing. He built the first version of the Schudio CMS to solve it. He did not set out to build a company. He set out to fix a specific problem for two specific clients.
It turned out a lot of schools had the same problem.
A room full of Blackpool headteachers.
The Schudio CMS launched to Blackpool schools at the annual gathering. The pitch was simple: a website you can actually manage, on hosting that does not fall over.
The decision to stay small.
Schools started telling other schools. The decision then, and still now, was to stay small and keep the level of support rather than grow into an agency. Growth for its own sake was never the point.
We built the compliance software before most suppliers knew they needed to.
School website compliance was becoming a real problem. The DfE was publishing requirements, schools were not meeting them, and the checking was being done by hand. We built software that compares a school's live website against the current requirements automatically. That was 2014.
Ian went to Uganda.
A long-held ambition. He partnered with established in-country organisations and we have been supporting them ever since. We have helped build schools and infrastructure for children and young people with additional needs. The work continues.
We have raised over £50,000 for children and young people with additional needs in Uganda.
Still owner-run. Still in Blackpool.
The CMS is now a full platform: compliance tooling, a multi-academy trust portal, an AI suite, six free tools, and a team that has trained over 5,000 school staff. It is the most advanced school website software in the sector. The team is still small enough that you will speak to the people who built it.
That is not a coincidence. It is a choice we make every year.
The numbers are proof, not decoration.
The people who built it are the people you speak to.
We are a small team in Blackpool. Ian founded the company in 2011 and still leads it. The people who answer support tickets are the same people who built the software and who run the training days.
That matters more than it sounds. When a school has a compliance question at 4pm on a Thursday before an Ofsted visit, they do not want a ticket number. They want someone who knows the answer. We have been in that situation enough times to know that the support is the product, not an add-on to it.
We have a 4.9 rating on Google. Schools left those reviews because the experience was different from what they expected.
We went, and we kept going back.
In 2015 Ian went to Uganda, a long-held ambition. He partnered with established in-country organisations, and since then we have helped build schools and infrastructure for children and young people with additional needs. We have kept supporting them every year since.
We have been going back since 2015.
There is a full account of the projects and the people behind them at the link below.
Read about our charity projects
Schudio is a Christian business.
That is not a marketing position. It is the honest explanation for a set of decisions that would otherwise look commercially strange: staying small on purpose, pricing by what is fair rather than what we could get away with, going to Uganda.
Ian's phrase for the Uganda work was "the least of these", from Matthew 25. That is where the impulse came from, and it is the same impulse that shapes how we run the company day to day.
Ian went to serve people in desperate need. That is a Christian motivation. The commitment is ongoing rather than a one-off.
We chose not to grow into an agency. The relationship is the thing we are actually selling, and you cannot have a relationship at scale. That is a commercial decision with a values origin.
We do not chase every deal. Existing clients never see a price rise: their renewal is what they signed at. We do not price by what we could get away with. These are not policies. They are what a Christian ethic looks like in a commercial context.
The office manager who rings gets us, not a queue. That is not a feature. It is what it looks like to treat people as people rather than tickets.
This shapes how we work, not who we work with. We build for community schools, faith schools of every kind, and trusts with no faith character at all. Everyone gets the same firm.
If you want to talk, we answer.
Whether you are considering a new school website, have a compliance question, or just want to understand what we do, we are happy to have that conversation without any pressure attached to it.
