ABSTRACT
The system will aid school proprietors, teachers, bursar and general administrative arm of schools to effectively manage students and other stakeholders of the school. The need to have a computerized system that will meet the growing needs of our primary and secondary schools is now critical for the success and growth of the educational institutions. The system will aid in recording results of students, keep accurate track record of all students and teachers information as well as give detailed information on students accounts and fees status. The system is divided into three (3) major phases. One phase is for the principal or proprietor who will serve as the admin to oversee the general running of the school as well as granting privileges and creation of accounts for teachers as well as student registration and information updates. The second phase is for the teachers who enter day-to-day running of the school. The teachers once granted access updates students’ academic records, as well as print report cards. The third stage is for the administrator or the bursar. Here the bursar manages accounts for each student. The system is built with PHP and MYSQL programming language to suit the ever dynamic needs of a school environment.  Information System

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Nowadays education plays a great role in development of any country. Many of education organizations try to increase education quality. One of the aspects of this improvement is managing of school resources (Fulmer, 1995).

With growth of internet many of education organizations perform management of education resources online. However, the sites developed by those organizations support a few languages and have to be redesigned in case new languages are required to be added or interface of the entire site is required to be changed. The redesigning process takes a long time since thousand lines of code should be rewritten or modified (Bernhardt, 2002).

Taking all these disadvantages into account the system that manages school resources and supports multi languages and whose interface can be changed without rewriting all the code can be designed. To meet all requirements the system also can run on different platforms. All of those aspects of the system can be achieved by using XML. However XML is a simple text format that should be transformed to html format. To perform this transform XSL should be used. In addition the system can be designed in such a way that it runs for a single school or for different schools. The single school implementation can be achieved using the PHP technology. However, the implementation for different schools can be server the messages are sent using Simple Object Access Protocol.

Based on this assumptions and facts the system capable of working on different platforms and supporting multi language was designed. The implemented system takes advantages from XML technology (Corbett et al, 1987). Hence, making easier to change view of entire system by performing XSL transformation of XML interfaces into HTML pages. The multi language support is achieved by storing words, which are used in the system, in the database. The implementation of the system was done using PHP and Web Services technologies, allowing system to be run locally or in distributed mode. When the system works in distributed mode the system’s one part namely server handles requests obtained from client via Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1 and sends respond messages if needed via SOAP 1.1.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

To help promote students achievement and success, schools must have access to complete, accurate, and timely information about students. One of the benefits of automated School Management System is that the student record system will simplify retrieval of required information and is a great instrument for school improvement by taking measures from the information acquired (Cooper et al 1996). Despite the use of automated SMS, the government schools in Nigeria are using paper based documentation system for performing various tasks and the school administrators apply their knowledge of hit and miss approach in scheduling classes and courses (preparing the timetable) which wastes manpower and much time unnecessarily that does not utilize the current technology.

Transcripts of students are prepared manually by the record officer and teachers. Report cards are produced by the home-room teachers. Attendance of students is recorded by the home-room teachers. In order to control absentees and know the number of days that a student has been absent from the school during the school days the attendance officer has to collect the attendance slips from the corresponding homeroom teachers and compile it which is also a time taking process. In addition to that retrieving records of students who have graduated couple of years ago has been a difficult task and the manual system also has difficulty of producing different reports which are required by the stakeholders such as teachers, administrators or officials. School Management

Teachers may want to associate a student with his parent or emergency persons for disciplinary measures which need searching of the students record in the record office. It has been difficult to search a record from thousands of such records and observed that students can take any person claiming that he/she is their parent or emergency person which creates problem in control of students. School Management

Due to the inefficiency of the current manual system, the need arises to automate School Management System in order to efficiently handle students’ attendance, to produce transcript, report cards and the various reports satisfying users and customers and to produce timetable which can schedule courses for teachers and classes of students (Bober, 2001) . School Management

1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The main aim of the study is design and implements a school management system. Specific objectives of the study are:

1. To design and implement a secure school management system for registration and admission of students.
2. To design and implement a school management system that will keep track of student information such as school fees and results.
3. To design and implement a school management system that will be user friendly for school proprietors to effectively manage resources of the school.

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The use of School Management System has the significance effect and this can be enumerated as follows:

• To help the school to know the pedigree of all the student admitted into the school.
• To create a storage of large volume of data on school records.
• To assist the school management for easily identification of students.
• To prevents students to involve themselves any havoc happening in the school because of the fear tracking them.

 1.5   SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This project is aimed at how the institute can improve the efficiency of the services. School Management System is one the application involves almost all the features of the information system? The futures implementation will be online help for users to obtain information.

1.6   ORGANIZATION OF THE RESEARCH

This project is divided into five chapter one gives a generation introduction, theoretical background, statement of the problem, aim and objective (s) of the study, significance of the study, scope of the study, organization of the research and definition of the terms.

Chapter two handles introduction, literature review highlighting basic concepts.

Chapter three is deals with system design that handles introduction, research methodology, input/output format, program flowchart.

Chapter four is the system implementation and evaluation phases that handle system design flowchart, choice of programming language, analysis of the modules and implementation.

Chapter five handles introduction, summary, conclusion and recommendation of the research.

• DEFINITION OF TERMS

School Management System: An information system for managing students and teachers resources in a school.

Tracking System: It is used for the observing of persons or objects on the more and supplying a timely ordered sequence of respective location data to a model e.g. capable to serve for depicting the motion on a display capability.

Student: A person studying at a university other place of higher education.

Student Information: Is a student-level data collection system that allows the department to collect and analyze more accurate and comprehensive information.

Student: An institution for educating children or any institution at which institution is given in a particular discipline.

REFERENCES

Armel, D.  (1997, June).  Achieving continuous improvement:  Theories that support a systems change.  Paper presented at the Association of Small Computer Users in Education Conference, North Myrtle Beach, SC.

Bernhardt, V.  (2002).  The school portfolio toolkit: A planning, implementation and evaluation guide for continuous school improvement.  Larchmont, NY:  Eye on Education Inc.

Bober, M.  (2001).  School information systems and their effect on school operations and culture.  Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 33(5), 1-11.

Cooper, J., Gencturk, N., & Lindley, R.  (1996).  A sociotechnical approach

to smart card systems design: An Australian case study.  Behaviour&  Information Technology, 15(1), 3-13.

Corbett, H., Firestone, W., &Rossman, G. (1987).  Resistance to planned change and the sacred in school cultures.  EducationalAdministration Quarterly, 23 (4), 36-59.

Fulmer, C. (1995).  Maximizing the potential of information technology for management:  Strategies for interfacing the technical core of education.  In B. Barta, M. Telem, and Y. Gev (Eds.), InformationTechnology in Educational Management (pp 1-8). London: Chapman and Hall.