The elevator pitch

First Six is a wellbeing and retention platform for the first six weeks at a new institution. It is built on a simple, well-evidenced observation: the earliest weeks disproportionately determine whether a student stays, and most of the students who leave were reachable if someone had noticed in time.

This page is the one-read version. The pages beneath it carry the evidence.

The problem it addresses

Attrition is front-loaded. A meaningful share of the students an institution loses in a year are lost in the first month or two, often before any formal support has had a reason to engage with them.

The students most at risk are frequently the least likely to ask for help. By the time a problem is visible through grades or attendance, the window in which a light touch would have made a difference has usually closed.

What First Six does about it

First Six gives students a calm daily companion for those weeks (a timetable, a weekly check-in, and a clear path to help) and gives the institution's wellbeing team an early, privacy-respecting view of how a cohort is travelling.

The student-facing app is deliberately low pressure. The weekly check-in takes under a minute and is designed to be answered honestly rather than gamed. The staff console turns those signals into something a wellbeing team can act on, without exposing any individual student to scrutiny they did not consent to.

How it fits your institution

First Six is multi-tenant and white-labelled to your brand. Each institution's data is isolated at the database level, and the platform runs in Australian data centres with the security posture documented in this section.

Rollout is measured in weeks, not quarters. A typical onboarding runs six to eight weeks and needs three people at the table: IT for sign-on, a wellbeing lead for the content, and someone in comms to introduce it to students.

What to read next

If you are evaluating fit, read The six-week arc for how the student experience is structured, then Safety and compliance for how data is protected. If you are in IT, the Developer docs cover single sign-on and student information system sync in full.