The lease is signed, the fit-out is booked, and the thing about to go wrong isn't the building. It's the program.
At one site, the program is what you teach. You're in the room, you see a tutor skip the week 4 set and you fix it on Thursday. At two sites, the program becomes what each site remembers. Site two gets a copy of the folder, the site lead reads it their own way, the tutors take their own copies home, and by week 6 the two sites are teaching two versions of the same thing. Parents talk to each other across suburbs. They'll tell you which version is better before you've noticed there are two.
This is the ninety-day plan for opening the second site without that happening. Everything in it can be done by hand this year. Where the platform makes a step automatic, it says so.
- The consistency problem starts at the material, not the people. Freeze the program before you hire anyone.
- The site lead teaches at site one for a month. Nobody learns a program from a folder.
- Every family at both sites gets the same welcome, the same homework policy, the same words.
- The opening month is a daily five-minute check and a weekly half-hour review. Then the first parent reports.
- Five numbers every Friday, both sites side by side. A gap should show in a fortnight, not a term.
Why the program drifts the moment there are two sites
The program at your first site was never only the folder. It was the folder plus you. You wrote the sets, you know why week 3 comes before week 4, you know the sentence you say when a parent asks about the homework. None of that is written down, because it never needed to be. You were always in the room.
A second site has the folder and not you. So the site lead fills the gaps from memory and instinct, which is what a good site lead does. The tutors fill their gaps the same way. Every gap filled differently is a small fork in the program, and after a term there are dozens.
The tell is the photocopier. Site two starts with the same sheets as site one. Then a tutor annotates a set, copies the annotated version, and that becomes the site two version. Someone drops a page that "never worked" for them. Someone adds a sheet from a previous job. Growth meant more photocopying, and each copy is a slightly different program.
You can't fix this by visiting more often. You fix it by making the material the thing that's consistent, so the people can vary the way people always will.
The ninety days, in one table
| When | Do this | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Ninety days out | Freeze the program. Every folder that site two will teach is final, versioned and in one central place. No site-specific copies. | There's now one thing to hand over instead of a drawer to interpret. |
| Ninety days out | Audit what's in the folder. Mark what's yours, what's licensed, what's a mystery. | The second site inherits your rights position. Know it first. |
| Sixty days out | Choose the site lead. They teach at site one for a month before opening. | The program is learned in the room, not from the folder. |
| Sixty days out | Hire site two's tutors and run them through the same onboarding as site one. | Same non-negotiables, same first fortnight, same standard. |
| Thirty days out | Write the welcome, the homework policy and the first-term words once. Both sites use them verbatim. | Parents compare notes. Give them nothing to compare. |
| Opening week | A five-minute daily check with the site lead. | Small things surface while they're small. |
| Opening month | A thirty-minute weekly review, walking the coming week's folder together. | The site lead stays on the program rather than beside it. |
| Week 2 | The first parent reports go out from site two, in the same format as site one. | The parent's first proof arrives before their first worry. |
| Every Friday | The scorecard: five numbers, both sites, side by side. | A gap shows in a fortnight, not at re-enrolment. |
The second campus launch checklist is this table as a printable page with a box beside each line. Print it the day you sign the lease.
Ninety days out: freeze the program
Freezing the program means deciding that, from this date, there is one final version of every folder site two will teach, and that version lives in one place both sites read from.
That's harder than it sounds, because most centres don't have one version. They have the version in the shared drive, the version in the filing cabinet, and the version in each tutor's bag. Step one is choosing which of those is the program. Step two is putting it somewhere central, named the way you say it: Year 6 Selective, Week 3, Ratios. Step three is the rule.
No site-specific copies. Site two doesn't get a copy of the folder. It gets the folder.
This is also the moment to know what's in it. Go through it with the material audit worksheet: what exists, what state it's in, and whether you wrote it, licensed it, or aren't sure. A second site doubles your exposure on anything in the third category. Sort it out now, while it's one drawer, and confirm your position with your own adviser if anything's unclear.
If you're thinking of putting the program on a platform, this is the week to do it, because the freeze is the conversion. One program, converted once from your material, published to every campus. Updated once, updated everywhere. The site-specific copy stops being a temptation because there's nothing to photocopy.
Sixty days out: the site lead teaches at site one first
The single most useful thing you'll do in the ninety days is this: whoever will run site two teaches at site one for a month before it opens.
Not observes. Teaches. Takes the Year 6 Tuesday class from your material, sets the homework the way you set it, marks it against your key, handles the parent who emails on Wednesday. A month is long enough to hear the sentences you say without thinking, and those sentences are the program as much as the sets are.
If the site lead is already one of your tutors, this is easy and you've probably already chosen them. If they're a hire from outside, build the month into the start date and pay for it. It's the cheapest month of the whole project.
