A proper front desk, wired to everything else.
Pre-registration, DBS checks, badge printing, host notifications, live on-site roster, and one-tap emergency evacuation — across every campus and building. Built on the Microsoft 365 you already have.
Early-access pilots open · Autumn 2026On site now · all campuses
Emergency roster
Host notified
The reception book is your biggest safeguarding blind spot.
Every college has the same tableau: a paper book, a standalone visitor iPad, a lanyard drawer, a SCR printed last Tuesday, and a WhatsApp group for contractors. At 8:47 on a Tuesday, nobody actually knows who's on site.
Paper sign-in, illegible scrawls
GDPR-hostile (everyone sees the page above). Photocopied for the evacuation roster twice a term. Wrong by 10am.
A standalone visitor iPad
Doesn't know about events, doesn't know about your MIS, doesn't alert hosts, doesn't check DBS. Another £3k/year line item, another vendor portal.
Contractors, late pupils, speakers
Each one in a different spreadsheet, WhatsApp group or clipboard. No single answer to "who is on site right now?"
From the calendar invite to the fire assembly point.
Every arrival — expected or otherwise — flows through the same loop that runs your events, registers and comms.
Pre-register
Host invites the visitor from Spark, Teams, or Outlook. An email with a QR pass goes out automatically.
Arrive
Visitor scans the QR at the kiosk, or walks up unannounced and taps their role.
Check
DBS status, watchlist, safeguarding flags and policy acknowledgement — run live against your SCR.
Badge & notify
Badge prints with photo, host, and escort level. Host gets a Teams / email / SMS ping the moment they sign in.
Sign out & log
Sign-out closes the loop. Every visit is timestamped, searchable, and retained per your DPA.
Invite the visitor the same way you'd invite them to a Teams call.
Events, parents' evenings, careers talks, interview days, contractor visits, inspector walk-rounds — all in one flow. Visitor gets an email, scans a QR on arrival, badge prints in seconds.
- Bulk invites from an event — invite 240 parents in one click; each gets a unique QR.
- Outlook & Teams plug-in — pre-register a visitor straight from the calendar invite.
- Contractor portal — suppliers upload DBS, RAMS, and insurance once; reused on every visit.
- Unannounced walk-ins still work — not pre-registered? Fast self-check-in with photo & policy.
The statutory checks run before the door opens.
Every sign-in is validated against your Single Central Record, your safeguarding watchlist, and your escort policy — in under a second. The blocked visit never makes it to a badge.
- SCR-linked DBS — expired or missing DBS blocks sign-in. Safeguarding lead is notified.
- Watchlist matching — banned individuals or flagged identities alert the DSL silently, in real time.
- Policy acknowledgement — fire, safeguarding and lone-working policies signed digitally on arrival.
- Escort enforcement — escort-required visitors can't be signed in without a named staff escort on roster.
A proper photo badge, printed in the time it takes to say hello.
Drop-in USB badge printers supported out of the box. Every badge carries photo, name, host, escort level, category colour, and a rotating QR for re-entry. No pre-cut stickers, no lanyard chaos.
- Supported printers — Brother QL, DYMO LabelWriter, Zebra ZD & Evolis (badge & lanyard).
- Per-campus templates — colour-coded by role: contractor, parent, speaker, inspector, interview, other.
- Auto-expire at sign-out — QR on the badge dies the moment the visitor leaves.
- Wallet fallback — no printer? Visitor's phone holds the pass in Apple or Google Wallet instead.
Every reception, every campus, on one pane of glass.
Built for MATs, college groups and federated sixth forms. Group and filter by campus, by building, by category. Centralised policy, local sovereignty — each reception can still do things its own way.
- Unlimited kiosks and receptions — one per campus or one per door, your call.
- Central trust / group dashboard — every site, rolling up in real time. Drill down to a building.
- Site-level policies — different escort rules at the craft centre vs the sixth form. Configured, not coded.
- Watchlists travel — a safeguarding flag at one site blocks the visitor at every site. Automatically.
The fire drill is a phone in a pocket, not a clipboard.
When the alarm sounds, your designated leads pull up a live roster on any phone — every student, every staff member, every visitor and contractor, grouped by building. Tick off at the assembly point. Log the drill.
- One tap from any phone — no pre-print, no IT call, no emergency-only passwords to remember.
- Includes visitors & contractors — the people most often missing from the paper list.
- Shared check-off — several leads mark off in parallel, progress syncs instantly.
- Auto-logged drills — every drill timestamped, who was checked off, and by whom. HSE-ready.
Wired to the events, registers, IDs and comms you already have.
Visitor Entry isn't a bolt-on. It sits in the same loop as Events, Scanner, Digital IDs and Communications — every arrival, one record, one audit trail.
Parents' evenings, open days, interview days
Every event in Spark can issue pre-registered visitor passes in bulk. One click, 240 QRs sent.
Staff & students tap the same pass
The Wallet pass students use at events is the pass staff use at reception — same scanner, same closed loop.
Late pupils flow to your register
A pupil signing in late at reception updates the MIS register automatically. Parent notified without anyone asking.
Host notifications via the channel they'll read
Teams DM during the school day, email for after-hours, SMS for urgent. Your rules, Spark's orchestration.
Staff sign in with their Microsoft 365 account
No new password. Leavers deprovisioned with your tenant. Conditional access & MFA inherited.
KCSIE, GDPR, fire-safety — all evidenced
Every sign-in is an auditable record. SCR linkage, watchlist actions and drills are logged for inspection.
Reception isn't one job. It's eight, split between six people.
Visitor Entry is designed around the real people staffing the front desk — not one abstract "admin user".
Stops apologising for the paper book
Greets visitors, prints badges, fields walk-ins — without a clipboard or a stare-down.
Knows who walked in — in real time
Gets silent alerts on watchlist matches, court orders, and escort-policy breaches. Can audit any term.
Contractors are no longer a WhatsApp group
Sees who's on site, where, and for how long. RAMS & insurance already attached to the visit.
Has the answer before the question
One dashboard across every campus. Drill-down for any building, any day, any category.
The first questions procurement will ask.
When is Visitor Entry generally available?
Early-access pilots open Autumn 2026. General availability follows in early 2027. Pilot colleges get it at no extra cost, with migration help from our team.
Do we need new hardware?
No. A spare iPad (or any web browser on a reception Windows box) is the kiosk. Badge printers are optional — we support Brother QL, DYMO, Zebra ZD and Evolis, and the visitor can also carry the pass in Apple or Google Wallet.
Does it work with our current MIS?
Yes. We connect to Arbor, Bromcom, SIMS and Compass for late pupil sign-in and SCR linkage. If your MIS isn't on the list, tell us — we build connectors on request.
Where is the data held?
UK data residency, London region. Per-tenant DPA, GDPR & UK-GDPR aligned. You own the data and can export it at any time, in any format.
How is it priced?
Included in every Spark subscription. No per-kiosk fees, no per-visitor fees, no professional-services invoices for new badge templates or campus policies.
We have three campuses and a contractor-heavy site. Does that add complexity?
That's exactly the case Visitor Entry was built for. Unlimited kiosks, per-site policies, federated watchlists, one dashboard across the group.
Replace the paper book. Keep the good hello.
Join the Visitor Entry early-access pilot. Live this autumn at a small group of UK colleges and MATs.