Getting Started
What IRIS5 is, and how to run your first audit.
What is IRIS5?
IRIS5 is an AI-powered diagnostic assessment for schools, built by Paideia Gamma. It examines the institutional health of a school across five dimensions:
- Financial health — sustainability, reserves, surplus quality, cash runway
- Enrolment & market position — pipeline, capacity, fee positioning, demand risk
- Governance & compliance — board effectiveness, policies, statutory duties, data protection
- Operational effectiveness — staffing efficiency, processes, cost structure
- AI exposure & opportunity — readiness, policy, safeguarding around AI tools
What makes IRIS5 different is its dual-layer design: it first captures what your leadership team believes about the school (a structured questionnaire), then — in a deep audit — checks those beliefs against what your documents actually say. The gap between perception and evidence is where the most valuable findings live. A school that rates its finances “green” while its management accounts show 38 days of cash cover needs to know that — and that is exactly what IRIS5 surfaces.
It’s built for heads of school, CFOs and business managers, board members, and school groups — for strategic planning, board reporting, accreditation preparation, or simply an honest health check.
The two assessment levels
| Light Audit | Deep Audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | 1 credit |
| Time | ~20 minutes | ~45 minutes + document gathering |
| Method | Questionnaire only | Questionnaire + AI document analysis |
| Ratings | Perception-based | Evidence-based + the perception gap |
| Metrics from your data | No | Yes |
| Contradiction detection | No | Yes — conflicts between your documents |
| Board-ready PDF | No | Yes |
Start with the light audit if you’re exploring, want a quick pulse check, or are opening a conversation with your leadership team. Go deep when you’re making strategic decisions, preparing for accreditation or a board review, or investigating a known concern. You can always upgrade a light audit later — your questionnaire answers carry over.
First steps
- Sign up with your invited email address and verify it via the link you receive. (IRIS5 is currently in private beta — sign-up is by invitation.)
- Enable two-factor authentication in Settings (recommended) — a sign-in code sent to your email.
- Create your school profile: country, school type, boarding status, legal structure (for-profit / not-for-profit — this changes which financial benchmarks apply), student numbers, capacity, average fee, and currency. Take a minute to get these right: thresholds and benchmarks are calibrated from them.
Running a light audit
Create an audit, choose Light, and answer the questionnaire — structured questions across all five dimensions, about 20 minutes. Your answers auto-save, so you can leave and come back. Submit for scoring and you’ll get a RAG rating (Red / Amber / Green) per dimension with commentary.
Read it for what it is: a perception snapshot. It reflects what you told it. An all-Green light audit means leadership believes things are fine — it does not verify that they are. If any dimension surprises you, in either direction, that’s the signal to go deep.
Pricing & credits
Deep audits are paid with credits: Single School ($199) is 1 credit for one school; School Group ($299) is 3 credits across up to 3 schools.
One credit buys one full analysis pass — document upload through cross-analysis and report. The credit is charged when you upload the first document of a pass, and you’ll always see a confirmation pop-up showing exactly what will be charged and how many credits you have. Nothing is ever charged silently.
If an analysis fails, the credit is refunded automatically. A failed run never costs you anything.
Running a deep audit
1. Complete the questionnaire. Same as the light audit (deep audits add some further questions). This captures the perception layer your documents will be checked against.
2. Prepare your documents. The quality of a deep audit tracks the quality of what you feed it. Aim for the most recent versions of:
- Financial: annual accounts, management accounts, budget, fee schedule
- Enrolment: enrolment/admissions data, capacity figures
- Governance: board minutes, key policies (safeguarding, data protection, AI), compliance registers, scheme of delegation
- Operational: staffing data, organisational structure
- AI: AI policy, staff training records, tool registers
Formats: PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx/.xls), CSV, plain text/Markdown — finance exported from Google Sheets as CSV works fine. Up to 40 documents per audit, 32 MB per file. Non-English documents are supported. Use clear file names and upload final versions rather than drafts where possible.
3. Upload. Drag and drop. Each document is analysed on upload; you’ll see per-document status. The first upload of a pass is when your credit is charged (with the confirmation pop-up).
4. Run the cross-analysis. One click. The AI compares every document against every other document and against your questionnaire answers. A progress bar keeps you posted; large packs can take several minutes. You can leave the page — the analysis continues server-side and the results will be there when you return.
Reading your report
- Dimension scores — evidence-based RAG per dimension, alongside your perception rating, so the gaps are visible at a glance.
- Contradictions — places where your documents disagree with each other. Each carries a severity, cites the documents and values on both sides, and reduces the affected dimension’s score — a school whose documents contradict each other has a reliability problem, and the score reflects it.
- Cross-document observations — patterns worth knowing that aren’t strict contradictions: trends, risks, budget variances, and genuinely positive signals.
- Perception gaps — where your questionnaire answers and your documents tell different stories.
- Priorities & recommendations — a ranked short-list of what to address first, plus which missing documents would most strengthen the next audit.
- Peer benchmarking — where comparable data exists, how your metrics sit against schools of similar type.
Download the PDF for board packs — it’s formatted for exactly that use. To re-run an analysis later (new documents, or after fixing something), upload a fresh document set — IRIS5 never stores your documents, so each pass starts from your upload. Each full pass uses one credit.
Privacy — the short version
- Your documents are never stored. They’re analysed and permanently deleted — what’s kept is the extracted analysis (metrics, key facts, and short supporting quotes) that builds your report. There is no document archive to breach.
- No AI training on your data, ever.
- Stored data lives in the EU (database in Ireland, application in Paris). The one exception, disclosed plainly: the AI analysis step itself is processed by Anthropic in the United States — transiently, under a data processing agreement.
- Not even us: Paideia Gamma staff cannot open your results without your explicit, revocable consent — and every access is logged where you can see it.
- Deleting your account deletes everything — school profile, questionnaire, results.
Full details in the Privacy Policy.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a deep audit take end to end?
Roughly an afternoon if your documents are at hand: ~45 minutes of questionnaire + upload, then a few minutes of analysis. Gathering documents is usually the long pole.
What happens if the analysis fails midway?
Your credit is refunded automatically, and the audit returns to a state where you can run it again.
Can I audit several schools?
Yes — the School Group purchase covers up to 3 schools, each with its own profile and audits.
We’re mid-year — should we wait for the annual accounts?
No. Management accounts and budgets are first-class inputs; the analysis is built to work with in-year data. Upload what you have, and the report will tell you which additional documents would strengthen the picture most.
The report flagged something we know is fine. What now?
Check the cited documents first — most “false alarms” turn out to be genuine inconsistencies between what two documents say, even when the underlying reality is fine. That inconsistency is itself worth fixing: your board packs should agree with your accounts.
Support
Questions, access requests, or anything unclear — contact us.