AirDesk — AI-Native Platform for Education Supply

The Problem

Your CRM wasn't built for this.

Supply teaching recruitment has a unique operational rhythm that no general-purpose recruitment platform understands.

⏰

The 7am scramble is your revenue engine.

Schools discover absences at 6:30am. They call three agencies simultaneously. The first to confirm a compliant teacher wins the booking. Your current CRM makes you click through five screens, cross-reference a spreadsheet, and hope your compliance data is up to date — while the agency down the road is already sending a confirmation.

🛡️

Compliance isn't a feature — it's survival.

One teacher placed with an expired DBS. One Ofsted inspection. One phone call from a head teacher. That's all it takes to lose 40% of your school contracts. Your compliance spreadsheet has gaps you don't know about.

📉

You don't know your real margin.

Different rates for different schools. AWR parity kicking in at week 12. Umbrella vs PAYE cost differences. Framework margin caps squeezing tighter every year. By the time your quarterly accounts reveal the problem, you've been losing money on bookings for months.

💬

Your consultants have given up on the system.

They've reverted to WhatsApp groups, notebooks, and memory — because the CRM adds friction instead of removing it. Every click that doesn't lead to a filled booking is a click too many.

🔻

Framework margins just got smaller.

CCS and DfE are capping what you can charge. Margins that used to absorb operational inefficiency no longer do. When your margin per booking drops from £45 to £35, every manual process — every spreadsheet, every phone call, every duplicate data entry — is eating directly into your profit.

These aren't technology problems. They're problems caused by using technology that wasn't designed for your business. And with framework margins getting tighter, you can no longer afford the inefficiency.

AI That Actually Works

Intelligence that fills bookings, not slide decks.

We've all sat through demos where "AI-powered matching" turns out to be a keyword search with a nicer label. AirDesk is different. Every AI feature solves a specific operational problem.

01 — Smart Candidate Matching

The right teacher, ranked in seconds.

A booking comes in. You need a compliant Year 4 teacher within 8 miles, available today, ideally someone who's worked there before. In your current system, that's 15 minutes of searching.

Compliance status — only fully compliant candidates shown. Hard-filtered. Non-negotiable.
School history — candidates who've worked at this school before ranked highest, because schools ask for the same person 70% of the time.
Proximity — real distance calculations, not "they live in the same city."
Role & subject match — Key Stage, subject specialism, SEN experience, year group.
Availability — confirmed for the specific date, not a generic flag.
Margin awareness — profitable placements surface above break-even ones.

Outcome: Bookings that took 15 minutes now take 2. Your fill rate goes up because you're responding before the competition.

Live Matching — Riverside Academy, Year 4

Sarah Mitchell

KS2 · 2.1 miles · Worked here 14 times

Compliant History

98%

James Cooper

KS2 · 3.8 miles · Worked here 6 times

Compliant History

91%

Priya Patel

KS1/KS2 · 4.2 miles · SEN specialist

Compliant Nearby

87%

Tom Richardson

KS2 · 5.6 miles · Available today

Compliant

82%

02 — AI CV Parsing

Upload a CV. Get a candidate record in seconds.

Your admin team spends 15-20 minutes manually entering each candidate's details. Multiply that by 30 new candidates a week. AirDesk's AI reads teaching CVs like an experienced education recruitment consultant would.

Recognises Key Stages (KS1-KS5), not just "departments"
Extracts subject specialisms and maps to your tagging system
Identifies SEN experience, SEND qualifications, specialist skills
Parses education history — QTS, PGCE, degree classifications
Pulls work experience with school names, roles, date ranges
Extracts personal details — name, email, phone, address, postcode

Outcome: Candidate onboarding drops from 20 minutes to 2. Your database is more consistent because AI doesn't make typos.

AirDesk AI CV parsing interface — drag and drop CV upload with automatic candidate extraction

03 — AI-Powered Email Campaigns

Personalised emails at scale, without the scale effort.

Writing personalised emails at scale takes time nobody has. Generic blast emails get ignored. AirDesk generates content that sounds like it was written by your best consultant.

Subject line generation optimised for recruitment open rates
Tone selection — professional, friendly, urgent, casual, formal — matched to purpose
Campaign-aware content — welcome email vs. re-engagement nudge vs. compliance chase
Dynamic personalisation — contextual content based on profile, availability, placement history
Send time optimisation — recommendations based on engagement patterns

Outcome: Candidates stay warm. Inactive teachers come back. Schools hear from you at the right time. All without writing a single email.

Campaign Builder — Re-engagement

Subject line AI Generated

We've got new bookings near you, Sarah — interested?

