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.

The pages beneath this one carry the evidence, the controls, and the technical detail you will want next.

The problem it addresses

AttritionStudents leaving before completing their course or qualification. 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. That timing is what makes it tractable: a problem concentrated in a known window is one a deliberate intervention can be aimed at.

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. The conventional signals an institution already watches (a failed assessment, a run of missed classes) are lagging indicators. They tell you a student is in trouble after the moment a quiet word would have mattered most.

First Six exists to surface a leading signal instead: a low-friction read on how a cohort is travelling, early enough to act while acting is still cheap.

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. That matters, because a signal students learn to manage is worse than no signal at all. The staff console turns those answers into something a wellbeing team can act on, without exposing any individual student to scrutiny they did not consent to.

The two sides are built around the same constraint from opposite directions. For students, the value is a calm companion that lowers the cost of staying on track and the cost of asking for help. For the institution, the value is an early, defensible view of cohort wellbeing that respects the privacy students were promised. Neither side works if the other is compromised, so the design holds both at once rather than trading one off against the other.

How it fits your institution

First Six is multi-tenantOne platform instance serves many institutions, with each institution's data kept logically separate from the others. and white-labelled to your brand, so students see your identity rather than ours. Each institution's data is isolated at the database level, not merely partitioned in application code, and the platform runs in Australian data centres with the security posture documented in this section. The detail of where data lives and how tenants are kept apart is in Data residency and tenant isolation.

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. Most of that time is your side getting identity and content ready rather than us building anything bespoke.

Common questions

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.

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