How Pathlight School secured 200+ access points across 6 campuses — and onboarded 800 staff in 2 days

The Challenge

Safeguarding a vulnerable student population across six dispersed sites — without a unified system

Pathlight School serves students with autism spectrum disorder across a network that spans more than just a single campus. In addition to its main school in Bishan and a secondary school, Pathlight operates satellite programmes integrated into mainstream schools across Singapore — a model that allows students to access support in settings closer to home. That reach, however, creates a significant operational challenge: maintaining consistent, auditable access control across six geographically dispersed locations, each with its own physical infrastructure, visitor flows, and staffing profile.

For a school working with students who have complex needs, the stakes around unauthorised access are high. Every visitor — from contractors and therapists to parents and delivery personnel — needs to be accounted for, verified, and time-tracked. Without a centralised system, each campus managed this differently, creating gaps in visibility for school leadership and inconsistencies that were difficult to address at scale.

The challenge sharpened at the start of each academic year. Pathlight's staff base — spanning teachers, allied health professionals, therapists, special needs assistants, and relief staff — needed to be onboarded across all sites simultaneously. With paper-based and manual processes, bringing several hundred staff into the access management system was a multi-week exercise prone to delays and errors. Every day a staff member was not yet in the system was a day they could not access the spaces they needed to work.

The Solution

One platform across 200+ access locations — and a staff onboarding process that cut weeks to two days

WerkDone deployed its Access and Visitor Management System across all six of Pathlight's geographical sites, covering more than 200 individual access locations. From the main school campus gates and internal zones to satellite programmes housed within mainstream schools, every controlled point was brought under a single, centrally managed platform. School leadership gained real-time visibility across the entire network — who had entered, when, and where — without needing to chase logs across multiple disconnected systems.

Visitor management was standardised across all campuses. Contractors, external therapists, volunteers, and parents moving through Pathlight's sites are now managed through consistent protocols — with digital audit trails that satisfy safeguarding requirements and can be pulled quickly for review. The system is designed for the reality of a SPED school environment: different visitor types with different access levels, managed without adding friction for frontline staff.

The self-assisted Staff Onboarding module addressed the academic year bottleneck directly. Rather than requiring HR or operations staff to manually process each profile, the module allows staff to complete their own onboarding through a guided digital flow — uploading credentials, capturing biometrics, and entering their access profile without a one-to-one manual session for each person. In 2024, Pathlight used the module to onboard over 800 staff in two days. The same process that had previously taken weeks became a two-day exercise that required minimal administrative resource.

The deployment has been live and in active use since March 2023, with WerkDone providing ongoing support across the full site network as Pathlight's operations evolve.