Tone

Professional Friendly Urgent Casual

Preview

Hi Sarah,

It's been a while since your last booking — we've got some great opportunities at schools near Clapham that I think you'd love. A couple are specifically asking for KS2 teachers with your experience...

● AI-generated · 3 personalisations applied

04 — AI Video Interviews

Professional video interviews, branded and ready to share.

Phone screens don't scale. Face-to-face interviews eat your diary. AirDesk lets you define a bank of questions, issue interviews to candidates on their own time, and get back polished, AI-analysed video — subtitled, branded with your logo, and ready to send to clients.

Question banks — create reusable sets by role type. Primary TA, Secondary Science, SEN Support — each with tailored questions.
Timed interviews — candidates get preparation time before each question, then a set window to record their answer. Consistent, fair, professional.
AI analysis — every response is transcribed, scored for communication quality, and summarised with key strengths and concerns.
Auto-subtitled — AI-generated subtitles added to every video. Accessible and easy to review without sound.
Agency-branded output — your logo, your colours, your professional presentation. Videos are distribution-ready for school clients.
Client-ready sharing — send polished interview packages to schools. Let them see the candidate before they commit to a booking.

Outcome: Screen 50 candidates without 50 phone calls. Share branded, subtitled interview videos with schools — giving them confidence to book teachers they've never met.

Video Interview — Full Workflow

Define Questions

Why did you choose to work in education?

30s prep 60s answer

Describe your behaviour management approach

30s prep 90s answer

How do you support SEN pupils in the classroom?

30s prep 90s answer

Candidate Records

Emma Phillips — Question 2 of 3

Recording answer · behaviour management

0:47

AI Processes & Brands

✓ Transcribed ✓ Subtitled ✓ Agency Branded ✓ AI Analysed

AI Summary: Strong communicator with 8 years primary experience. Enthusiastic SEN inclusion approach. Excellent behaviour management examples. Recommended for shortlist.

05 — Predictive Intelligence ROADMAP

From reactive to proactive. The next evolution.

AirDesk is building predictive capabilities that will transform supply agencies from responding to demand into anticipating it. Early access customers will be the first to use these features.

Demand Forecasting

Learn historical patterns — certain schools always need cover on Mondays, demand spikes in the third week of every half-term. Pre-match teachers before the call comes in.

Candidate Availability Prediction

Identify when teachers are likely to become unavailable — taking permanent roles, reducing days — before they tell you.

Automated Reference Chasing

AI-drafted follow-ups, alternative contact discovery, and intelligent escalation for unresponsive referees.

Timesheet Anomaly Detection

Flag hours that don't match bookings, unapproved timesheets, and patterns that suggest issues need attention.

Intelligent Automation

Smart systems that protect your business while you sleep.

Not everything needs a neural network. Some of the most valuable intelligence comes from automation that codifies best practice and removes human error from high-stakes processes.

🛡️

Compliance Engine

Hard blocks, not soft warnings. If a teacher's DBS has expired, AirDesk won't let you book them. Not a yellow triangle you can click past at 7:15am. A hard stop.

Proactive expiry management starts the renewal process automatically — 60 days, 30 days, 14 days. Automated verification workflows check against the DBS Update Service API and update compliance status. School-specific requirements tracked per booking.

Home Office Right to Work (Share Code verification)
DBS Update Service (Disclosure & Barring Service)
Audit-ready compliance files produced instantly
Extensible for additional providers

💰

Rate Guard & Margin Protection

See your real margin before you book, not after. True margin calculated at point of booking — pay rate, charge rate, employer costs, umbrella fees, AWR parity, and framework rate caps.

Automatic margin thresholds
Framework rate cap enforcement
Rate configuration hierarchy
Director approval routing
Never book below your margin floor

📊

AWR Tracking

The regulation that costs you money if you don't track it. After 12 qualifying weeks, pay parity kicks in. Your margin disappears.

Every agency we've spoken to tracks AWR in Excel. That's terrifying.

Automatic qualifying week tracking
Cost impact calculations
Factors into margin & matching

📱

WhatsApp & SMS

Meet candidates where they are. Teachers don't check email at 6:45am. They check WhatsApp.

Booking confirmations instantly
Reminders evening before / morning of
Full audit trail logging
Meta Cloud API & Twilio

⚡

Automation Triggers & Drip Campaigns

Engagement that runs itself. AirDesk fires actions based on real events in your business.

Candidate welcome sequences
Compliance expiry chasing
Inactive candidate re-engagement
Dormant employer nudges
Birthdays & work anniversaries
Multi-step drip campaigns

The Platform

Everything else you need, in one place.

