The answer arrives as an email thread.
You write to every school for the current safety statement. The replies come back over a fortnight, in as many formats as there are schools, and one of them is on a laptop belonging to someone on leave.
Ark HQ for Education and Training Boards
For Education and Training Boards
The duty sits with the ETB. The work happens in each school.
Compliance in an ETB school is run locally and carried centrally. Ark HQ gives the centre a current view of every school without taking the work, or the decisions, away from the people doing it.
Employer-level dutyIn an ETB school the board is the employer. The statutory safety duties, and the data-controller responsibilities, sit at the centre.
School-level deliveryRisk assessments, drills, committee meetings and staff training happen in each school, on each school’s calendar.
One agreementOne contract at ETB level. Schools come on against it, in the order and at the pace the office sets.
02 · The gap
You carry it. You can only see it when you ask.
Nothing in the structure is broken. The schools do the work, the Boards of Management approve it, and the ETB holds the duty. The problem is that the centre’s only instrument for seeing any of it is a request.
No two schools are on the same version.
A policy approved centrally last year is live in some schools, in draft in others, and in a folder in the rest. Nothing in the usual setup tells you which is which.
The inspector asks the employer.
An HSA inspector or a Department of Education query lands at the centre. The evidence that answers it is in each school.
03 · The architecture
Central visibility. Local control.
The reason estate software gets refused in schools is that it reads as management from the centre. This is built the other way round: the office gets the view, the school keeps the decisions.
Every school in one table.
Current state per school, per policy, per requirement — read from the work the schools are doing, not from a return they filled in for you.
Each school sees its own.
A principal logs in and sees their school. Not a league table, and not the school down the road.
The Board of Management still approves.
Policies are adopted by the school’s own Board, and the record shows who approved what and when. The estate view reports that record; it does not override it.
One contract, one invoice.
Procurement happens once, at ETB level. Each new school is an onboarding against that agreement rather than a negotiation of its own.
04 · What an estate can run
Four of them, and you need not take four.
Each one stands alone. They share a design and a team, so an estate running more than one gets the joins without paying for integration work.
School policies, under control.
Drafting, consultation, Board approval and staff acknowledgement, with a sealed record of every version. At estate level you can see which schools are current on which policy.
The expert-led safety programme.
An annual cycle of risk assessments, health-and-safety statement work, committee meetings and inspection readiness — led by our people in each school, not handed over as software.
Staff training with an audit log.
Courses for school staff, with completion recorded per person instead of per spreadsheet. The office can see where a mandatory course has not landed.
A co-pilot for school staff.
Safe, compliant, human-led AI for teachers, SNAs and administrators — grounded in Irish education law and curriculum, and in the school’s own approved policies.
05 · Who already runs this
Three of the sixteen boards, and none of them started big.
Ark HQ has work invoiced in three Education and Training Boards. One bought at board level and rolled outwards; two started in a single school and stayed there until the school was happy. That is the whole pattern, and it is the one we would propose to you.
Dublin & Dún Laoghaire ETB
AskArk, bought centrally and invoiced twice over the past year. The board took the decision once; the schools came on as they were ready rather than on a date set in the office.
Waterford & Wexford ETB
A full SafeSchool programme running in one post-primary school in the estate — the Health & Safety Statement, the risk assessments, the committee meetings and the inspector support, in that school, on that school’s calendar.
Kildare & Wicklow ETB
AskArk in one school since 2025. A small start by design: it is the cheapest way for a board to find out whether staff use a thing before anybody signs for the estate.
We have not named the schools. The boards agreed to be named; the individual schools have not been asked, and we are not going to assume on their behalf.
06 · How it starts
One call, then one school.
There is no estate-wide pilot. If something does not work in one school it will not work in twelve, so that is where we would start.
1
A call with whoever carries the duty.
Usually the Director of Schools, the head of corporate services, or whoever in the Chief Executive’s office answers for health and safety. We ask what you run now and where the gaps are. If what you have is working, we will say so.
2
One school, one product.
Pick the school where the problem is most obvious and the product that addresses it. Nothing else in the estate changes while that runs.
3
Then roll out on your calendar.
School by school, or term by term, in whatever order suits the office. The agreement is already in place, so each school after the first is an onboarding.
07 · Questions
The ones that come up first.
No. The agreement sits at ETB level and schools onboard against it, so a school joining later is an onboarding rather than a fresh procurement.