Mainframe Engineering: UK Student Work Placement & School Portal
A custom Laravel web application built for Mainframe Engineering Ltd in the UK to coordinate student work experience placements between secondary schools and vetted local employers across Birmingham, Solihull, and Coventry.
Coordinating student work experience placements involves three groups with different needs: school career coordinators registering cohorts of students, local employers offering placements, and administrators verifying health, safety, and insurance compliance before any student goes on site.
Previously, tracking school allocations, employer insurance expiry dates, and student placement matches across Birmingham, Solihull, and Coventry required dozens of disconnected spreadsheets and email chains.
Softlimes designed and built a single multi-role Laravel portal where schools, employers, and administrators each log into a tailored dashboard with strict role-based permissions.
Challenge:
Replacing spreadsheet chaos across schools and employers
Managing hundreds of student placements across multiple UK council regions created three operational risks:
- Fragmented school submissions: Schools emailed student lists in different spreadsheet formats, requiring hours of manual cleanup.
- Employer compliance tracking: Every host company must pass health, safety, and liability checks before accepting students, which was hard to track in email.
- No live status visibility: School coordinators had to call or email administrators to see which students had confirmed placements.
Mainframe Engineering needed a secure web portal that enforced vetting steps automatically and gave schools live visibility.
Our solution:
Role-based workflows for schools, employers, and vetting staff
We built the platform around three connected workflows:
- School registration & cohort portal: Schools register, upload student placement requests, and track approval status in real time.
- Employer onboarding & health-and-safety gate: Employers submit company details, risk assessments, and insurance documents that administrators review and approve before placements unlock.
- Regional admin control center: Administrators filter placements by school, employer, industry, and postcode across Birmingham, Solihull, and Coventry and export compliance reports.
Before
- Student placement requests arrived in mismatched CSVs and emails.
- Employer insurance and health-and-safety checks were tracked manually.
- School coordinators had no self-serve view of placement progress.
- Matching students to approved employers required manual cross-checking.
- Generating regional summary reports took hours of spreadsheet work.
After
- Structured online registration for schools, students, and host employers.
- Built-in compliance gate that blocks unvetted employers from placement matching.
- Live role-based dashboards for school coordinators and administrators.
- Fast filtering by region (Birmingham, Solihull, Coventry), sector, and status.
- One-click CSV and PDF compliance and placement exports.
Technologies used
Built with tools the client team can maintain and expand:
- Framework & Backend: Laravel, PHP 8.x, Eloquent ORM, Role & Policy Middleware
- Database & Storage: MySQL, Encrypted Document Uploads, Audit Trail Logging
- Frontend UI: Responsive Admin & School Dashboards, Tailwind CSS, Interactive Filters
Client feedback:
Programme Director
Mainframe Engineering Ltd (UK)
“Having schools, employers, and our vetting workflow in one Laravel portal removed weeks of spreadsheet admin across our Birmingham, Solihull, and Coventry placements.”
Outcome:
Schools and employers across three West Midlands regions now complete registration and compliance vetting through one secure portal, giving administrators a complete audit trail for every student placement.