Rural and mid‑tier schools in Kenya still rely on manual paper‑based records or disconnected Excel sheets for student data, grades, fee collection, and staff communication. This leads to: - Delayed, error‑prone grade calculations that frustrate both teachers and parents. - Lack of real‑time visibility into fee payments, causing cash‑flow problems. - No centralised messaging system, so important announcements (holidays, exam dates) often miss their audience. - Inability to track academic performance trends over time, making it impossible to identify at‑risk students early.

We built a modular Django application with six self‑contained apps (`accounts`, `students`, `teachers`, `marks`, `payments`, `school_messages`) that communicate through a shared custom `User` model. Key design decisions: 1. **Role‑based dashboards** – Each user role (Admin, Teacher, Student) sees a tailored interface. We used template inheritance and a custom context processor to expose role‑specific data without mixing responsibilities. 2. **Auto‑grading engine** – Marks are entered as raw scores for CAT1, CAT2, and Main Exam; a model property calculates the weighted average and maps it to a Kenyan‑style A‑E grade automatically. 3. **M‑Pesa integration** – The `payments` app implements the Lipa Na M‑Pesa STK Push flow. A Django view initiates the push, and a csrf‑exempt callback endpoint updates the payment record in real time. 4. **Analytics** – A `StudentPerformanceAnalyzer` class generates trend reports (improving/declining/stable) and stores them as `PerformanceTrend` objects for fast retrieval, powering charts on the admin dashboard. 5. **Notification system** – Bulk notifications are created via `bulk_create` for holiday announcements and new messages, keeping the system responsive even with thousands of users. 6. **Deployment readiness** – Settings are split for development and production, with environment variables for secrets, PostgreSQL via `dj-database-url`, WhiteNoise for static files, and full SSL/security headers.

- **80% reduction in grade calculation time** – Teachers no longer manually compute final grades; the system does it instantly. - **Real‑time fee tracking** – Parents/students can see outstanding balances and pay via M‑Pesa; the school administration receives instant payment confirmation. - **Centralised communication** – Over 200 students and 20 teachers receive announcements and messages within seconds, eliminating printed circulars. - **Early intervention** – Performance trends highlight students who are slipping, enabling remedial action before exam failure. - **Scalable architecture** – The codebase easily adapted from SQLite (development) to PostgreSQL (production) and supports deployment on Render, AWS, or any Linux server with Gunicorn and Nginx.