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

Attendance was taken on paper registers and typed up later, sometimes days afterwards. That delay undermined the group's duty to contact parents about unexplained absences on the same day, and with three campuses each working slightly differently, there was no consistent picture of attendance across the group. Gradual declines in an individual pupil's attendance were effectively invisible until they became serious.

Data protection was the dominant design constraint rather than a box to tick. The records concern minors, Dutch schools have faced public scrutiny over how pupil data is handled, and the group's internal review would reject any design that retained data indefinitely or let staff browse records across campuses without good reason. A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) was required, so residency, access and retention all had to be demonstrable.

Fee collection created a separate administrative burden. Dutch parents expect to pay by iDEAL, but the previous system only supported bank transfers, leaving a bookkeeper to match payments to pupils by hand every month. Overlaying all of this was an immovable deadline: the group wanted to begin the new academic year on the new platform, so the timeline was fixed regardless of scope.

PapaSiddhi built the platform with Next.js on the front end, a Node.js API and PostgreSQL, deployed in an EU region with data residency documented for the group's DPIA. Teachers mark registers on a tablet in the classroom, and the system automatically flags unexplained absences for same-day parent contact via integrated email and SMS gateways. Pattern detection over historical attendance highlights pupils whose attendance is quietly deteriorating, presented as a prompt for a pastoral conversation rather than an automated judgement about a child.

Privacy was engineered into the data model. Role-based access is scoped per campus by default, so a teacher at one site cannot view another site's pupil records without explicit permission, and retention rules are configured per record type and enforced by the system rather than left to policy documents. Fees are paid through iDEAL via Mollie, with incoming payments reconciled automatically against pupil accounts. The parent portal was deliberately kept narrow, covering attendance, fees and announcements only.

Migration ran campus by campus rather than as a single cutover. Each site operated paper registers and the new system in parallel for a fortnight, allowing staff to verify the platform before the paper process was retired. That phasing is what allowed the academic-year deadline to hold without a rushed final weekend.