Cambridge SMS

A Cambridge-curriculum school, like any institution, runs on a tangle of spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups and paper registers. Pupils’ grades live in one place; their attendance lives in another; their fee balance is known only to the bursar; the parent finds out about Friday’s field trip from a forwarded message. The brief was to replace that tangle with one calm system — without inventing a new vocabulary or asking the staff to learn one.

We modelled the school the way the school models itself. Term I, Term II, Mid-Term, End-Term — the same words a teacher writes at the top of an exam paper. Years 7 to 11 organised by stage (Lower Secondary, IGCSE). Roles that match the staff handbook: head, teacher, parent, pupil.

From there: four portals, one database, row-level security at the table. A parent can never read another family’s record, because the database won’t serve it — not because the screen happens to hide it. A teacher can mark today’s register with one tap, but cannot edit a class they don’t teach. The head sees everything. The pupil sees themselves.

The demo runs with a realistic small school: 121 pupils across 8 classes, 12 teaching staff, 90 days of attendance, 9,168 individual grade entries. Four demo accounts — admin, teacher, parent, pupil — let prospective heads click through their actual day in fifteen minutes.

Next: the Flutter mobile companion (same Supabase project, same row-level security), n8n workflows for fee reminders and absence alerts, and a real payment gateway for term-fee collection.