It started with a report card that never arrived.
My younger brother had a habit of hiding his report cards. Every term there was a reason — it wasn't ready yet, the teacher hadn't finished, it was coming next week. By the time anyone found out how he was really doing, the term was over and it was too late to help him.
That's not unusual. In most schools, a parent finds out how their child is going once or twice a year, on a piece of paper the child carries home. If the paper doesn't arrive, nobody knows.
At the same time, I was watching the other side of it at work. As Senior Assistant Registrar for student records at the PNG University of Technology, I deal with enrolment data, transcripts and assessment records every day — and I'd seen how much of the country's school administration still runs on Excel and Access. Teachers spending evenings on spreadsheets that break. Marks re-typed three times between the classroom and the report card. Records that exist in one person's files and nowhere else.
Simon had reached the same conclusion from the business side. So we built PromeCynEd — a system where the school's records live in one place, and where a parent can see their own child's progress without waiting for a piece of paper.
We're still building it. But that's the problem we started with, and it's still the one we're solving.