Ifitwala Ed: open-source education platform — looking for feedback and design-partner schools

Hi everyone,

I’m sharing Ifitwala Ed, an open-source education platform built on the Frappe Framework. This is a standalone app with a desk and 4 different independent portals in Vue (Admission, Students, Parents, Staff). Key focus throughout has been on integration of all the calendars (class events, meeting events, school events), strict data governance as we are working with children, real education roles (counselor, pastoral, instructors, academic admin, curriculum coordinator, admission, etc.), designed from the start for high-concurrency.

This project comes from my experience working in international schools for 25 years. The idea is to unify the disconnected SIS tools, admission SaaS, spreadsheets, forms, shared drives, and manual follow-ups for educators and school leaders.

The goal of ifitwala_ed is to give schools a more coherent operational backbone for admissions, student records, guardians, staff workflows, attendance, policies, documents, reporting, and analytics.

It is still early, and I do not want to keep building it in isolation. I am sharing it now because I’d like feedback from both the Frappe community and real schools.

We would value feedback on both the technical side of the apps and also from other peers educators or peers working with education institutions. :

We are looking for 4–5 design-partner schools willing to trial ifitwala_ed with us.

For selected schools, we would provide setup and close support at no software cost during the design-partner period. In return, we would expect real usage, structured feedback, regular conversations, and a clear internal contact person from the school.

The best fit would likely be small to medium-sized schools that currently manage important workflows through a mix of spreadsheets, forms, emails, shared drives, messaging apps, and disconnected systems.

The first workflows we are especially interested in validating are:

  • admissions / enquiry-to-enrolment

  • student and guardian records

  • policy acknowledgement and signature tracking

  • student logs and follow-up

  • school analytics and operational visibility

Although not a finished product, it is a working platform that I want to expose early to critique and real school workflows.

Repo is here: https://github.com/fderyckel/ifitwala_ed

We are starting to build the documentation here: https://ifitwala.com/docs/en

A small video (rough) showcasing Ifitwala Ed, here.

Install steps are same as for any other frappe apps. It will also install ifitwala_drive which is our way to have a more governed and strict file management system as again as education institution and during admission process we tend to gather many confidential information of users (copy of id, previous reports, etc.)

If you have technical feedback, product feedback, school contacts, or know an institution that may be interested in becoming a design partner, I would be grateful to hear from you.

Thank you.

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Hi @f_deryckel

I hope you know that Frappe are looking for maintainers for their education app ( GitHub - frappe/education: Open source education / school management system · GitHub )

Any reason you are not partnering with them as it seems to be a duplication to me

Not criticising - just wondering

That is a fair question.

I do know about Frappe Education (you can see I wrote some issues in its earlier days), and I have a lot of respect for the work already done there.

In my mind, Ifitwala Ed is not meant as a direct duplicate, because the starting point is quite different. Frappe Education sits closer to the ERPNext ecosystem, while Ifitwala Ed has been designed from the ground up around school operations, education roles, child data governance, scheduling, unified calendars, admissions workflows, and separate portals for admissions, students, guardians, and staff.

We found that for the kind of product we wanted to build, it was cleaner to start from education workflows first rather than heavily patch or reshape an existing app whose assumptions were not exactly the same.

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