AI and automation are the engine. But the platform they run on needs to be complete, practical, and usable at speed.

🌅

Morning Hustle Dashboard

Purpose-built for the 6:30-9:00am window. One screen showing every unfilled booking with AI-ranked matches alongside. Bulk operations for filling eight jobs before the bell rings.

This isn't a dashboard you study. It's a dashboard you act from.

⚡

Quick Book

One-click booking. Create a job, assign a teacher, check compliance, calculate margin, notify the teacher, confirm with the school — in a single operation.

Single & multi-day bookings
Transaction-safe: no half-booked states

🏫

School Portal

Schools request cover without picking up the phone.

Submit cover requests
Track confirmations in real time
Approve timesheets
View placement history
Branded to your agency

👤

Candidate Experience

Mobile-optimised. Teachers can view bookings, update availability, submit timesheets, and upload compliance docs.

If they can't do it on their phone in 30 seconds, they won't do it.

📋

Applicant Tracking (ATS)

11-stage Kanban pipeline for permanent and fixed-term roles. Same candidates, same compliance data, same interface.

Customisable pipeline stages
Interview scheduling
Pipeline analytics

⏱️

Timesheets

From classroom to payroll without re-keying. Teachers submit, schools approve, payroll data is ready. Anomaly detection flags mismatches automatically.

📰

CRM & Content Hub

Activity timeline, content publishing, engagement tracking, and surveys — all in one place.

Blogs, videos, adverts, surveys
Targeting rules by role & location
Views, reactions, bookmarks

⭐

Ratings & Reputation

Bidirectional ratings that feed directly into matching. High-rated candidates surface first. Low-rated are flagged or excluded automatically.

🏆

Gamification & Engagement

Points, badges, and milestones for profile completion, timesheet submissions, compliance updates, and availability confirmations.

Booking Management

AI CV Parsing

Candidate compliance view — Daniel Allen's compliance Kanban board with DBS, Right to Work, and QTS tracking

Compliance Tracking

Managed Service Provider

Run entire school staffing programmes. From one platform.

Win MSP contracts and deliver on them. AirDesk gives you the dashboards, reporting, and operational control to manage all supply staffing for a school or multi-academy trust — with full transparency for your clients.

Everything an MSP needs, nothing it doesn't.

Schools and trusts are consolidating their supply spend through CCS frameworks and direct procurement. They want one agency to manage everything — fill rates, compliance, cost control, reporting — within capped margins. AirDesk makes you that agency.

📊

Client-Facing Dashboards

Give school business managers and trust HR directors real-time visibility into fill rates, spend, and compliance — branded to your agency.

🎯

SLA & KPI Tracking

Define service level agreements per contract. Track fill rate targets, response times, and compliance metrics automatically. No more manual reporting.

💷

Cost & Margin Transparency

Multi-tier rate management across schools, roles, and terms. Show clients exactly what they're spending while protecting your margins.

🏫

Multi-Site Management

Manage staffing across an entire trust from a single view. Different requirements per school, one consolidated programme. One invoice.

MSP Dashboard — Riverside Academy Trust

Live

96.2%

Fill Rate

£47.2k

Monthly Spend

100%

Compliant

Riverside Primary 98% filled 142 bookings SLA Met

Oak Hill Secondary 95% filled 89 bookings SLA Met

Meadow Lane SEN 91% filled 67 bookings At Risk

St. Margaret's Infant 100% filled 38 bookings SLA Met

MSP contracts are the highest-value relationships in education supply. AirDesk makes them operationally deliverable — not just a promise in a pitch deck, but a platform that proves your performance every day.

Framework Economics

Framework margins are shrinking.
Your operating costs don't have to.

CCS and the DfE are capping agency margins across public sector recruitment frameworks. The agencies that survive aren't the ones that complain — they're the ones that automate.

22%

Margin reduction
under new caps

£1.4bn

Agency spend
under DfE scrutiny

2/3

Of agencies now
using AI to cope

📉

Margin caps are the new normal

The DfE's Maximising Value for Pupils programme and CCS framework reforms are imposing national margin caps on education supply agencies. Margins that once absorbed inefficiency now leave no room for it. Every manual process directly erodes profit.

⚡

Automation is the only lever you control

You can't negotiate higher caps. You can't reduce employer NI. But you can eliminate the manual work that eats your margin — CV screening, compliance chasing, booking coordination, timesheet processing. AirDesk automates all of it.

🛡️

Know your real margin under framework caps

AirDesk's Rate Guard calculates true margin at point of booking — factoring in framework rate caps, AWR parity, employer costs, and umbrella fees. You'll never accidentally book below your margin floor, even on framework-capped rates.

