Six years after leaving behind VSware, the cloud-based school admin system that he brought to 1 million students in Ireland and Norway within five years, Patrick Barry is back on the edtech train with Tyro, the school admin and AI-powered timetabling platform.
Launched in September 2023 in six early adopter schools – including St Mark’s Community School in Tallaght, the alma mater of Niall O’Reilly, Barry’s co-founder and chief technology officer of the firm – Dublin-based Tyro has already been rolled out to 40,000 pupils in 55 secondary schools in Ireland.
Following fresh investment of €2.1 million from Folens Group and Enterprise Ireland, Barry has his sights set on an upcoming Department of Education contract for a school administrator provider, which he previously managed with VSware, set to be awarded in early 2025.
Tyro, Barry said, is a “data-driven and student-centric experience”, rather than a mere school admin system.
On the Tyro interface – as user-friendly on the app as it is on desktop, according to Barry – parents can flag everyday hiccups like last-minute sickness, immediately registering their child’s absence for the day on individual teachers’ roll-call sheets.
Teachers, in turn, can send parents push notifications about anything from school trip fee reminders to permission slips and academic reports, without an envelope being lost to the bottom of an intermediary’s schoolbag.
“It all comes back to the word Tyro, which means a learner, a beginner or a novice,” said Barry. “Every feature we build, we're putting the student at the centre.
“When a student logs into Tyro, the home screen is a timeline where they see, in chronological order, everything that's happening with them at the school, as opposed to being a database-led system, like we built previously with VSware,” he said.
10 million students
Barry credited his co-founder O’Reilly for rolling out in 18 months what took five years to build in his first edtech venture, leaving him “catching his breath” in the first week of the summer holidays.
This is in keeping with the whirlwind academic year as now experienced by staff, parents and students alike, with school life still scrambling to catch up with itself post-pandemic, Barry said.
As well as presenting modern solutions to everyday issues – through features such as its AI-driven timetable creator, curating class schedules based on students’ subject preferences and available facilities – Tyro has tailored its software to the specific requirements of modern schooling.
The platform is designed to accommodate the growing number of students who require additional support outside of their core classes, which, according to Barry, isn’t catered for on most school’s internal admin systems.
The myriad of data collected on attendance and academic performance raises subtle indicators to senior teachers that all may not be well with a given student, allowing them to flag in-app with other staff that the pupil should be given specific attention or leeway.
“By communicating that information in real-time across the school, it avoids unnecessary friction,” Barry said. “That is what I mean by student-centric,” he added.
‘Gatekeeping’ contracts
According to its own projections, Tyro is set to reach 100 schools by the end of the calendar year, ahead of the state tender opening in early 2025.
Barry’s eyes are set on international expansion in the same year, with markets such as the Netherlands currently on the company’s radar.
His own experience in the edtech industry, however, has prepared him for the patient approach required for such growth.
Making strides in new markets, he explained, requires becoming the go-to company for consultancy firms such as Fujitsu and PwC who are tasked with “gatekeeping” the industry and large-scale contracts on behalf of state bodies.
Not that that has tempered ambitions.
“We achieved a million students with VSware. Our goal is 10 million with Tyro.
“That’s what excites me, because the investors we have, both Enterprise Island and Folens, realise the bigger picture – that growth comes in big chunks, and you’ve got to pick your battles. That's what we're doing.”
This Making it Work article is produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland