School Management Systems | IGCSE ICT

Schools have to manage many different sets of data:

• Pupil information (name, contact details, etc.)
• Staff information (name, bank details for pay, etc.)
• Timetable (rooms, times, subject, staff, classes, etc.)
• Pupil attainment (marks, grades, comments, etc.)
• Pupil behaviour (dates, incidents, notes, etc.)
• Administration data (letters, forms, etc.)
• Financial records (wages, fees, etc.)
• Exam entries (times, dates, pupils, results, etc.)

Rather than use lots of different systems to manage this information, many schools use a School Management System (sometimes called a School Information System, or SIS). This is a system that manages all of a school's data in a single, integrated application.

Having all of the information in a single system allows schools to more easily connect data together.

For example, when viewing a pupil's record, the user could follow a link to the pupil's class, and from there a link to the pupil's teacher, and from there a link to the teacher's other classes, and so on.

These connections between sets of data allow complex tasks to easily be performed such as:

• Sending letters to all parents of pupils who scored below 50% in their last English test
• Printing personalised timetables for IGCSE pupils (even though they have all chosen different options)
• Monitoring the progress of pupils in multiple subjects, over a number of years

As you can imagine, School Management Systems are pretty complex. Most systems are based on a complex relational database. The database contains many tables of data, each table having many records and many fields.

Pretty complicated, isn't it? And this would just be a small part of the overall School Management System database!

(Don't worry - you don't have to learn this diagram - it's just an example to show you that this is not a simple database!)