Software success in class of its own

INSPIRED: The KAMAR team, with Kent Lendrum fifth from right.

Former Tauranga computer studies teacher Kent Lendrum has built a database originally created to help run his classes at Mount Maunganui College into a comprehensive student management system now used by about 300 schools from Kaitaia to Invercargill.

"We have about 75 per cent of the secondary schools market," said Mr Lendrum, who built the KAMAR system. "Although we do have a couple of intermediates and primary schools, we are focused on the secondary schools market, plus a few area schools (combining primary and secondary)."

KAMAR's biggest competitor is MUSAC, a system developed at Massey University.

According to the most recent Ministry of Education data online, for 2011, MUSAC had the biggest share overall of both primary and secondary schools, followed by eTap, Assembly/Schoolmaster and KAMAR.

However, MUSAC is seen by educators as being more suitable for smaller and primary schools.

Bruce Farthing, deputy principal at Otumoetai College, which started off with MUSAC almost two decades ago, said the college "outgrew MUSAC" so in 2000 adopted Integris, an international student management system. It eventually shifted to KAMAR in 2008. "Each of these programmes has very good features," he said, noting that the problem with Integris was that it was not widely adopted in New Zealand and so was poorly supported.

"By 2008, we were the only secondary school in the Bay not using KAMAR, so we moved to it. The situation now is that KAMAR has a total hold on the secondary schools market. In essence, competition is a choice between MUSAC and KAMAR, but the problem with MUSAC is that it doesn't handle big schools well and KAMAR does."

KAMAR's FileMaker-based school administration package manages all aspects of student administration, including student and caregiver details, attendance, health, ministry returns, staff details, student and class lists.

There are also subject, teacher and global mark-books for recording student results including NCEA, curriculum objectives and key competencies.

Reports can be linked with student results, awards and other achievements, and linked to produce student reports for emailing, printing or web uploads.

The system also has the capability of monitoring truancy.

Teachers mark the roll daily, then the school's attendance officer runs a filter to sort out students whose parents have reported their child will be away, leaving a list of unexplained absences.

The school can follow up manually, or arrange for the system to email or text parents directly.

Mr Lendrum began KAMAR with a simple system in 1999, then other teachers started using it and additional features were added.

Eventually, other schools began asking about it and the business began, initially part-time before taking off.