Most of what we write here is about agents, approval queues and the governance around them. This one is smaller. I think it says something the bigger stories can’t.
Last week I spoke to a music teacher who has been using a lesson log Trent built over the summer. I should say up front that this one came to Trent through family, not through a form on the website. It doesn’t change what the teacher told me, and I’d rather you knew.
Before
Every lesson ends the same way: what was covered, and what to practise before next week. That went into a notebook the pupil carried home. A lot of the teaching is with secondary-school children, so the notebook lived in a school bag, and school bags are where notebooks go to disappear.
The notebook would get lost, or they just wouldn’t bother bringing it. And with that many pupils you can’t remember exactly what each of them did the week before. So I was writing two notes, one for me and one for them. It’s just admin, isn’t it. A music teacher, on the year before the log
Then some parents, quite reasonably, asked for an email at the end of each week so they could support the practice at home. So the same lesson was being written down three times: once for the pupil, once for the teacher, once for the parent. At the end of every term there was a spreadsheet on top of that, so the teacher’s husband, who oversees a team of about ten peripatetic music teachers, could see how each child was getting on.
None of that is hard. It’s the sort of work that never makes a to-do list, because it’s too small to plan and too constant to skip. Across a full timetable it’s a serious slice of the week, spent in the gap after each lesson, writing the same thing three ways.
The idea that was going to be a summer project
The teacher had the answer by April: one place, online, where the lesson is written once and the pupil and the parent both see it. The plan was to work out how over the summer holidays. Anyone with small children will recognise that plan.
I mentioned it to Trent almost in passing. I said, I have this idea, and I don’t know anything about building apps. He said, “I’ve been known to dabble.” And then it was just done. The same teacher
I’ve worked with Trent for the best part of ten years and I’m still not sure what he’s capable of. He built a base for the lesson records and rebuilt the website around it, a site that until then had only ever been a holding page, and had it running in time for the summer. Over the holidays, teaching one day a week from home, the teacher tried it with a handful of pupils and checked the parent emails worked. This term it goes to every pupil on the books. After Christmas the husband will offer it to the teachers he oversees. He can’t impose it, their contracts don’t work like that, so it will spread the way these things should: because people ask for it.
After
It’s changed everything. I have an iPad in the lesson now and I just jot as I teach. Before, I’d put time aside at the end to write things down three ways. And the end-of-term spreadsheet has gone, because it’s already there. The same teacher
Parents can leave a comment against a lesson, and they do. The ones who wanted the weekly email have something better than an email. The ones who were happy as long as their child was happy have lost nothing. Nobody needed a training day.
The part I didn’t expect was about the teaching itself. The log is laid out in sections: repertoire, scales, pieces. Filling in headings rather than a blank page changes what you notice.
It makes you make sure you’ve thought of something for each part, rather than writing something generic. I’ll look at it and think, I haven’t done a tone exercise today. It’s probably made me a better teacher. Not that I’m looking at an iPad all the time, but you’re thinking in that way. The same teacher
Why I’m writing this one up
Because the story we tell most often is about a business finding the work nobody wanted to do and taking it away, and here it is at the scale of one person with a timetable. The lost notebook was never a technology problem. It was a person doing the same small job three times because the record lived in three places. Put the record in one place and the three jobs become one, done in the moment, while the lesson is still fresh.
The other reason is the line I hear most often on a first call: “I didn’t know that was possible.” The teacher assumed building an app was a summer’s work for someone else. It wasn’t. A lot of ideas that used to need a budget and a quarter now need a clear description of the problem, and somebody who’s been known to dabble.
I asked what to say to anyone thinking about working with us. The answer was short.
It’s realising those ideas you’ve got in your head but don’t know how to make viable. You have an idea and then you don’t know what to do with it. And it’s time, isn’t it. So the fact that we’ve been able to get it running so quickly has been great. The same teacher, asked what to tell someone who’d never heard of Woodlark
There will be more from the parents and the older pupils once a term of it is in the book. We’ll add their words here when we have them.
The teacher’s words are from a call with Richard in early September 2026, tidied for reading. The teacher and the schools are not named.