Schools
For schools, where a child's year lives in a markbook, a mark must never be quietly changed, and at the end of every term somebody writes a report for every child in the class.
What we hear
A class's whole year in one fragile spreadsheet.
One bad paste or a copy saved over the original, and a term of marks is gone. Or worse, still there and silently wrong.
An absence typed in as a zero.
A missed test drags a child's term mark down, and nothing on the sheet says why.
Slips found at the end of term.
A mistyped mark only shows itself when the report looks wrong, weeks after it was entered.
Report comments written from scratch.
Thirty comments a class, every term, mostly in the evenings.
Next year's classes built on sticky notes.
Friendships, pairs to keep apart, bands and languages, juggled by hand.
Bhala, our markbook for primary schools
Bhala is a markbook platform we built for South African primary schools. A teacher picks a class, a subject and a term, and enters marks one assessment at a time. The term mark is worked out from weights that sit on the screen, not typed in by hand.
- Marks are append-only, and the database enforces it, so nothing is ever overwritten.
- An absence is never stored or shown as a zero.
- Beside each mark sits that pupil's previous result and the difference, so a slip shows while the teacher is still marking.
- Mark entry works offline.
- Each school's data is kept apart by the database itself, with row-level security.
Reports in the school's own words
Draft report comments are built only from sentences the school wrote itself, never generated. The screen says plainly what may never go into a draft: sensitive records, the ability bands the sentences are chosen with, and private staff notes. A class view shows patterns, such as the strands a class is weakest in, without diagnosing a child; what to do next stays the teacher's judgement.
For next year, a class builder collects friend choices, pairs to keep apart, bands and languages before anything is sorted, and a slip goes home to parents so the friend choices come from the children.
Where it stands
Bhala is finished and working, with 836 tests passing. It has not yet been set up for a school, so there is no school to name here yet. If yours would like to be the first, or needs something like it built around the way you already mark, talk to us.
The work behind this page
How we usually help
Tell us the job that still gets done by hand. We will tell you on the first call whether it is worth building.