This story was made in collaboration with Safe Software partner Avineon Tensing.
The move toward smartphone-free school environments
A growing body of evidence shows that smartphones negatively impact children and young people in school environments, hindering concentration and contributing to behavioural and emotional challenges. Critically, removing smartphones from the school day has been linked to reductions in bullying, improved behaviour and attendance, and better academic outcomes.
The Smartphone Free Schools Rating Initiative is advocating for better learning environments by helping schools across the UK adopt consistent smartphone-free policies. The initiative outlines a 3-tiered rating system based on schools’ smartphone policies, aiming for every school across England and Wales to reach “Gold” status (a policy prohibiting smartphones in the school environment) by 2030. Participating schools are displayed on a public-facing map*, increasing transparency for parents, policymakers, and educators.
*School registrations surface on a web map published to the Smartphone Free Schools Ratings Initiative website.
Building a sustainable and scalable foundation
Originally, schools self-registered by submitting smartphone policy details through online forms. That information was catalogued in back-office systems and visualized on the initiative’s map. As a volunteer-led organization, the initiative’s early workflows relied on one geospatial volunteer to manage the school registrations, data updates, and public-facing map. While this worked in the short term, the process was highly manual. It introduced long-term risks to scalability and diverted volunteer time away from advocacy and support.
Reaching more schools highlighted the need for a more efficient and sustainable data collection and management strategy. To reach its goal by 2030, the initiative needed a cost-effective, automated solution that could scale without adding infrastructure or ongoing maintenance overhead.
Turning a proof of concept into a production-ready solution
The Smartphone Free Schools Rating Initiative had already developed a strong proof of concept using online forms, spreadsheets, FME, and Esri ArcGIS Online. Collaborating with Safe Software partner Avineon Tensing allowed the team to build on this foundation and evolve the solution into a production-ready, cloud-hosted system using FME Flow Hosted.
Working closely with the initiative, Avineon Tensing redesigned and streamlined its data workflows, focusing on automation, reliability, and long-term maintainability. Their approach addressed several key challenges, including:
- Data integration: Combining multiple data sources to accurately reflect smartphone policies on a public-facing map.
- Manual processing: Reducing manual steps involved in validating submissions, joining datasets, and publishing updates.
- Reliance on a single volunteer: Improving resilience by spreading technical knowledge and reducing single points of failure.
- Hosting and maintenance overhead: Avoiding the cost and complexity of managing infrastructure, monitoring, and upgrades. Infrastructure is fully managed through Safe Software’s hosted deployment option for FME Flow, FME Flow Hosted.
The outcome was a streamlined, no-code FME solution that automates the extraction, validation, and transformation of school registration data into a map-ready format.
Fostering smartphone-free environments with FME Flow Hosted
With FME Flow Hosted in place, the workflow was structured into two tasks:
- School data collection: Definitive open school data from English, Welsh, and Scottish governments is sourced and updated biannually.
- Validation and publishing: School registration data is provided and flagged as ‘moderated’ by team members. It is then validated, cleaned, and joined to definitive school data with FME. Registration data is published to Esri’s ArcGIS Online to surface on the public map.
The move to an automated solution with FME ensures the infrastructure can scale effortlessly as the initiative expands, critical for achieving the 2030 Gold status target for all schools.
By running processes through FME Flow Hosted, the initiative avoided local infrastructure costs while gaining the ability to automate scheduling, monitor workflows, and scale with ease. With Avineon Tensing managing upgrades and ongoing support, the team can reallocate internal capacity toward outreach, engagement, and helping more schools across England and Wales adopt smartphone-free policies.
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The provision of FME Flow Hosted enabled the initiative to run all necessary processes in the cloud, eliminating local infrastructure costs and allowing Avineon Tensing to remotely support the environment at no cost.
Explore how Safe Software supports other educational, research, and non-profit organizations in using their data to make an impact through the FME Grant Program.
