A school year produces thousands of small moments in a classroom and, at the end of it, a single number on a report card that captures almost none of them. Povey.app starts from a simple observation: the people best placed to say whether a class actually worked are the ones sitting in it, and they should be able to say so the same day, not months later in a survey nobody reads.
Feedback that moves in both directions
Every student spends years being graded — homework, tests, oral exams, final marks — and almost none of that time is spent the other way around. Povey.app changes the direction of that flow. After each class, it takes a pupil, a secondary school student, or a university student about thirty seconds to say how well the lesson actually landed: was the material understandable, did it hold their attention, was the pace right. Multiply that by a class, a school, a semester, and what emerges is something no single end-of-term evaluation could ever produce: a real-time, continuously updating picture of teaching quality, built from the people experiencing it firsthand.
That is the whole idea behind the name. Every point of view matters — not just the one written in red pen on top of the page.
Why once a year was never enough
Traditional teaching evaluations, where they exist at all, tend to arrive at the end of a term, ask a handful of generic questions, and get filled out from memory by students who have mentally already moved on. By the time the results reach anyone, the class is over and nothing about it can change. Povey.app treats feedback as a living signal instead of a postmortem: a dip in engagement shows up in a teacher's dashboard the same week it happens, not the following academic year, which means there is still time to actually do something about it.
Thirty seconds, right after class
The core loop is deliberately small. After a lesson, a short set of prompts appears — how clearly the material was explained, how engaged the class felt, whether the pace was too slow, too fast, or just right — plus an optional anonymous comment for anything a scale can't capture. Once or twice a day, the app also checks in on how a student is actually feeling, because a bad morning at home shows up in the classroom whether anyone names it or not, and understanding that context turns a raw score into something a teacher can actually act on. Around exams and major tests, a further short check captures how fair the material felt, how hard the student worked to prepare, and whether the difficulty matched what was taught — data that, gathered across a whole class, tells a far more honest story than any single grade distribution.
Three journeys, one app
Povey.app is not one product wearing three different names — it is genuinely built around the fact that a nine-year-old, a sixteen-year-old, and a twenty-year-old need different things from the same underlying idea.
- Younger pupils get a simple, mostly visual way to say how a lesson and a school day felt, framed around a small number of easy choices rather than open-ended text — enough to build a real feedback habit without asking more of a nine-year-old than is reasonable.
- Secondary school students get the full loop: per-subject ratings across a real timetable, a way to flag when a test didn't match what was taught, and enough nuance to distinguish "this teacher is strict" from "this teacher is unfair," which is a distinction that matters enormously and rarely gets captured anywhere else.
- University students get a version built around lecture halls and course structures rather than daily classroom routines — rating professors and courses that might only run for a single semester, with more weight placed on written comments, since one lecture a week leaves less room for a long, built-up relationship with a lecturer.
What a teacher or professor actually sees
None of this is designed to be a punishment mechanism. A teacher or professor using Povey.app opens a personal dashboard — never a public shame board — showing how their ratings have trended over the last week, month, or term, broken down by class and by subject. Written comments appear alongside the numbers, so a dip in a score always comes with some sense of why. On top of the raw numbers, the app generates a short, plain-language weekly summary: which topics are consistently landing well, where a class's attention seems to be drifting, and what changed compared to the previous few weeks — the kind of pattern that is almost impossible to notice by memory alone across a hundred students and a dozen classes, but obvious once it's laid out in front of you.
Nobody is required to use any of this. Teachers and professors come to their dashboard because it's useful, not because they have to — and for the ones who are already good at their job, it tends to be the first tool that actually shows them so, in specifics rather than in a single end-of-year number.
What a parent sees — and what they don't
Parents connected to their child's account see trends, not surveillance: how their child's engagement and mood have moved over recent weeks, gentle alerts if motivation or wellbeing appears to be dropping, and a clearer read on how prepared their child feels heading into an upcoming test. What a parent does not see is any individual rating their child submitted, any written comment, or any private daily check-in — those stay between the student and the app, on the same principle that makes the whole system work in the first place: honesty requires knowing that nobody who grades you, and nobody who raised you, is looking over your shoulder while you answer.
What a school leader sees
A head teacher or department head gets the view they almost never otherwise have — not one class, but the whole school, aggregated, with month-by-month reporting instead of an anecdote that reaches their office only after it has already become a problem. It's the kind of early signal that normally only exists informally, through whichever teacher happens to mention something in the staff room, made available as an actual, ongoing dataset instead.
Privacy is the foundation, not a feature
A meaningful share of Povey.app's users are children and teenagers, which means privacy can't be an afterthought bolted on at the end — it has to be the starting design constraint for everything else. Individual ratings are never shown to anyone by name; a teacher sees the aggregate and the comments, never who submitted which one. A private daily check-in, where a student can note how they're actually doing, is never visible to a parent, a teacher, or anyone else — it exists purely for the student's own use. Data belonging to minors is treated as a distinct, more sensitive category under European data protection law, parental access to a child's trends is granted only through an explicit connection the child is part of setting up, and from the age at which local law allows a young person to consent for themselves, they control that access directly.