Site two's tutors go through the same first fortnight as anyone you hire for site one, using the same tutor onboarding checklist: Working with Children Check sighted and recorded before day one, one class shadowed, the folder read end to end, one set marked against the key and compared with your marking. The non-negotiables are the same at both sites, in the same words, signed. A second site is not the place to relax the standard because you're short.
Thirty days out: the same words to every family
Parents at site two will know parents at site one. Same schools, same sport, same group chat. From opening day, both sites are being compared, and the comparison is made on small things: the welcome letter, what was said about homework, what happens when a set isn't done.
So write those things once and use them at both sites without variation. The welcome, one page. The homework policy, one page: how much, by when, what to do when stuck, what the centre does when it's not done. The three sentences you say to a new family in the first conversation. Give the site lead the exact words and ask them to use them, at least for the first term. They can find their own voice once the program is steady.
The first-term offer, if there is one, is the same at both sites. A better deal at the new site is the fastest way to make a site-one family feel like the old customer, and they'll say so, to you and to the group chat.
Opening month: the daily check and the weekly review
For the first four weeks, two rhythms.
The daily check is five minutes, by phone or message, once the last class is out. Who came, what was taught, anything odd. It isn't supervision. It's the fastest way to hear that the Thursday class ran short of material or that a parent asked a question nobody could answer, while it's still a small thing.
The weekly review is thirty minutes, sitting down with the site lead and walking the folder for the week ahead. Which set, which pages, what the tricky bit is, what you'd say. You're not checking up. You're keeping the site lead on the program rather than beside it, which is where every site lead drifts to without this.
Then, in week 2, the first parent reports go out from site two, in exactly the format site one uses. What the child worked on, what improved, what's next, a line from the tutor, the centre's logo. The parent report template is the one-page version you can fill in by hand. The point is that site two's first parent proof arrives before site two's first parent worry, and that it looks identical to what site one's parents get.
The Friday scorecard, both sites side by side
From opening week, five numbers every Friday, on one page, in two columns.
| Number | What it tells you | What a gap between sites means |
|---|---|---|
| Completion rate | Whether the six days between sessions are being used | The homework policy isn't being said the same way, or the sets aren't landing |
| Class accuracy by topic | Whether the teaching landed | Same set, different results: someone is teaching it differently |
| Parent reports sent | Whether proof is going out | Zero at one site is the first thing to fix, before anything else |
| Students gone quiet for two weeks | Next term's losses, early | A new site's routine hasn't formed yet, so a quiet family there needs a call sooner |
| Tutor hours | Whether the roster matches the plan | More hours for the same classes usually means someone is rewriting material |
The point of the second column is that it makes a difference visible in the first fortnight. Without it, you find out at re-enrolment, in the parent's words, when one site's families renew and the other's don't.
On paper this takes the site lead half an hour on a Friday. On the platform the owner view shows every class at every campus without anyone compiling it: completion, topics under pressure, students gone quiet, and the parent reports due. A second campus shows up as another column, not another login.
| Student | Fractions | Ratios | Percentages | Area | Word problems | Set 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Priya S. | done | |||||
| Liam T. | done | |||||
| Mei W. | done | |||||
| Aarav K. | done | |||||
| Chloe N. | done | |||||
| Daniel P. | done | |||||
| Zoe R. | done | |||||
| Ethan L. | not started | |||||
| Hannah M. | done | |||||
| Noah B. | done | |||||
| Isla C. | done | |||||
| Arjun D. | done |
What the platform changes
Everything above works on paper. What changes when the program is on a platform is that the consistency stops depending on discipline.
The program is converted once, from your material, and published to every campus. When you fix a question in week 3, it's fixed at both sites that evening. There are no site-specific copies because there's nothing to copy: a tutor at site two assigns the same Year 6 Week 3 set, from the same bank, that a tutor at site one assigns.
Classes are per campus. Each site's tutors see their own classes and nobody else's. The owner sees across both. Parent reports go out from both sites on the same Friday, with the same logo, from the same address, with the improvement by topic pulled from what each student actually did.
If a campus needs something of its own, an extension set for a strong group, it can add it, and it's visible only to that campus. The central program stays central. That's what the multi-site groups page walks through, and if you run a structured program across many classes already, the coaching colleges page covers the same problem at one site.
Additional campuses are priced per site, on top of your base plan: $1,500 setup and $590 a month for each additional campus, in Australian dollars ex GST. The pricing page has the full table. Tutor seats are unlimited on multi-site, which matters when the second site's roster is mostly casuals.
The plan stays the same. The consistency stops being something you check and becomes something the tutor dashboard shows you.
This week
Write the freeze date on the calendar: ninety days before opening, or today if you're already inside that. Choose which version of the folder is the program and put it in one place. Name the site lead, and book their month at site one. Open the checklist, put it on the wall, and find the next line.