A secondary school teacher, when asked what she hated most about her job, said it was not the pay (she’d made peace with that). It was not the stubbornness of the students or their noise either (kids will and should be kids after all, she said). No. What she hated most about her job was the time spent on the non-teaching duties. She wished she spent less time doing mostly repetitive paperwork and more time engaging with the students.

Administering a school requires a lot of hard work and paperwork. Take student administration, for example. Up-to-the-minute details about a student are necessary and required by various departments and also for appropriate feedback to the guardian. From class attendance to assessment scores to behavioural evaluations, it is imperative that all details of a student be accurate and presented without error and bias. Staff administration, finance management, calendar and timetable scheduling, asset management. Teachers and other administrative staff have been tirelessly collating this data by hand for years and, for teachers especially, this is time-consuming and errors are costly.

It behoves the school, therefore, to implement a system of administration that is not only time-saving, but efficient and cost-effective. Certain software solutions have arose with grandiose claims of meeting all school administration needs, but on implementation and close inspection by the schools, they are found to be nothing but exam processing software. The school bears the cost of this falsehood; a cost paid in time and cash.

When choosing a software service for school administration, consequently, it becomes important to ensure it meets several paramount features pertinent to comprehensive oversight of the school. Among these features are:

1. Comprehensive student and staff data management
2. Academics and assessment management
3. Interfacing between staff and students’ guardians
4. Fees and transaction management
5. Notifications via mail or SMS (or both)
6. Employee management and salary
7. Calendar and schedule management

While parts of the curricula of the Nigerian education system have been widely derided for being outdated, redundant and generally moribund, little has been said of the need to modernize the administrative tasks in which teachers and other staff of a school find themselves investing precious man hours. The tools available for the extracurricular duties of the teacher and the school administrators are as important as those for teaching and learning.