Notes from a year coordinating placements with a spreadsheet

Before I built any software, I spent a year coordinating Year 11 work placements out of a single Google Sheet. We had 78 students, 31 host providers, and three placement blocks across the year.

The sheet worked. Mostly. These are the things that made me want to build the system, roughly in the order I noticed them.

The merge problem. Three of us edited the sheet at once. We did our best. About once a fortnight, someone's edit silently overwrote someone else's, and the only way we noticed was when a student turned up at a host we had already replaced. Google's version history saved us each time, but the cost of catching it was a few minutes of detective work and a small dent in trust.

The repeated information. Every host had a contact email, a contact name, a phone number, the type of work, the maximum students per block, and a note about whether they wanted students contacted directly or routed through us. Every time a student was placed, we copied four of those fields back into the student's row. Every time we contacted a host, we did so out of a separate email account, and the trail of the conversation lived in our inbox, not on the sheet.

The compliance copy-out. At the end of each block, we printed the list of student-host pairings, attached the consent forms, and posted the pack to whoever was archiving it that year. The packs were nearly always slightly out of date by the time they were printed. We made notes in the margin.

The "where is" question. The most common email I sent during placement weeks was, "Where is X today?" I'd type the student name, scroll across columns, find the host, find the host's address. Sixty seconds for one question. We averaged about thirty of those a week during a block. Half an hour, every week, of pure lookup.

The sick-day cascade. When a student called in sick, the host had to be told. So did the school's attendance system. So did the parents, sometimes. Three messages, three different places, three different formats. We forgot the host once. The host was understanding. We did not forget the host again.

The end-of-year compliance. A request would come from somewhere, asking how many placements had run, how many hours each student had completed, and how many sites had been used. The numbers were all in the sheet. Producing them in the format that had been requested took most of a Saturday. I love teaching. I do not love that Saturday.

None of these problems were unsolvable in the spreadsheet. We solved most of them. The point I came to slowly was that solving them in the spreadsheet meant the solutions lived in our heads. The next coordinator, when one of us moved on, would inherit a sheet but not the workarounds.

That is the point at which a system stops being a productivity tool and starts being institutional memory. And that, more than any single feature, is why I started building.