Twenty years of software for a primary school
Pupil assessment tracking linked to the school's management system, a tablet Hebrew reading assessment, and for many years the finance office's contributions system.
- 20 yearsworking with the school
- 4school management systems connected
- 6paper assessments moved to tablets
The client
A state-funded Jewish primary school.
The challenge
Pupil details lived in the school's management system, test results in spreadsheets and family payments somewhere else again, and staff were typing the same names into all of them.
Tracking pupils' progress
The assessment system has been in daily use since 2014:
- Subjects broken down into areas and topics, with test papers built from them and set for a year group or class
- Marks entered topic by topic, and turned into the grade bands the school reports against, such as "working towards"
- Results by pupil, class, year group, teaching group and special-needs group, with a check for pupils not yet put in a group
- Key Stage results, each pupil's results by topic, and reports for teachers and for each year, as printable PDFs
- Timed reading checks that measure words per minute against a target for each year, shown on a graph in the pupil's report
A Hebrew reading assessment on tablets
In 2026 we replaced the school's six paper Hebrew reading assessments, covering letters, vowels, blends, syllables and reading rules from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2, with a tablet app. Teachers mark with a touch as the child reads, can undo a slip, and are warned before leaving unsaved work. Results feed straight into the pupil's record, and each child gets a printable practice sheet of just the items they found hard.
Keeping up as systems change
Pupil and class lists come straight from the school's management system, so nothing is typed twice. The school has changed that system more than once: we started with file imports from SIMS in 2014, moved to ScholarPack in 2016 and to its online connection in 2022, and to Arbor in 2025. Each time, staff carried on as normal, and one pupil's problem record no longer holds up everyone else's.
Running the finance office
From 2006 until it was retired a few years ago, a separate desktop system ran families' voluntary contributions:
- Families and their children, with contribution rates by section of the school, special rates and sibling rules
- Payments, standing orders, corrections and write-offs with recorded reasons
- Donations, receipts and charity vouchers, with the voucher agencies recorded
- Gift Aid worked out and ready to go into the HMRC claim
- Statements on their own or in batches, emailed in bulk, from templates the office could edit
- Debtor reports, a report of families not meeting the contribution level, and financial reports, exportable to Excel
The result
The assessment system is still in daily use and still being developed, twelve years and three management systems on.
Technical details
The assessment system is an ASP.NET MVC web application in VB.NET with Entity Framework and SQL Server. Pupil data has come in turn from a SIMS file importer pushing to a WCF sync service, ScholarPack's file import and then its OAuth API, and Arbor's GraphQL API, with fault tolerance for individual pupils. PDFs are generated with Syncfusion; an upgrade to .NET 10 and C# is planned.
The contributions system was a VB.NET Windows Forms application on LINQ to SQL, built on our own shared libraries, with TX Text Control document templates, bulk statement emails, Excel, CSV and TSV exports, and imports from SIMS, ScholarPack and Bromcom.
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