ClassCover is Ireland's first purpose-built booking platform for substitute teachers and SNAs. Schools get cover in minutes, subs get booked with a tap. No more jobs boards, phone calls, WhatsApp groups, or waiting to hear back.
Substitute teaching placements sorted in minutes. Not 39 phone calls.
The substitute and SNA booking platform trusted by 1 in 2 Australian schools is coming to Ireland in 2026.
Ireland's substitute teacher crisis is one of the most thoroughly documented problems in education. 60% of primary and special schools cannot reliably source a substitute. In Cork, four schools made up to 39 phone calls to fill a single absence. And yet the subs are out there: they covered more than a million school days in 2024/25. The shortage is real, and so is the pool that schools struggle to reach.
ClassCover is the platform built to close that gap. It is a mobile booking platform for substitute teachers and SNAs, and it launches in Ireland in 2026. Hundreds of Irish substitute teachers and SNAs have already signed up ahead of launch.
How ClassCover works
Getting cover today is a manual job. A school rings down a personal phone list one name at a time, or fires a request into a WhatsApp group and takes whoever replies first. It is slow, and there is no backup when the first names cannot help.
ClassCover gives a school its own growing list of trusted substitute teachers and SNAs to book from with one tap. The request goes to chosen subs in priority order, and the first available accepts. If no one on the priority list can take it, ClassCover widens automatically to the school's wider, vetted list. Subs keep an availability calendar, so requests only ever reach people who are genuinely free that day.
The school books a known, available person and gets a confirmation back. Schools get cover in minutes, subs and SNAs get booked with a tap.
Built for both sides, and for SNAs
ClassCover is the first platform in the Irish market to book substitute teachers and SNAs on the same workflow. That matters: special and DEIS schools carry both the highest vacancy rates and the highest reliance on SNAs, and SNA cover has never had a platform of its own.
It is free for substitute teachers and SNAs, always. They set their availability once, accept or decline bookings with a tap, and build relationships with the schools that add them to a priority list. No agency fees. No weekly re-registration. No waiting by the phone.
Proven at scale
ClassCover is already proven at scale. It is used in over 5,000 schools across Australia, around 1 in 2, handling more than 500,000 bookings a year, with an average booking confirmation time of 2 minutes 17 seconds.
The Irish version is built for the local context: Teaching Council registration on every profile, tools to keep Garda vetting records organised with expiry reminders, and Irish school terminology and calendars. Schools keep responsibility for vetting. ClassCover keeps the records and the reminders in one place.
Pre-register now
ClassCover launches in Ireland in the new 2026 academic school year. Schools, substitute teachers and SNAs can pre-register now at classcoverapp.ie.
Schools can apply for the pilot programme, or get access to ClassCover Lite at launch which is the always free tier for schools. Substitute teachers and SNAs can join the waitlist, free, always.
Don't post and wait. Book and be done.
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