Built to be fair
An open feedback system needs real protection against the two ways it could go wrong: a single bad day turning into a pile-on of unfair ratings, or a teacher being judged on a sample too small to mean anything. Povey.app addresses both directly. Statistical trimming removes extreme outlier ratings before an average is calculated, so a handful of retaliatory scores can't swing a teacher's dashboard on their own, and a rating is only treated as a reliable signal once a class has produced enough of them — a single day's data is shown as exactly that, not dressed up as a verdict.
A daily habit, not a chore
Feedback systems fail when they feel like homework, so Povey.app borrows the same mechanics that make small daily habits stick elsewhere: a visible streak for consistent participation, light class-versus-class participation boards, and small shareable moments after a rating that make the app feel less like a form and more like something worth telling a friend about. None of this changes what the ratings mean — it just makes it far more likely that enough of them get submitted for the underlying signal to actually be trustworthy.
AI insight, without the jargon
Behind the dashboards sits a straightforward use of AI: reading the volume of ratings and comments a single teacher accumulates across a term and turning it into a short, human-readable summary instead of a spreadsheet nobody has time to dig through. The same underlying pattern-matching lets Povey.app spot a correlation a teacher would otherwise have to notice by instinct — say, that engagement consistently dips in a particular class right before lunch — and surface it as a single, plain sentence rather than a wall of numbers. Future updates aim to extend the same approach to students directly, offering gentle, judgement-free observations about their own study patterns based on the data they've already generated, never on anything written in a private, personal check-in.
Why "transparency," specifically
It would have been easy to build Povey.app around a different word — grading, scoring, ranking — and each of those would have missed the point slightly. A grade implies a verdict; a ranking implies a competition; what actually changes a classroom for the better is neither of those, it's simply seeing clearly what is already true. A teacher who is doing a genuinely good job usually already suspects it, but rarely has anything concrete beyond a gut feeling and the occasional kind comment in a hallway. A teacher who has drifted off course, on the other hand, is often the last person to notice, because nobody tells them directly and the only formal signal — end-of-year grades and results — arrives too late and measures the wrong thing entirely. Transparency simply means neither of those people has to guess anymore.
The same logic applies at every other level of the system. A parent doesn't need a ranking of schools; they need visibility into how their own child is actually doing, day to day. A head teacher doesn't need a competition between staff; they need an honest, ongoing read of where a good class is quietly becoming a great one, and where a struggling one needs attention before a full year is lost to it. Povey.app is built around that distinction deliberately — transparency as the goal, not measurement for its own sake.
Frequently asked questions
Does a teacher have to opt in to being rated? Ratings happen at the class level as part of the normal daily flow for students at a participating school — a teacher doesn't need to do anything to be included. What is optional is claiming a personal dashboard, which unlocks the trends, comments, and AI summaries described above.
Can other students see my ratings or my comments? No. Ratings and comments are visible only in aggregate, to the teacher or professor concerned, and — for basic trend data only, never individual entries — to a connected parent where that applies. Other students never see anyone else's individual submissions.
What happens if a student rates the same class every single day out of habit rather than honestly? The system is built around patterns across many students and many days rather than any single entry, which is precisely why one student's rushed or careless habit barely moves an aggregate built from an entire class over an entire term.
Is this only useful for problem classes? No — arguably the opposite. The clearest use case is a class that's already working well, where a teacher finally gets to see, in specific and repeated detail, exactly what they're doing right.
Does the app cost anything? The core rating experience is free for pupils, secondary school students, and university students. Teachers, parents, and schools can access deeper dashboards, trend history, and reporting through optional paid tiers, without ever changing what students themselves see or how their ratings are collected.
Getting started at a school
Povey.app is designed to spread the way most genuinely useful classroom tools do — starting with a handful of curious students at a single school, rather than a top-down rollout imposed from outside. A teacher profile can exist before that teacher ever creates an account, ready to be claimed the moment they're curious enough to look. A school doesn't need a formal decision or a procurement process to get started; it typically begins with a small group of students who simply start using it, and grows from there as more of their classmates, and eventually their teachers, join the same conversation.
Where Povey is headed
Povey.app is being built school by school, starting in Slovenia and expanding outward across schools and universities in Central and Eastern Europe. Alongside the app sits Povey.eu, a public, browsable record of the same underlying ratings — searchable by anyone, without an account, as a directory of how schools, teachers, and professors are actually perceived by their own students. The two work together: the app is where the daily habit of giving and receiving feedback actually lives, and the public site is where that feedback becomes visible to anyone deciding which school, which faculty, or which course to trust with their time.
Get involved
Povey.app is free to use for students. If you're a pupil, a secondary school student, or a university student, you can start rating your own classes as soon as your school joins. If you're a teacher or a professor, claiming your dashboard takes minutes and puts real, structured feedback in front of you for the first time. If you lead a school or a department, reach out — the earlier a school joins, the more useful its own data becomes.