Demonstration environment. A walk-through of NEO's online-school infrastructure for Local Authority commissioners and partners.
NEO by Nudge Education
Open day · About this demo

A working walk-through, not a brochure.

NEO opens its doors to its first cohort in September 2026. This site lets you step into a Tuesday in autumn term from three points of view — a learner, a practitioner-mentor, and a Local Authority commissioner — so the architecture behind the school can be seen in the round.

What's real

The bones of this demo are real. The curriculum subjects shown — IGCSE English, Maths, Science, the Cornerstones, Verse-ality Certified Novacene IP modules — are the live curriculum, browsable at curriculum.nudgeeducation.online. Term dates follow the published 2026–27 calendar. The platform stack is Google Workspace — Google Classroom for the course-and-assignments surface, Google Meet for live lessons, Google Calendar for scheduling, Google Drive for the working-document layer.

The governance frame is real. NEO is operated by Nudge Education Ltd (Company No. 10192753). It is not a DfE-registered independent school and is not subject to ISI inspection; it pursues OEAS accreditation only. KCSIE 2025, the Online Safety Act 2023, the ICO Children's Code, and UK GDPR all apply. The Diamond AI Policy frame governs every AI-touching workflow: automation raises signals, humans make decisions.

The data shape and access scopes are real. Learners are seen by their assigned teachers and their named mentor — not by virtue of staff role but by documented relationships. Domain walls between safeguarding, finance, HR and governance are absolute. Every consequential change is an explicit consent gate, every action leaves an audit trail, and no third-party AI agent holds learner-data access without a named human authorising it for a defined window. These are the Ten Design Principles from Setting up NEO — Systems Account Set Up v2.0.

What's fictional

The three learners — Maya, Theo, Yasmin — are composite personas built from common referral patterns (an EBSNA learner returning to learning, a transitional placement post-care, and a catch-up tuition arrangement). Their surnames are placeholders. The Practitioner-Educator's name is a placeholder; in production, mentors are named individuals. The commissioning Local Authority — Greenfield County Council — is fictional. Attendance, engagement and progress numbers are illustrative.

The artefacts on Maya's mycelial portfolio map are illustrative too, but the format is real: every artefact carries a .verse file (the learner's reflective voice) and a .know file (the evidence). Together they form a portable, learner-owned record that a learner takes with them when they leave NEO. The mycelial-map metaphor and the .verse/.know pattern are lifted from the Haven Cloud portable-portfolio prototype, re-keyed to NEO Cornerstones.

The four-layer taxonomy

A central architectural decision is that curriculum, course, classroom and lesson mean four different things — and NEO's data model keeps them distinct.

  • Curriculum is the offer (English, Maths, Science). Defined once, evolves slowly. Lives in the curriculum vault.
  • Course is a runnable instance — GCSE Year 10 Maths, September 2026 to July 2027. Has a syllabus, teachers and enrolled learners.
  • Classroom is the Google Classroom that houses one course. NOOMA mirrors membership and submissions; Google does what Google does well.
  • Lesson is a scheduled live event in Meet. A course has many lessons across its lifetime.

A learner enrolled in a course automatically gets the classroom (and its Meet link); none of those words are interchangeable. This sounds pedantic; in practice it's what stops the data model collapsing.

Three perspectives, one Tuesday

  • Enter as a learner — Maya's morning. Now-card with the live Meet link, today's timetable, this week's rhythm, the mycelial portfolio, the artefact grid, and the .verse / .know provenance modal.
  • Enter as a practitioner — the mentor cockpit. Caseload of three, today's check-ins, the standing risk-assessment layer, an open pen-portrait, signals surfaced by NOOMA (never auto-actioned), and escalation routes by role.
  • Enter as a commissioner — the Local Authority dashboard. Placement summary, attendance and engagement strips, progress mastered against targets, safeguarding status, compliance against KCSIE 2025 / OEAS / Children's Code / Online Safety Act, and the report and export controls a commissioning officer expects.

What this is not

This is not the production NOOMA platform. It is not connected to live Google Workspace, not connected to live learner records, and does nothing on click — every action button is labelled and disabled or opens an explanatory modal. The Google Meet button on the learner view is a static link. The intent is to show what the experience will feel like, faithful to the underlying architecture, without ever pretending real children's data is involved.

Credit

This demo lifts patterns from the Haven Cloud portable-portfolio prototype (mycelial map, .verse / .know provenance) and from the existing NEO marketing site (typography, palette). Architectural framing follows NEO Solutions Architecture v0.2 and Setting up NEO — Systems Account Set Up v2.0. Built for an open-day audience in May 2026.