Introducing Kestrel
A student information system for Australian independent schools, built around one record per person.
Every school runs on a record. Who is enrolled, and in which class. Who their family is, and who may collect them. What they need if they are unwell, and how they are going. A student information system is where that record lives, and nearly everything else in a school reads from it: the roll, the report, the excursion list, the census, the conversation with a parent.
Kestrel is a student information system for Australian independent schools. We built it because we think that record is the most important thing a school holds, and it deserves to be designed, secured and hosted that way.
Why Kestrel exists
A school’s record is a duty of care. When a parent rings the office or the alarm sounds, the school is relying on facts about real children being right, everywhere at once. So Kestrel is built around one idea: one record per person. Every student, parent, staff member and alumnus has a single record, and every part of the school works from it. A change made once is right wherever it appears.
That record is also some of the most sensitive information about young people anywhere. Holding it well is not a feature; it is the foundation. So we started with how Kestrel is built, and built the school’s work on top.
What Kestrel covers
- The person record: students, families, staff and alumni, with every enrolment and relationship
- Admissions: from enquiry to enrolment
- Attendance: rolls, absences and the front desk
- Assessment and reporting: the markbook, reports, and NESA and VASS
- Wellbeing and medical: entries at the level of access the writer chose, conditions, action plans and the health centre
- Co-curricular and excursions: seasons, rosters and consent
- Communications, and family and student portals
- Statutory returns: the census, STATS attendance and NCCD
Kestrel is the student record. A school’s finance, HR and timetabling systems keep doing the jobs they were built for, and Kestrel holds the people and facts those systems need.
How Kestrel is built
Hosted in Australia. School records are stored and processed in Australia. Support is onshore.
Each school kept apart by the database itself. Each school’s records sit in their own part of the database, reached only through a role that can see that school and no other. The separation does not depend on application code getting a query right.
Every sensitive read recorded. Kestrel records not only who changed a record but who read it. A school can always answer who looked at a child’s wellbeing or medical record, and when.
Access by role and by kind of record. What a person can see depends on their role and on the kind of record: a teacher sees the alert they need beside a name on the roll, and the detail stays with the people allowed to read it.
Modern sign-in. People at the school sign in with passkeys, or with the school’s own single sign-on.
Backed up and tested. Backups are encrypted before they leave the host, taken three times a day, and a restore is performed and checked every month.
Private by design. Kestrel runs no advertising and no analytics, and school data is not used to train any model. Privacy impact assessments, and the list of every provider that touches a school’s data, are published.
Open to the school’s own systems. A school issues its own API tokens, each scoped and each with an expiry, so its other systems can read what they need from the record.
Nothing to install. Kestrel runs in a browser for the people at the school, families and students, on a desktop or a phone.
Kestrel is built in Australia by Hoverpoint. If you work in a school, whether as a principal, registrar, business manager or IT lead, follow Kestrel on LinkedIn, or book a walkthrough: we’d like to hear what your school’s record needs to do.