Self-Hosting for Small Schools: Records, Communication, LMS

Small schools, tuition centres, and training providers face the same software needs as large institutions but without the budget. A self-hosted stack provides student information management, communication, and learning resources at fixed, predictable costs.

The Stack

• Student information system: OpenEMR customised for school use (student demographics, attendance, grades). Alternatively, a customised EspoCRM with student-specific fields. No dedicated open-source SIS exists that is as mature as Moodle is for LMS, so a CRM with custom fields is the pragmatic solution.
• Learning management: Moodle for course delivery, assignments, quizzes, and grading. The most widely used LMS in the world, free and open-source, deployed on your server.
• Communication: Mattermost for staff communication. WhatsApp for parent communication is the practical reality, but Mattermost can be used for formal announcements that need to be documented.
• File storage and sharing: Nextcloud for sharing lesson plans, teaching materials, and administrative documents among staff. Shared folders per department and per grade level.
• Website: WordPress for the school website with news, events calendar, and admission information.
• Email: Docker Mailserver for staff email. Listmonk for parent newsletters and announcements.

Student Records Without the SaaS Tax

Commercial student information systems charge per student per year. A school with 300 students might pay 1,500 to 3,000 US dollars annually for an SIS. A self-hosted CRM with custom fields handles student demographics, parent contact information, attendance records, grades, and behaviour notes for zero software licensing cost. The trade-off is setup time versus ongoing fees. One weekend of configuration replaces an annual subscription that never ends.

EspoCRM customised for school use: student entity with fields for name, date of birth, grade level, parent contacts, medical notes, and enrolment date. Attendance entity linked to students with date, status, and notes. Grade entity linked to students with subject, term, grade, and teacher comments. The CRM becomes the single source of truth for every student.

Moodle for Course Delivery

Moodle handles online learning: upload course materials, create quizzes, collect assignments, grade submissions, and track student progress. Students log in from home or from the computer lab. Teachers see who completed which assignment and who needs intervention. For a tuition centre or training provider, Moodle is the platform that replaces Google Classroom or paid LMS subscriptions.

Moodle runs on PHP with PostgreSQL or MySQL. A VPS with 4GB RAM handles 500 concurrent students. For a small school with 300 students and staggered class times, this is more than sufficient.

Parent Communication That Works

WhatsApp groups are the default parent communication channel for small schools. They work but create problems: messages are lost in the scroll, important announcements are buried, and there is no record of who was told what and when. Listmonk provides a better channel: weekly newsletters with school announcements, upcoming events, and individual student reports. Parents receive email updates in a format they can search, forward, and reference.

For urgent communication, WhatsApp remains the practical tool. Use it for time-sensitive announcements (school closure, event reminder) and use Listmonk for everything else that needs to be documented and searchable.

Admissions Management

EspoCRM handles the admissions pipeline: inquiry, application received, documents submitted, interview scheduled, offer sent, accepted, enrolled. Each stage updates automatically when the previous stage is completed. Admissions staff see the pipeline at a glance. School leadership sees enrolment projections based on the pipeline data.

When a parent inquires through the school website, the inquiry form creates a lead in the CRM. Admissions staff follow up. If the inquiry converts, the lead becomes a student record with all the inquiry history attached. No data re-entry, no lost inquiries, no parent calling to ask if the school received their application.

VPS1 builds school management stacks for small schools and training providers. Student records, learning management, staff communication, and parent communication. One fixed cost, no per-student fees.