Pennant School

Pennant keeps the school day in one place: notices, homework, attendance, marks, behaviour, term reports and fee accounts, for the parents, teachers and office of a South African school. Most schools already run on four things at once a class WhatsApp group nobody can leave, a paper diary that goes missing, a spreadsheet only one person can open, and a report that arrives three weeks after anything could have been done about it. Pennant is the same information, held once, and shown to each person only where it concerns them. FOR PARENTS AND GUARDIANS • See your own children, and nobody else's. • Notices from the school and a term calendar in one feed. • Homework, with what is due and roughly how long it should take. • Attendance, the same day it is taken. • Merits and demerits against the school's own conduct code. • Term reports, including a printable copy. • Fee statements and balances. • Message a teacher directly, without handing over your phone number. FOR TEACHERS • Take a class register in under a minute, present, absent, late or excused, with a note where one is needed. • Set homework and capture marks on the CAPS seven-point scale. • Log merits and demerits against your school's scale. • Post to a whole class at once. Every reply comes back privately to you, so parents never see each other. • Write report comments, and hand the report up for sign-off. FOR THE OFFICE • Enrolment, staff, classes and the school calendar. • Roles that mean something: a principal, a bursar, a class teacher and a receptionist do not need the same access, and in Pennant they do not have it. • Term reports move from subject teachers to the class teacher to the principal, then release. A released report is frozen; a correction is a numbered revision that says what changed. SET UP BEFORE THE FIRST BELL Register your school and the four South African school terms are already there, along with the CAPS subject list — 264 subjects across the phases, including the arts, the languages and the technical subjects that usually have to be typed in by hand. Add your classes, invite your staff, and hand each family a join code. BUILT FOR POPIA Your school is the responsible party for its learners' information and Pennant is its operator. Every read and write is checked on the server against rules that encode who may see what. A parent is linked only to their own children, and a join code names one child, expires, and cannot be used without a second fact only your family knows. A NOTE ON WHAT IT DOES NOT DO Pennant records what the school tells it about fees. It does not take payments, and it never sees a card or bank detail. You need a school account to use Pennant. If your school does not use it yet, we would be glad to talk to them.