BRITISH SCHOOL OF MARBELLA
Location:
Marbella, Spain
School Type:
International Primary and Secondary
Language Spoken:
English and Spanish
Years with Schooly:
Since 2023
THE SCHOOL
A school built for International Families
The British School of Marbella serves a diverse community of expatriate and international families on Spain’s Costa del Sol. With students from over 20 countries and a bilingual English-Spanish curriculum, the school prides itself on genuine international education.
But behind the scenes, the school was running on a patchwork of tools that had accumulated over years. Different systems for attendance, grades, communication, and admissions. Each with its own login, its own data, and its own limitations.
The result was a school that worked hard but spent enormous energy on administrative overhead rather than education.
THE CHALLENGE
6 tools and zero cohesion
Before Schooly, the school was using separate platforms for attendance registers, parent communication, report cards, admissions, timetabling, and events. None of which talked to each other. Staff were re-entering data across systems. Miscommunication between school and parents who were receiving messages in a foreign language. Attendance was tracked manually and reviewed only on the following day.
THE BREAKING POINT
Attendance sat at 78%. A figure the headteacher described as “quietly embarrassing.” Policy changes, follow-up calls, and attendance letters hadn’t moved the number.
THE SOLUTION
One Platform.
Deployed Schooly and replaced all six tools with a single, unified platform in under two weeks.
KEY INSIGHTS
Multilingual by design, not by workaround.
For a bilingual school like Marbella, language had always been a hidden friction. English-language notifications went unread or misunderstood by Spanish-speaking families. Spanish communications confused English-speaking expat parents.
Schooly’s parent app delivers every notification, message, grade update, and event reminder in the language each parent has set automatically. No manual translation. No separate communication streams.
The result: Spanish-speaking families, for the first time, reported feeling genuinely included in the life of the school.
THE PROBLEM
Attendance problems are often communication problems.
In most schools, when a student doesn’t show up, the chain of events is slow. A teacher marks the register. An admin staff member reviews absences. A call or email goes out to parents sometimes that day, sometimes the next morning.
By the time a parent is informed, hours have passed. For students who are truanting or whose absence is unexplained, that delay is the window in which problems grow.
WHAT CHANGED
From the moment Schooly went live, every absence triggered an instant push notification to the parent’s phone, in their own language, within seconds. No admin step. No delay.
“Before Schooly, our school struggled with multiple, disjointed apps. Schooly changed everything. Teachers now have a single system for everything from attendance to parent communications. Our attendance rates jumped to above 95% and parents are more engaged than ever.”
School Headteacher
“I used to dread Monday mornings. Chasing attendance, answering the same parent calls about grades and events. Now I open one screen and everything is there. I honestly can’t remember what I did before it.”
School Administrator
“Being able to access Schooly in Spanish makes my life so much easier. And whereas before I more or less got the gist now I know exactly what is being communicated.”
Spanish-speaking Parent
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