How Ark Start built a scalable data platform to demonstrate its impact

Ark Start is a subsidiary of Ark Schools that provides high-quality preschool education in disadvantaged communities. Its nurseries are not-for-profit and funded primarily through government subsidies, making clear evidence of educational impact and financial sustainability important to its long-term development.

At the start of the engagement, Ark Start operated five nurseries. It planned to expand to 12 by the end of the year and 24 by 2032, supporting 1,500 children annually.

As Ark Start prepared for growth, it had an opportunity to improve how it used data to understand its reach, evaluate children’s progress and demonstrate the value of its early years provision. Its data was held across several disconnected systems. These included Famly, its nursery management platform, CEM Aspects assessment data, Excel spreadsheets and the Ark Schools data warehouse. Producing an impact report required the team to extract, clean and combine this information manually.

Ark Start had already developed Power BI wireframes for some reports, but it did not have the automated data pipelines or shared data model needed to support them. This limited how quickly the organisation could access insight and created a reporting model that would become increasingly difficult to manage as more nurseries opened.

Ark Start wanted a centralised data platform that would automate data ingestion and provide consistent reporting across demographics, attendance, assessment outcomes and safeguarding. It also wanted to track children’s progress from nursery into primary school, giving the organisation a clearer view of the longer-term impact of its work.

The platform needed to support Ark Start’s immediate reporting requirements, scale to 24 nurseries and maintain appropriate data sharing with Ark Schools. It also needed to support Ark Start’s potential independence without requiring a substantial redesign.

esynergy had previously built Ark Schools’ centralised data platform on Databricks. This gave the team an existing understanding of the technology environment and allowed the new platform to use infrastructure that was already in place.

The engagement began with a six-day, fixed price discovery phase. The team gathered reporting requirements, assessed the available data sources and application interfaces, and produced a solution design before beginning the build.

Rather than creating a separate technology estate, esynergy established a partitioned Ark Start environment within Ark Schools’ existing Databricks platform. This reduced implementation time, licensing requirements and technical risk.

The platform used Azure Data Factory and Databricks to ingest, process and organise data through raw, cleaned and curated layers. Automated pipelines brought together information from Famly, CEM Aspects and the Ark Schools data warehouse. Power BI dashboards then presented the data across demographics, attendance, CEM Aspects assessments, Good Level of Development assessments, Phonics Screening and safeguarding.

Where information was not available through the Famly application interface, including attendance data, the team developed an alternative ingestion approach and aligned the resulting logic with Famly’s daily reporting format.

The work was delivered through weekly agile sprints. The same core team supported discovery and implementation, preserving the original design decisions throughout delivery.

A second phase added safeguarding reporting, updated CEM data, refreshed the Index of Multiple Deprivation data and progressed the ingestion of Ark attainment records. esynergy also provided Power BI training to help the Ark Start team use and maintain the reporting environment with less external support.

The platform was designed to benefit from the existing shared infrastructure while retaining a clear route towards an independent data environment if needed.

Ark Start now has a centralised data platform bringing together nursery, assessment and school data. Automated pipelines have replaced manual extraction and preparation across its principal reporting sources.

The organisation can access Power BI dashboards covering its reach, attendance, assessment outcomes and safeguarding. Data refreshes follow the reporting cycle of each source, including weekly demographic updates, twice yearly CEM Aspects updates and annual Good Level of Development and Phonics Screening updates.

The platform gives Ark Start a more consistent basis for demonstrating its impact on funders and stakeholders. It also provides the foundation for tracking children’s progress from nursery into primary education. This will help Ark Start assess whether the benefits of its early years provision continue after children leave its nurseries.

The platform was designed to support growth from five to 24 nurseries with minimal additional development. Further work extends it to additional nurseries and reporting areas, including finance.

By reusing Ark Schools’ existing infrastructure and applying a low code approach, esynergy reduced unnecessary technology and licensing requirements. Training and knowledge transfer also increased Ark Start’s ability to use the platform internally, limiting long-term reliance on external delivery support.