Mbizo high school integrated administration system

Abstract

The idea of developing Mbizo high school integrated administration system was hatched due to the lack of a suitable IT based solution to administrative processes of schools classified in class B. Many school administration systems available off-the-shelf are not fit for most of the school in Zimbabwe and study have shown that they are prematurely abandoned due to their unsustainability. The new system is tailor made to suite well in environments of class B school like Mbizo high school. The integrated school administration system uses web based technology to support admission of students and profiling, fees payments, staff attendance and eLearning. PHP was used as a server scripting language, HTML was used for client scripting and MySQL was used for databases. The system integrates all this modules through the use of one main database. Data was gathered though the review of documents, questionnaires and interviews. These data gathering techniques where instrumental in trying to understand the old system and the formulation of requirements for a new system. A comprehensive feasibility study was carried out, testing if the system was worth doing of which the system proved to be worth developing. After the formulation of functional and non-functional requirements, working designs of the system where formulated and implemented. Parallel changeover was used as strategy to migrate from the old system to the new system as it protects against data loss in an event of a new system failure. The newly developed Mbizo high school integrated school administration system can be improved as further developments can focus on extending modules to add functions left on the initial system. The development and implementation of the system was a success.