I built EduNavigate because I've been that parent.

My family arrived in the UK in 2020, and one of the very first questions we faced was one every recent-arrival family knows: which school for the children? What sounded like a simple search became a maze of Ofsted grades, catchment maps, DfE performance tables, admissions timelines, appeals processes, and school-website blog posts that had not been updated in years.

Then COVID hit. Open days were cancelled. In-person tours vanished. The people who would normally answer these questions — headteachers, existing parents, local admissions teams — were managing crises of their own. Choosing a school became a data problem I could not solve alone.

I'm an IT consultant by training. What I could see clearly was that the raw information did exist — sitting in eight or nine separate government portals, updated on inconsistent schedules, and downloadable only as spreadsheets that no ordinary parent would open on a Tuesday evening. The problem was not a lack of data. It was that nobody had done the work of pulling it together in a form a parent could actually use.

So I started building the thing I wished had existed for my own family. What began as a weekend project grew into EduNavigate — with the help of colleagues who understood data engineering, my children's teachers who understood what parents are really trying to find out, several education consultants in Manchester with backgrounds in DfE work who patiently corrected me every time I misused the jargon, and friends who volunteered as the earliest users when the search felt overwhelming to them too.