Rate Guard — CCS Framework Bookings

Framework Cap Active

Oakfield Primary — Y3 Cover Cap: £195/day £38.20 margin Above floor

St Mary's Academy — KS2 Supply Cap: £195/day £22.50 margin AWR week 14

Riverside SEN — 1:1 TA Cap: £145/day £35.80 margin Above floor

Beacon Hill — NQT Long-term Cap: £210/day £8.40 margin Below floor

Bookings above margin floor 3 of 4

The government is clear: agency margins in education supply will keep tightening. The DfE's MVP programme, CCS framework reforms, and national margin caps are here to stay. The agencies that thrive will be the ones whose technology makes every booking profitable — not the ones still calculating margins in a spreadsheet after the fact.

Why AirDesk

Built for education supply. Not adapted for it.

Most agencies run on platforms designed for permanent recruitment — Bullhorn, Firefish, Vincere, Eploy, TrackerRMS. They don't understand:

Term-time patterns and school calendars
The difference between KS1 and KS2 and why it matters for matching
Safeguarding requirements that are non-negotiable in education
Same-day booking workflows where 90 minutes is the entire sales cycle
AWR qualifying weeks and their impact on margins
Schools ask for the same teacher 70% of the time — your system should know this

These platforms can be configured to handle some of this. But configured means compromised. It means workarounds, bolt-ons, custom fields, and a consultant on retainer to maintain it all.

Capability	General CRM	AirDesk
Data model	Generic candidate/job/placement	Understands schools, Key Stages, subjects, terms, safeguarding
Matching	Keyword search, maybe basic scoring	AI-weighted scoring across compliance, history, distance, subject, margin
Compliance	Configurable checklists, warnings	Hard blocks, automated verification, API integration, audit-ready
Speed	5+ screens to make a booking	Single-screen booking with one-click confirmation
Margins	Reports after the fact	Real-time visibility at point of booking, with AWR factored in
School experience	No native portal, or a bolted-on one	Integrated portal, branded to your agency, that schools actually use
AI	"AI-powered" label on existing search	Purpose-built AI for CV parsing, matching, email generation, video analysis
Video interviews	Third-party bolt-on, if any	Built-in question banks, timed recording, AI analysis, subtitles, agency branding
MSP capability	Spreadsheets and manual reporting	Native MSP dashboards, SLA tracking, multi-site management, client reporting
Framework rate caps	No awareness — margins calculated blind	CCS/DfE rate caps factored into real-time margin calculations
Education knowledge	None — you teach it everything	Built-in understanding of UK education recruitment from day one

The 7am Test

It's 6:47am on a Tuesday in November. A school emails: "Teacher absence — Year 5, today, please arrange cover urgently." Your consultant has 90 minutes to fill this booking before the school gives up and calls another agency.

Every screen, every button, every workflow in AirDesk is designed to pass this test. If it doesn't help fill that booking faster, it doesn't belong in the product.

This is why we don't build AI chatbots for candidates, AI-written job descriptions, or sentiment analysis dashboards. We build AI that reduces clicks, saves time, and prevents mistakes. That's it.

The cost of "good enough"

You can make a general CRM work for education supply. Agencies have been doing it for years. But "making it work" means:

× Compliance spreadsheet alongside the CRM

× AWR tracked in Excel

× Morning bookings via WhatsApp & memory

× Margin calculated retroactively

× Framework margins absorbed by operational inefficiency

× Hours of data entry AI could do in seconds

The question isn't whether your current system can do the job. It's how much the workarounds are costing you — in time, in risk, and in bookings lost to faster competitors.

Our Approach

The AI Philosophy

Invisible by default.

The best AI features are ones your consultants never think about. The matching is just fast. The CV parsing just works. The emails just sound right. We don't make users manage AI — we make AI manage complexity.

Humans decide, AI informs.

AI ranks the candidates. Your consultant chooses who to book. AI flags compliance issues. Your officer decides the response. We amplify human judgement; we don't replace it.

Education-specific, not generic.

Our models understand the difference between KS1 and KS2, between QTS and QTLS, between a primary NQT and a secondary cover supervisor. That specificity is the difference between marketing and results.

Security & Data

🔒

Hard Data Isolation

Multi-tenant with complete separation at the database query layer. No agency can ever see another's data.

🏗️

Enterprise Infrastructure

Encrypted at rest and in transit. Automated backups. Comprehensive audit logging.

🇬🇧

GDPR-Compliant by Design

UK GDPR requirements built in. AI processing via enterprise API agreements — your data is never used to train models.

The AI-native platform built exclusively for education supply.