NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS NEWS
Empowering Kiwi Businesses
Skool Loop, a New Zealand technology company that builds communication tools for schools, serves more than 1,500 schools across New Zealand and Australia and reaches over one million users. It does so with a team of 25 people, most of whom finish work at 3pm.
Around 90 per cent of that workforce are mums. Many joined the company straight out of school with no technology experience, and the business has been built around the school bell rather than the standard nine-to-five day.
Founded in Kaikōura in 2013 by Sharlene Barnes, Skool Loop provides a free communication platform for schools. The app connects staff, parents, and the wider school community through push notifications, electronic signatures, absence reporting, calendar integration, and emergency alerts. Free integrated school websites sit alongside it.
The company also offers SkoolBooks, an online classroom journal that gives teachers and parents a simple, connected way to track student learning. It has offices in Kaikōura and Rangiora.
Because the customers are schools, the working day follows the same rhythm. Staff start around 9am and finish by 3pm, and the model is treated as a design decision rather than a perk. The office itself stays open from 7am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, so the business keeps standard hours even though most of its people do not.
The arrangement holds together because every role at Skool Loop is backed by a trained second person. That means a sick child, a bereavement, a school assembly, or the end of the school day does not leave a customer waiting.
For a small business, that is the part other operators will recognise as the hard bit. Covering absences usually means either overstaffing or letting work pile up. Skool Loop’s answer is to train two people into each job, which costs more in training time but keeps service steady when someone has to leave at 3pm.
The company’s recruitment follows the same logic. It hires for willingness to learn rather than a perfect CV, and teaches the technical side in-house. One employee, Tayla, joined at 17 straight from high school with no previous tech experience. She now works in customer onboarding and support, building and configuring the Skool Loop app for each new school that joins the platform.
Skool Loop’s experience suggests the constraint most employers assume is fixed, a full day of availability, may be less rigid than it looks. The company has grown to more than 1,500 schools and over one million users while most of its staff leave at 3pm.
The trade-off is structural, not cultural. Covering every role twice and keeping a longer office day for customers requires planning and investment in training. In return, the business draws on a pool of workers, parents and school leavers in small towns that many employers pass over.
For owners in regional centres, where the talent pool is thin and good people are often ruled out by hours alone, the practical lesson is clear. The customer’s day sets the working pattern, and the staffing model is built to protect it.
NZ Business News reports on the decisions, deals and numbers shaping New Zealand business — the companies making them, the policy and market conditions they work within, and what it means for the people running businesses here.