Run the school
SmartSkool Offline-first school management that does not stop when the line does.
Built for pre-nursery, nursery, primary and secondary schools, government and private. This page answers the questions in the order you will probably ask them: what it does, what it runs on, what it costs, what you install, and what happens when something goes wrong.
One term free for a school, with no obligation — long enough to run a real results cycle. The offer is under "Try a term", below.
- 01 A whole school's results computed and printed the same day
- 02 Runs on your own machines; syncs only what you choose, when you choose
- 03 Parents and students follow results and events through Android and iOS apps
- 04 Fees, attendance, library, boarding and clubs stop living in separate books
- 05 Nursery through senior secondary in one installation
Who it is for: Pre-nursery, nursery, primary and secondary schools, government and private.
- Starfield College
- Doveland High School
- Spring Leaders Secondary School
- Computer Training School, NNS Quorra
- Edge Lane School
- BrookStone School
What it does
Every record the school keeps, on machines the school owns.
SmartSkool Suite 3 holds admissions, students, staff, attendance, fees, boarding, the library and results in one place, on machines in your own office. It was built for schools where the internet is a convenience rather than a guarantee — and where the people who need the records are the bursar, the registrar, the exams office and, through SmartSkool Online, parents. Long-standing customers knew it as CAMS, the Computerized Academic Management System; Suite 3 is that idea rebuilt for speed.
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Admissions
Take applications with whatever set of details you actually collect, decide on them, and turn an accepted applicant into a student record without typing anything twice.
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Results and report cards
Scores go in once. Positions, averages, grades and the printed report come out computed, for a class or for the whole school. Use the report card designs that ship with it, or build your own from the template placeholders when the board wants a particular layout.
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History that stays reachable
Any student, any term, any session — pulled up and reprinted years later without opening an archive box, and with transcripts generated rather than assembled.
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Fees, invoices and receipts
Bill by class or by student for school fees, books, boarding or transport, issue invoices and receipts, record part payments, and see who is outstanding before the term ends rather than after.
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Fingerprint attendance
Register by class for students, and staff attendance taken by fingerprint rather than a signing book, so lateness and absence are a report somebody can run at the end of term instead of a column nobody adds up. The reader is part of SmartSkool — there is no separate product to buy or integrate.
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Boarding
Create hostels, allocate students to spaces, bill boarding fees and report on who is where.
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The library
Know which books you have, who has borrowed what, and who is past their return date — with the alert arriving rather than being noticed.
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The bell, automated
Bell ringing is a twentieth-century job. The period manager runs the school day with custom sounds and alerts, so nobody has to watch a clock.
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Staff
Records for academic and non-academic staff, assignment to subjects and to form-teacher positions, and permissions that keep each user to the part of the system that is theirs.
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Clubs, houses and prefects
Run the parts of school life that are not lessons: clubs, sports houses, prefect positions and prefect elections — with medical information and emergency contacts held where somebody can find them in a hurry.
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Events, and parents who can see them
Create school events and activities and sync them online, where parents reach them — along with their child's results — through the SmartSkool Online apps for Android and iOS.
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Sits beside SmartExaminer
Both install on the Ratelsoft Applications Server, and on a SmartExaminer subscription the scores from a sitting arrive in SmartSkool by themselves — which is how a school generates result sheets the same day the exam was written.
The reasoning
How it holds up when you look closer.
The claims above, with the mechanism behind each one — the part a brochure leaves out and an ICT officer asks about first.
Why offline-first
Offline-first is not a fallback we added; it is the design. Four reasons, in the order schools tend to discover them.
- Speed. An online system goes back to the server for the smallest change. SmartSkool uses the machine in front of you, and because it is fully networkable, several people can enter data on several computers at once and still generate results at local speed.
- No internet, no problem. You know the feeling of being told "no network" at the bank. Enter the scores whenever you like; when a connection is there, one button syncs.
- Save data, save money. An online system loads images, fonts and scripts before it will let you type a number, and does it again on the next click. Offline-first sends the data and nothing else, once.
- It is your data. With a fully online system you are at the provider's mercy and your records are locked inside their service — and if they are breached, you are breached. Here, only what you choose goes online, encrypted, and the rest never leaves the building.
What comes in the suite
SmartSkool is a suite rather than a single program, and a deployment usually brings more than one product with it.
- SmartSkool itself, with staff management, the library, the automated period changer and the rest
- SmartSkool Online, including the Android and iOS apps parents and students use
- SmartExaminer, integrated, so exam scores land in SmartSkool ready for result generation
- SmartLearn mobile apps for exam-class students — JAMB, PUME, SSCE, JSCE and NCEE
Try a term
We give a school a full term free, with no obligation: SmartSkool, SmartSkool Online with the mobile apps, the SmartExaminer integration, updates and support. A term is long enough to run a real results cycle, which is the only honest way to evaluate a school system.
Say what you are running and how many people it has to serve, and we will answer from the software rather than from a slide.
The numbers
What it needs, what it weighs, what it covers.
So you can plan before you talk to us rather than after — the version, the size of the download and the machine it has to run on.
- Current version
- SmartSkool Suite 3 (3.0.6), 155 MB
- Requires
- Ratelsoft Applications Server 3 or above (3.0.2, 210 MB) — install it first
- Where it installs
- On as many machines as you like, but it must also be installed on the application server itself
- Platforms
- Windows, with Android and iOS apps and a web view for SmartSkool Online
- Upgrading from version 2
- Applications Server 3 is not compatible with version 2 or below. If SmartExaminer 2.x is on the same machine, back up and talk to us about migration before installing.
- Learning it
- Online documentation and a step-by-step tutorial playlist
- Range
- Pre-nursery and nursery through senior secondary, in one installation
When something goes wrong
Questions we get asked.
And the answers we give, in the words we would use on the phone. If yours is not here, it reaches a person.
01 Where is our data kept?
On your server, in your school. Only what you choose to sync goes online, and it is encrypted when it does. The records are yours, they export, and they are not locked into us.
02 Can more than one office use it at once?
Yes. The bursar, the registrar and the exams office work against the same server over the school network at the same time, each with permissions covering their own part of the system.
03 Can parents see results?
Through SmartSkool Online, yes — results, school events and activities, in apps for Android and iOS. Nothing reaches it that you have not chosen to sync.
04 We already run SmartExaminer. Does this replace it?
No, they are built to run together on the same applications server. On a SmartExaminer subscription the scores from a sitting arrive in SmartSkool automatically, so the exam and the report card stop being two separate jobs.
05 We are a university, not a secondary school.
Then SmartSkool is not the right fit as it stands — it is built for pre-nursery through senior secondary, and a faculty, department and semester structure is a different shape. Talk to us about what you need rather than buying this and bending it.
Say which product, which machine and what it said. Most questions are one of the ones here; the rest we would rather hear about before the day than on it.
Judge the software, not the slide
Download SmartSkool.
Then try it on your own machines.
Installers are free to download and a licence unlocks them. Tell us what you are running and how many people it has to serve, and we will say which licence fits — from the software, not from a brochure.
Or compare the whole family first.