Answers
Questions Kenyan schools ask.
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Straight answers about running a Kenyan primary or junior school on Shule Yangu — what it does, what it costs, what it does not do, and what happens to your records. If your question is not here, write to info@relatax.org.
What is Shule Yangu?
Shule Yangu (“my school” in Kiswahili) is school management software for Kenyan primary and junior schools running the Competency-Based Curriculum. It covers learner records, CBC assessment and report cards, school fees and invoicing, M-Pesa and bank payments, and a parent portal. It is a product of RelaTax and runs in any browser — there is nothing to install on a school computer.
Does it do CBC report cards properly, or percentages with a CBC label?
Properly. Results are recorded as performance levels 1 to 4 — Below, Approaching, Meeting and Exceeding Expectation — against KICD learning areas, strands and sub-strands, with the core competencies and values the report card asks for. There is no percentage, and no class position unless a school turns it on, because CBC does not rank children. Marks pass through entry, moderation and release as three separate steps held by different people: a teacher cannot release results, and a release is recorded against the head who made it. KPSEA at Grade 6 and KJSEA at Grade 9 are handled.
How do parents pay school fees?
To the school’s own paybill, with the child’s admission number as the account reference — or to the school’s bank account with the same reference. The money goes straight to the school; it never passes through us, and we never hold a school’s float. Cash and cheques taken at the office are recorded by hand and land in the same ledger with the same numbered receipt. A parent can also press a button in the portal and have the M-Pesa prompt sent to their own phone, for whatever amount they choose — part payments are normal and the system does not refuse them.
Do parents need to download an app?
No. The parent portal is a web page that opens in any phone browser — a parent signs in with their phone number, or the child’s admission number, and a PIN. If they want it to behave like an app they can add it to the home screen in two taps, which also lets the school’s notices arrive as notifications. Nothing is compulsory, and there is no Play Store download to explain to three hundred families.
What does it cost?
Pricing is per learner per term, agreed in writing before anything starts. There is no setup fee, no charge for parent accounts, and no per-user licence to count. SMS and WhatsApp messages are charged through at cost by the network. Write to info@relatax.org and we will send your school’s figure the same day.
What happens when the internet goes down?
The parent portal keeps showing pages a parent has already opened. The school side needs a connection, because a school’s records live on a server rather than on one computer in the office — which is the same reason a stolen laptop or a dead hard disk costs the school nothing. Payments made to the paybill while the school is offline are recorded by Safaricom and appear against the right child when the connection returns.
Who can see a child's information?
Only staff at that child’s school, and only the parts their role allows. Rights are split on purpose: whoever sets a fee cannot collect it, whoever collects cannot waive it, and whoever enters a mark cannot release it. Medical and safeguarding notes sit behind their own permission and every single read of them is written to an audit log. A guardian sees only their own children; a guardian the school has restricted sees nothing at all. Two schools on the platform cannot see each other, and that is proved by a test that runs before every release.
Can a school get its own data out?
Yes — at any time, without asking us, and in a form other software can read. One button in Settings produces a zip of ordinary CSV files (learners, guardians, staff, enrolments, invoices, payments, marks, report cards) together with every invoice, receipt and report card as a PDF. NEMIS export is built in. A school that leaves takes everything with it; we do not hold records hostage, and the terms say so.
Does it handle siblings, bursaries and payment plans?
Yes. Siblings appear together under one parent login. A sibling discount, a staff-child rate or a bursary is configured as a rule for that school and applied when invoices are raised, with the reason recorded against the invoice rather than typed into a note. A term can be split into instalments, and arrears are then measured against the plan — so a family paying as agreed is never chased, which is the single most common complaint about fee software.
Can parents ask questions on WhatsApp?
Yes. A parent writes to the school’s WhatsApp number in their own words — English or Kiswahili — and gets an answer from the school’s own records: what a child owes, how to pay, their latest released results. Anything it should not decide — a payment plan, a waiver, a complaint — is handed to the office with the whole conversation attached, and the office answers from the same screen it answers every other message on. The assistant is given one family’s record by phone number and can ask for nothing else.
What does it not do?
It does not do timetabling, daily attendance registers, payroll or a library catalogue. It is built for PP1 to Grade 9 — primary and junior school — not for senior secondary or KCSE. If a school needs any of those today, it is better to know now than in the second term. We would rather lose a sale than fit a school badly.
How long does it take to set a school up?
The same day. Setting a school up creates its year, its terms, its classes and the full set of KICD learning areas automatically. Learners and fee structures come in from an ordinary spreadsheet with a fixed set of headings — every row is checked and shown to you before anything is written, so a bad column is a message rather than a mess to unpick. Most of a day is spent deciding who in the office gets which rights, which is the part worth slowing down for.
See it for yourself
The five-minute demo plays through a school’s day and a parent’s phone without anybody signing in. What a school keeps and why is on the privacy page, and what we promise in writing is in the terms.