EduKZN · Durban, KwaZulu-Natal

KwaZulu-Natal · South Africa

The academic operating system for schools that refuse to run on paper.

EduKZN unifies enrolments, attendance, billing, transport, boarding, academics and staff into one intelligent platform — then wraps it in a school website that parents actually enjoy using.

  • 10core modules on one login
  • 1data spine, no double entry
  • 0spreadsheets required
  • POPIAcompliance by design
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01 — Why schools switch

Schools don’t struggle from a lack of effort. They struggle from a lack of one source of truth.

Where most schools are

  • A register book, three spreadsheets and a WhatsApp group that disagree with each other
  • Fee queries answered by searching bank statements by hand
  • Report cards typed twice: once by the teacher, once by the admin office
  • Transport lists rebuilt every term, from memory
  • Parents phoning the office for information you already have

Where EduKZN puts you

  • One learner record that every module reads from and writes to
  • Fee statements reconciled automatically, ageing to the day
  • Marks captured once, report cards generated in a click
  • Routes, stops and boarding check-ins live on the driver’s phone
  • Parents self-serve on the portal, so your office stops repeating itself

Minutes, not evenings

Daily admin that used to consume an afternoon — registers, receipts, absence follow-ups — collapses into a handful of taps.

One record, ten surfaces

Capture once in any module and it appears everywhere it should, from the parent portal to the district return.

Insight before it becomes a crisis

Attendance dips, fee arrears and subject underperformance surface on a dashboard weeks before they reach a meeting.

02 — The platform

Ten modules.
One login. Zero double entry.

Every module shares the same learner, guardian and staff records, so nothing is captured twice and nothing falls between systems. Start with the modules you need today and switch the others on when you are ready.

SITE / ENROLMENTS Asset slot — ready for your media Module 01

Your front door, wired to your back office

Website & Enrolments

A fast, mobile-first school website with an online application form that writes straight into your enrolment pipeline. No PDFs, no re-typing, no lost paperwork.

  • Public site with news, galleries, staff profiles and downloadable policies
  • Multi-step application form with document upload and sibling linking
  • Automatic acknowledgement emails and application reference numbers
  • Enrolment funnel: enquiry → application → interview → accepted → enrolled
  • Waitlist and capacity control per grade
  • Public site
  • Applications
  • Pipeline
  • Waitlists
01 / 10

03 — Parent portal

The information parents want, before they phone you for it.

One secure login per guardian, every child in the family, on a mid-range Android phone over a 3G signal. Marks, attendance, statements, reports, consent forms and announcements — without a single call to the office.

  • Live fee balance with downloadable statements and payment history
  • Term marks, attendance summaries and report cards the moment you publish them
  • Direct messaging to the class teacher and the admin office, all logged
  • Permission slips, consent forms and event RSVPs signed on the phone
Request portal access Demo credentials supplied during your walkthrough

Interface illustration — exact layout configured to your school’s branding.

04 — On the ground

Built for the school you already run.

From a 180-learner farm school outside Greytown to a 1 600-learner campus with four boarding houses. Drop your own photography into these slots once the design is signed off.

05 — Reporting

Signals, not spreadsheets.

Every register, invoice and mark writes to the same analytical layer. Choose a window, and the trends re-draw instantly — the same view your grade heads, bursar and governing body can open for themselves.

Attendance rate

Whole school · Rolling 12 months

62% J 68% F 71% M 66% A 74% M 79% J 83% J 81% A 86% S 89% O 91% N 94% D
74% May 79% Jun 83% Jul 81% Aug 86% Sep 89% Oct
86% W1 88% W2 84% W3 89% W4
91% Mon 93% Tue 88% Wed 94% Thu 92% Fri

Illustrative interface data. Live figures come from your own registers.

Grade 9 — term overview

Attendance, average and fee status per class

Class level summary with expandable learner detail
Class Attendance Average Fees Detail
Grade 9A 97% 72% Settled
Grade 9B 96% 68% Settled
Grade 9C 89% 61% Arrears
Grade 9D 94% 65% Settled
Grade 9E 82% 58% Escalated

Report cards in a click

Weighted term calculations, levels, symbols, comments and signature lines — generated per learner or for a whole grade, then published to the portal.

Financial position, live

Ageing buckets, collection rates per grade, outstanding transport and boarding fees, and a debtor ledger ready for your accountant.

Compliance evidence

Attendance returns, staff SACE validity, vehicle documents and consent records — all exportable when a district or auditor asks.

06 — Mobility

Transport you can prove.

Routes, stops and seat allocation live in the platform. Drivers check learners on and off from their phone, and guardians get a notification when the bus leaves and when it is two stops away.

  • Route planner with capacity, stops and pick-up windows
  • Timestamped boarding register per trip, per stop
  • Vehicle, licence and roadworthy expiry alerts
  • Transport fees billed alongside school fees
TRANSPORT / ROUTE-MAP Asset slot — ready for your media
Route and boarding overview

07 — Boarding

A hostel that runs itself.

Houses, rooms, beds and boarders. Nightly roll call you can audit, weekend leave with guardian approval, matron notes and medication records — all in one place.

  • Bed-level occupancy maps per house and room
  • Digital sign-in and sign-out with audit trail
  • Exeat and weekend leave approval workflow
  • Sick bay, medication and incident log for matrons
BOARDING / ROLL-CALL Asset slot — ready for your media
House roll call and occupancy

08 — Onboarding

From first call to first register in four steps.

You keep running your school the way you do today while we configure alongside you. Nothing switches over until your data reconciles and your staff are comfortable.

  1. 01

    Discovery

    A 45-minute call with your head, bursar or SGB. We map your current registers, fee structure and reporting obligations — and show you exactly which steps the platform removes.

