Best Tools for School Leaders: Staff, Curriculum & Teacher Management

The search for a school leader's "Swiss army knife"

I have spent a long time hunting for the perfect tool for school leaders — one app that can handle curriculum development, staff management, student tracking, and attendance without falling apart. I tested the main contenders across all of those jobs. Here are the four I keep coming back to, and where each one wins.

1. Notion

If you want everything in one app, Notion is the way to go. It offers a free Pro plan for teachers, deep customisation, and it loads fast. I use it to build portfolios and simple websites, manage teacher and student information, and collaborate with staff by assigning roles. There are hundreds of templates to start from, and it now has offline access, mail, and a calendar. AI is built in, though you pay extra to unlock it.

2. Monday.com

Similar to Notion, with some genuinely nice touches. The embedding feature makes documents look great, and the status columns, people fields, and progress maps are excellent for tracking. The charts are especially good for visualising student data. Two downsides: it gets slow — and occasionally freezes — once a board is packed with content, and it is a bit expensive.

3. Google Sheets

Free, web-based, and familiar to almost everyone. It is brilliant for real-time collaboration, works on any device with a connection, and integrates neatly with the rest of Google Workspace. I lean on it for budget tracking, student data, staff scheduling, and inventory. The trade-offs: it has fewer features than a dedicated tool like Monday or Notion, its data visualisation is basic, automation is limited, and it slows down with very large datasets.

4. Excel

Google Sheets' direct rival, and still the data-analysis powerhouse. Formulas, charts, and pivot tables make it strong for budgeting, performance tracking, and reporting. The big advantage is the desktop app: download a file and you can edit it fully offline, where Sheets needs to sync to Drive first. That said, files stored in Drive are arguably more secure than ones sitting on a laptop. The downsides are the subscription cost, clunkier collaboration, and a steeper learning curve.

So which one?

There is no single winner — it depends on your needs, budget, and how technical your team is. Notion wins on customisation and centralising everything in one place. Monday.com shines for visual project management. Google Sheets is the free, accessible workhorse. Excel is unbeatable for deep analysis and offline work. In practice, many school leaders end up combining them — Notion for staff directories and curriculum, Monday for projects, and a spreadsheet for the number-crunching.