How to choose a school management system in Uganda

Almost every school management system claims to do everything: registers, marks, report cards, fees, timetable, library, SMS. Feature lists look alike, so they are a poor way to choose. A better starting point is to write down the three problems that cost your school the most time or money today.

For most Ugandan schools the answers are similar. End-of-term report cards take teachers and the director of studies several days and still contain mistakes in positions. The bursar cannot quickly say which parents owe money, and fee reminders go out late or not at all. Parents complain that they do not know what is happening until a problem is serious. Keep your three problems in front of you when you watch every demonstration, and ask the supplier to show exactly how their system solves each one, with your kind of data.

A system built for another country can usually be bent to work in Uganda, but the bending happens every term, in your staffroom. Ask to see, on screen, a report card that follows your exact grading.

• UNEB grading for primary and secondary, including aggregates and divisions where you use them.
• The lower secondary competence-based curriculum (CBC), graded differently from A level in the same school.
• Positions calculated the way your school does it: within a stream or across all streams, by total or by average, and how ties are handled.
• Beginning, mid and end of term exams, and whether they add up by weight or whether end of term decides on its own.
• NCDC lesson plan and scheme of work layouts, if your teachers are required to prepare them.

In Uganda most school fees now arrive by MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money. A good system takes the payment into the school’s own merchant account, matches it to the right learner automatically, and sends the parent an SMS receipt. A weaker system only lets the bursar type mobile money payments in by hand afterwards, which saves little time and invites mistakes.

Ask the supplier to show a live payment from a phone to a test learner, with the receipt arriving. Ask who holds the money: you want it to land in the school’s account, never in the supplier’s. Ask what the charges are, both the mobile network’s and the supplier’s. Finally, check that cash and bank payments use the same receipts and appear in the same balances, so the bursar has one place to look.

The biggest reason school systems fail is not technology but adoption. If taking a register takes longer on the system than in the book, teachers will quietly go back to the book. Hand a teacher a phone during the demonstration and time how long it takes to take a register for a class of sixty and to enter marks for one test.

• Does it work on the cheap Android phones teachers own, not only on a laptop?
• Does it work when the internet is slow or drops in the middle of a lesson?
• Can teachers enter marks for a whole class on one screen?
• Does each person see only what their role needs, so the screens stay simple?
• Is training included, and is there someone to call in your language when a teacher is stuck?

Parents rarely see the inside of a school system, but they feel it. SMS when a child is absent, a receipt for every payment, results they can check online and a portal where they can see fees balances all build trust, and trust is what keeps families at your school and brings their neighbours.

Check whether messages go out under your school’s name, and who pays for SMS. Some suppliers resell SMS at a high mark-up; others let the school use its own SMS account, which is usually cheaper. WhatsApp is increasingly important, so ask whether the system can send through the school’s own WhatsApp Business number.

Your learners’ records are your school’s most sensitive asset, and under Uganda’s Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 the school is responsible for them. Ask plain questions and expect plain answers.

• Where is the data stored, and how often is it backed up? Are backups encrypted?
• Can you export all your learners, marks and payments to Excel at any time, without asking?
• Is every change logged, so you can see who changed a mark or a fee?
• What happens to your data if you stop using the system?
• Does the supplier have a written privacy policy you can show parents?

Prices in Uganda range from a few hundred thousand shillings a term to several million, and they are structured very differently: per learner, per module, flat per school, or a large set-up fee followed by a smaller yearly fee. Work out the total for one year for your school size, including set-up, training, SMS and any modules you will need in the second year.

Be careful of very low prices with long contracts, and of systems that charge separately for every small module. A termly plan you can stop at the end of any term keeps the supplier honest. Ask for a free trial with your own school’s data before you pay anything, and use it for a real week, not just a demonstration.

Score each system from 1 to 5 on these questions, with your head teacher, director of studies, bursar and one class teacher in the room. The system with the highest total that also solves your three problems is usually the right choice.

1. 1Does it follow our curriculum and produce our report card correctly?
2. 2Does mobile money go to our account and match learners automatically?
3. 3Could a teacher take a register and enter marks on a phone in under two minutes?
4. 4Will parents receive messages and receipts under our name?
5. 5Can we export everything, and is our data backed up and protected?
6. 6Is there local support we can call, and is training included?
7. 7What is the total cost for one year, and can we stop at the end of a term?

We built IWAT School Solutions in Kampala around this checklist: UNEB and CBC grading with positions, fees by MTN and Airtel mobile money into the school’s own account, registers that work offline on a phone, and SMS and WhatsApp from the school’s own accounts. Plans start at UGX 350,000 a term with no set-up fee, and you can try it free for 7 days with your own school. Whatever you choose, use the checklist: the right system is the one your school will still be using next year.