Laerskool Pionier
Web Development, School Website & Admissions Portal
2026 – Present
Replacing a static brochure site and a ten-page paper form with a bilingual school website, a self-service admin dashboard and a fully digital admissions portal.
Laerskool Pionier is a dual-medium Afrikaans and English primary school in Volksrust, Mpumalanga, with around 680 learners and a history that stretches back to 1902. Its old website was a static brochure with hardcoded content: the office couldn’t change an event, a photo or a phone number without calling a developer. Admissions ran entirely on paper — a ten-page personal-information form, six per-grade registration variants, and certified copies delivered by hand.
We built a single Next.js application with three surfaces: a public bilingual site, a role-based admin dashboard where staff manage every word and picture themselves, and a parent portal where families apply online with a magic-link login, upload documents once for every child, and sign consents digitally. The school now prints one clean branded PDF per application instead of filing a stack of forms.
A school run on paper, and a website nobody could update
Every year the school handled overlapping paper intakes: different grades open for applications at different times, and each application meant a parent rewriting the same guardian, employer, medical-aid and emergency-contact details for every child. The paper form even capped a family at five children — purely a layout artefact. Certified documents had to be physically delivered, and the office had no way to answer a simple question like how many Afrikaans and English applications were sitting in Grade R.
The website was no better. It was a static site with mock content and a third-party form, so the calendar, gallery and contact details drifted out of date. Everything the school wanted to communicate — in two languages — went through a developer first. The brief was to give the office full control of the site and take admissions off paper without losing the legal rigour of signed consents and certified documents.
One Next.js app, three surfaces, no paper
The first release — the public site, the content dashboard, the calendar and the gallery — shipped in three days on Next.js 16 with a self-hosted Convex backend, so admin edits appear on the live site instantly. Bilingualism is built into the data model rather than bolted on with a translation library: every event, history entry and email exists in Afrikaans and English side by side, and the desktop navigation shows both languages at once.
The admissions portal followed. Parents sign in with an emailed magic link, complete a family profile once, add each child in a per-grade wizard gated by the school’s own application windows, upload documents inline and sign every consent digitally — typed or drawn, with an immutable snapshot of the wording, time, IP and device. Staff review applications by grade, language, intake year and status, add notes, and export a branded, auto-paginated PDF with the signatures embedded. Every view, edit and export of sensitive data is written to a POPIA audit log with field-level diffs.
Paper out, parents in
The office now runs its own website in two languages, admissions are fully digital with signed consents and a printable PDF per application, and a family profile carries over to every sibling and every future intake year.
A self-managed bilingual website, fully digital admissions with signed consents, and family profiles that carry over year after year.