  2. 02

    Configuration

    We configure grades, classes, subjects, fee bands, staff roles and permissions against your real data. You review it in a sandbox before anything goes live.

  3. 03

    Migration & training

    Learners, guardians, staff and balances are migrated and reconciled to a control count. Admin staff and teachers get hands-on training; parents get a one-page onboarding SMS.

  4. 04

    Go live & support

    You go live with an assigned implementation lead for the first term, then move to ongoing support with a named contact and documented response times.

09 — Deployment

Run it hosted, or run it on your own hosting.

EduKZN ships as a standard PHP application. That means it runs happily on the shared Linux hosting many schools already pay for — or in our managed South African cloud, if you would rather not think about servers at all.

Entry package

School Starter

R399/ month

Suggested setup fee: R1,350 once-off

  • Template-based, mobile-friendly website
  • School subdomain
  • Home, About, Staff, Admissions, Contact and other standard pages
  • News and announcements
  • School calendar and document downloads
  • School administrator login and content editing
  • Standard technical support

Excludes custom design, school visits, mailbox fees and extensive content updates.

Book a walkthrough
Recommended

School Professional

R699/ month

Suggested setup fee: R2,500 once-off

  • Everything in Starter
  • Customised school branding and page layouts
  • Registered custom domain connection
  • Staff profiles, galleries and expanded document management
  • More extensive calendar and announcement management
  • Up to 1 hour of routine content assistance per month
  • Priority remote support

Domain registration, professional mailboxes and extra work charged separately unless explicitly included in the quote.

Book a walkthrough
Custom quote

School Enterprise

R15,750+once-off implementation

Suggested management fee: R1,499+ / month

  • Bespoke website and agreed portal functionality
  • Advanced user roles and permissions
  • Admissions application workflows
  • Optional parent/student portal development
  • Integrations quoted according to scope
  • Defined maintenance, backups and technical support

The implementation fee covers agreed development deliverables, not unlimited development or permanent support.

Request a proposal

Hosting requirements: PHP 7.1 or newer, MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10+, and Apache with .htaccess overrides enabled. A hardened .htaccess baseline ship with every install, including security headers, directory-listing protection and cache rules. No build step, no Node, no cron dependency for the core platform.

10 — Security & compliance

You are holding children’s data. We treat it that way.

Access is granted, never assumed. Every action is logged, every field has a purpose, and every parent can see exactly what the school holds about their child.

POPIA by design

Consent capture, purpose limitation, retention schedules and breach workflow built into the data model — not added later.

Encrypted in transit

TLS everywhere, HSTS enforced, and password hashing with modern adaptive algorithms. No plain-text credentials, ever.

Role-based access

Permissions resolve down to module, grade and class. A teacher sees their learners; a bursar sees the ledger; neither sees the other.

Immutable audit trail

Every record viewed, created, changed, exported or deleted is logged with the actor, timestamp and source address.

Daily encrypted backups

Automated snapshots with a 30-day restore window, and a documented disaster recovery drill run every term.

Local data residency

South African data centres by default, with a self-hosted option when your governing body requires it.

POPIA-aligned processing TLS 1.2+ with HSTS Audit trail on every record South African data residency Role-based least privilege

11 — Questions

Answers before the committee meeting.

Still unsure about something specific to your school? Ask us directly — we would rather answer the difficult question now than surprise you later.

Ask a question
How long does it take to get a school live on EduKZN?

Most single-campus schools are running within two to four weeks. Week one covers configuration — grades, classes, fee structures, staff roles and your existing learner data. Week two is training for admin and teaching staff, plus parent onboarding. Larger multi-campus or boarding schools typically need a further two weeks for data migration and hostel setup.

We already have a school website. Do we have to replace it?

No. You can run EduKZN behind your existing site and simply embed the enrolment form, parent portal and news feed. If you would rather consolidate, we can rebuild your public site inside EduKZN with your branding, and redirect your old URLs so you keep your search rankings.

What happens to our existing data?

We migrate learners, guardians, staff, fee histories and academic records from spreadsheets or your current system. Every migration is validated against a control count before go-live, and we keep your source files untouched so there is always a rollback path.

Does it work on the phones our parents actually own?

Yes. The parent portal is built mobile-first and tested on mid-range Android devices over 3G. Pages are lightweight by design, and the driver and teacher apps tolerate intermittent connectivity by queuing entries until the signal returns.

Where is our school data stored, and who can see it?

Data is hosted in South African data centres by default, with a self-hosted option if your governing body requires on-premises storage. Access is role-based down to grade and class level, every record change is written to an audit log, and no learner data is ever shared with third parties or used for advertising.

How does EduKZN handle POPIA compliance?

POPIA is built into the platform rather than bolted on: consent capture for guardians, purpose limitation per data field, retention schedules, breach notification workflow, and data subject access and deletion requests handled from the admin console. Our privacy notice and PAIA summary are published in the footer.

Can we export everything if we decide to leave?

Always. You can export learners, guardians, attendance, marks, financial ledgers and documents in open CSV and PDF formats from the admin console at any time. There is no lock-in clause and no exit fee for taking your own data.

Can EduKZN run on our existing shared Linux hosting?

Yes. EduKZN is built to deploy on standard shared Linux hosting running PHP 7.1 or newer with MySQL, and the included .htaccess hardening works on cPanel-style hosts out of the box. If you prefer a fully managed environment we can host it for you.

12 — Talk to us

Book a walkthrough with your own data.

Tell us a little about your school. We will come back within one working day with a proposed walkthrough time and a short list of the modules that will save you the most admin, most immediately.

  • 45 minutes Screen-share with a solution consultant, no obligation.
  • Your workflow We map it against the platform live, so the gaps are obvious.
  • Your data stays yours We never demo with another school’s records.
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