What is gestschool?

gestSchool is a web application built to help a school manage an entire academic year in one place: enrollments, grade reports, report cards, attendance, and announcements, without paying for expensive commercial software licenses. It was designed for schools in Angola, covering the local education system's basic and medium levels, but the project describes its structure as generic enough to adapt to other Portuguese speaking education systems. The system covers the practical, day to day work of running a school. It keeps records for students, including personal details, guardians, and enrollment history, and links guardians to the students they are responsible for. It tracks teachers, distinguishing lead teachers from assistants, and staff such as secretaries and pedagogical or general directors. On the academic side, it organizes school years into terms, groups classes and courses, and manages class groups with details like room, shift, capacity, and an assigned homeroom teacher, along with subjects and their curriculum. For day to day teaching, the system records lessons with a summary and planned content, tracks attendance, and manages evaluations per term with configurable weighting, producing grades, grade reports by subject and by class, and individual report cards for each student. Announcements can be sent to specific audiences, such as all users, just teachers, or a single class. Access is controlled through seven preconfigured roles, covering everyone from the general director down to students themselves, each seeing only what is relevant to them. The interface supports both Portuguese and English. It is built with the Laravel framework in PHP, using Blade templates, Alpine.js, and Tailwind CSS on the front end, and SQLite by default for the database, though MySQL and PostgreSQL are also supported. A Docker based setup is offered as an alternative to installing PHP and Node directly. The project also includes seed data that generates a realistic example school with thousands of students, teachers, and records for testing. The license is a custom Public License that allows free use only for public schools and nonprofit educational organizations, explicitly prohibiting commercial use or resale.