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Kestrel

The student record an Australian school runs on.

Admissions, the family record, attendance and health, safeguarding, and the statutory returns. Each of them is recorded once against the student, by the people already doing the work, and held to the standards your school is audited against.

Talk to us about your school What the record holds
Year 9 rollWeeks 3 and 4
Two weeks of attendance for seven Year 9 students, by admission number. Each row shows ten marks, Monday to Friday, and the attendance rate derived from them. Student 24-0658 was present for the first week and absent for four days of the second.
Student MTWTFMTWTFRate
24-0817A.M.PresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresent100%
24-0412J.R.PresentPresentPresentLatePresentPresentPresentPresentLatePresent100%
24-0933S.K.PresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresent100%
24-0658T.N.PresentPresentPresentPresentPresentAbsentAbsentPresentAbsentPresent70%
24-0125M.O.PresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentLatePresentPresentPresent100%
24-0741K.D.PresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentAbsentPresent90%
24-0596R.W.PresentPresentLatePresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresentPresent100%
Present Late Absent The rate is derived, and the codes behind it are your school's own.

Admissions belongs on the student's own record

Most schools run an enquiry through a separate CRM, then re-key the family into the student system on acceptance. The enquiry and the student are the same person, so Kestrel keeps them on one record from first contact.

  • Enquiry capture, expressions of interest and online application forms
  • Tour, event and interview scheduling with the outcome recorded
  • Entrance assessments and scholarship applications
  • A waitlist held as a ranking, so an offer goes to the right family
  • Offers, acceptance, and re-enrolment at the end of each year
  • A portal for parents and for agents acting on their behalf
An established Australian school in red brick, with a verandah along its length, gum trees and an empty line-marked quadrangle.
The first visit is where the record starts.

Families in the shapes they come in

Separated parents, two households, a grandparent with care, a court order limiting who may be told what. Each school office deals with this weekly, and most systems handle it with a free-text note.

  • Households and addresses, with a student able to belong to more than one
  • Kinship and standing held apart, so the system knows who may act for a student
  • Court orders and the protected record, checked by each path that sends anything
  • Fee responsibility split by percentage, with concessions and scholarship flags
  • Multi-campus and multi-school families kept together
  • Information routed to each guardian in turn
The front counter of an Australian school office, with a jug of native flowers, a brochure stand and a staff member working behind it.
The counter is where a school finds out a family has two households.

Know where each student is, and what they need

Attendance and health are one question on the day it matters. A roll that is marked, a condition that is flagged, and a list of who is on site that is correct when somebody asks for it.

  • Per-lesson roll marking against the absence codes your school has agreed
  • Part-day handling, the two-hour rule and attendance rate derivation
  • Unexplained-absence follow-up and roll-completion chasing
  • Kiosk sign in and out, and an evacuation list built from live attendance
  • A conditions register with action plans and their review dates
  • A medication register and administration log, and sick-bay case notes
A school health centre with a made bed, a labelled cabinet of supplies and a wall-mounted first aid station.
Whoever is in the sick bay needs the conditions register open in front of them.

Safeguarding records that meet the standards

Child Safe Standards, reportable conduct schemes and the retention floors that come with them are the obligations your school is audited against. No student system on the Australian market names them. Kestrel is built to them.

  • Incident and observation logging, with escalation and notification routing
  • Child-safety and mandatory reporting records, with the reporting clock on them
  • Counselling case notes under their own confidentiality tier
  • Retention set to the floor your state requires
  • Individual plans and the NCCD register
  • An audit trail on the record, including who overrode what and why
A quiet pastoral care room with two pale armchairs, a low table holding tissues and a glass of water, and a window onto gum trees.
What is said in this room is held under its own confidentiality tier.

The statutory returns come out of the record

The census sets your funding and the returns are due whether or not the data lines up. When attendance, enrolment and disability adjustment are recorded once against the student, the return is a read of the record.

  • The non-government schools census
  • The Address Collection notice that sets recurrent funding
  • NCCD census fields, drawn from the adjustments already recorded
  • STATS attendance XML and the NAPLAN roster export
  • Senior-secondary board submission in your state's format
  • PRISMS fields for international students, and substantiation packs
Three school staff standing over a desk of files and printouts, in an office window looking onto a garden.
Census week is three people, a deadline, and whatever the system will give them.

Built in Australia, for the rules Australian schools are held to.

Kestrel is written and hosted here, against the state and federal obligations your school is audited on, by people you can reach in your own working day.

The parts we have decided not to build

A student system holds the records of children, so some capabilities are worth refusing even when a school asks for them. These decisions are settled, so a school that asks for one of them is told no.

Declined outright

  • Facial recognition sign-in

    Biometric capture of children, for a convenience a card already provides.

  • Live location tracking of staff and students

    Knowing who is on site is what a school needs.

  • Movement tracking between areas of the school

    Sign in and sign out happen at the level of the whole school.

The Children's Online Privacy Code binds the vendor directly from 10 December 2026 and covers school management systems. Kestrel is being built to it now.

Handed to your finance system

  • Kestrel owns the billing data

    Family and fee-payer structures, split percentages between separated parents, sibling links and discounts, scholarship flags, and the enrolment events that trigger a charge.

  • Your finance system owns the ledger

    The general ledger, chart of accounts, accounts payable and payroll stay where your accountant already works. Kestrel hands the charges over.

A student system that grows a general ledger ends up worse at both. The billing data belongs on the family record, and the accounting belongs in an accounting package.

The questions procurement asks after the demo

A student system is judged on the things a sales page usually leaves out. Here are ours, written so you can check them.

Passwordless sign-in

Staff sign in with a passkey on a device they already unlock, with an emailed code as the fallback. There is no password for a school to reuse, write down, or have phished.

Each school in its own schema

A school's records sit in a database schema of their own, reached by a role of their own. The database itself keeps schools apart, so isolation never depends on someone remembering to write a condition into a query.

Built and hosted in Australia

The application, the database and the backups are in Australia, run by an Australian company. Support comes from the people who wrote the code.

An API you can read before you buy

The integration API is documented by an OpenAPI description generated from the endpoints themselves, so the reference and the running system stay in step.

Working to ST4S Tier 1

Kestrel is being built against the Safer Technologies 4 Schools Tier 1 requirements. The gap analysis is tracked as ordinary work on our board, and we will show it to you.

Ready for the Children's Online Privacy Code

The Code binds vendors directly from 10 December 2026 and its draft covers school management systems. The decisions it forces have already been made here.

The detail behind each of these is published with the product, where it is checked against the code it describes: the security posture, naming everyone outside the company who touches a school's data and what reaches them, and the Privacy Policy. Both are readable without an account and without asking us first.

Bring us your hardest question

We build the walkthrough around your school's own questions. Tell us what your current system cannot answer, and we will show you what the record does with it.

Book a walkthrough hello@kestrel.seraco.io