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Jason Hearse, Founder — Vale Swim Academy, Nottingham
“I built the pool. I run the swim school. I wrote the software. ClassBase isn’t theory — it’s what I use to manage 350 customers at Vale Swim Academy every day.”
— Jason Hearse
In 2018, frustrated by the lack of high-quality small-group swimming lessons in my area, I built my own pool and started a swim school — with no prior experience in the industry.
I started with 15 students, a diary, and Excel spreadsheets. It worked fine… until I hit 50 students and two teachers.
Suddenly, the diary was chaos. Parents wanted online booking. I needed Direct Debit to stop chasing payments. The tools I looked at assumed I was running 100+ students — enterprise pricing, complex onboarding, features locked behind “upgrade to Pro” gates.
I was stuck in the middle: too small for enterprise software, too big for spreadsheets. So I built ClassBase.
Today, that school — Vale Swim Academy — has grown into one of Nottingham’s leading providers for both lessons and private pool hire, managing 350 customers and 200 swim students using ClassBase every day.
But it started with just me, 15 students, and a frustration that existing platforms didn’t work for small operators.
The swim school sits alongside my day job, not after it. I’ve spent 35 years as an IT consultant building admin tools for global enterprises — banking, logistics, large-scale operational systems where one minute of friction is multiplied across hundreds of users. That’s still the work I do day-to-day, across multiple concurrent clients.
The brief is always the same: take the repetitive tasks that eat operational teams’ days, and make them disappear into clicks.
It transfers down better than it transfers up. Swim school admin is a smaller surface than enterprise back-office, but the patterns are the same: repetitive tasks, friction that compounds with every customer added, and operators who’d rather be teaching than typing.
ClassBase is what happens when you combine real operational experience with the discipline of enterprise-grade engineering — both still active, every week.
After years of using existing activity management platforms, it became clear that while they ticked boxes on paper, they weren’t built from real operational experience.
Waiting lists are a good example. Every platform treats them as a static list you manage by hand. When a space opens, you manually call parents in order. If they don’t answer? You move to the next one. Rinse, repeat. In ClassBase, when a parent registers they specify what days they can’t attend — they’re automatically added to the waiting list. This stops us offering spaces they can’t make. When they’re offered a trial, the Direct Debit setup is triggered automatically. No phone calls. No spreadsheets. No manual follow-up.
Finding empty spaces in the timetable? Every system I used left you scrolling through classes manually, trying to spot where the gaps were. In ClassBase, you click “Find Gaps” or hover over the utilisation indicator — it shows you exactly where the spaces are, which levels, and which teacher. Filling a class shouldn’t require detective work.
Even something as simple as blocking out bank holidays at the start of the year was painful. In ClassBase, you click one button and closure days are automatically populated for the entire year. No manually adding dates one by one.
Simple tasks became time-consuming. Workflows didn’t match how a real swim school runs. Most systems forced you to adapt your business to the software — not the other way around.
The turning point came in early 2026, when SwimBiz — one of the UK’s largest swim school platforms — went down for days during a critical invoicing period.
At the same time:
It highlighted a clear gap: a system that works at every level — from a single teacher to a large multi-site school — without complexity, lock-in, or punitive pricing.
If you’re a single teacher with 10 students, you deserve the same GoCardless Direct Debit, parent portal, and waiting list automation that schools with 500 students use.
Professional tools shouldn’t require professional scale.
That’s why ClassBase starts at £25/month +VAT with every feature unlocked — no “upgrade to Pro” gates, no per-student charges that penalise growth.
ClassBase is a modern, cloud-native activity platform built from the ground up around real-world operations.
It’s not just swim school software — it’s designed for any activity-based business that needs scheduling, payments, customer management, and automation.
And critically, it’s built to reduce admin, not add to it.
We already have multiple schools live on the platform, with more actively migrating.
Our largest tenant runs over 300 spaces per week across multiple pools. The smallest is a single teacher. Both use the same system — configured to fit their business.
“Doing well — I’m impressed.”
— Hayley, Swim Dynamics. Migrated from pen and paper; registered 35 customers overnight without needing a support call.
The focus now is on refining onboarding and ensuring schools can transition quickly without disruption.
The next step is intelligent automation.
We’re developing an AI assistant that understands your school — helping handle day-to-day queries, admin tasks, and communication — so operators can spend more time delivering their service, not managing systems.
Longer term, we’re building a network where schools can share knowledge — turning every operator into a contributor, not just a subscriber.
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