School Management Platform for St. B****** Schools, NetherlandsCase Study

The starting position was three campuses each doing things slightly differently, with attendance recorded on paper registers and typed up later, sometimes days later. That lag mattered — the group had a duty to contact parents about unexplained absence and could not reliably do so the same day. Data protection was the dominant constraint rather than a checkbox: this is personal data about minors, in a jurisdiction where the supervisory authority is active and where Dutch institutions have been publicly scrutinised over how school systems handle pupil records. Any design that quietly retained data indefinitely or made records broadly visible across campuses was not going to pass their internal review. Payment was the other friction point. Dutch parents expect iDEAL, and the previous system only handled bank transfer reconciliation manually, which meant a bookkeeper matching payments to pupils by hand every month. There was also a hard deadline: the group wanted to start the new academic year on the new system, which fixed the timeline regardless of scope.

We built the platform on Next.js with a Node.js API and PostgreSQL, deployed in an EU region with data residency documented for the group's DPIA. Attendance capture was designed for the actual classroom situation rather than an idealised one — teachers mark a register on a tablet in under a minute, and the system flags unexplained absences for same-day parent contact automatically. We used pattern detection over historical attendance to surface pupils whose attendance is quietly deteriorating, which is a signal the paper process never produced; we were careful to present this as a prompt for a human conversation rather than an automated judgement about a child. Role-based access is scoped per campus by default, so a teacher at one site cannot browse another site's pupil records without explicit permission. Retention rules are configured per record type and enforced by the system rather than left to policy. Payment runs through iDEAL with automatic reconciliation against pupil accounts, which removed the monthly manual matching entirely. The parent portal is deliberately narrow — attendance, fees, announcements — because the group's previous system failed partly through trying to be everything. Migration ran campus by campus rather than as a single cutover, with each site running parallel for a fortnight so registers could be checked against the system before the paper process was retired. That phasing is why the academic-year deadline held without a rushed final weekend. Related: custom software development and our education sector work.