In a school network where students might be taught by a teacher hundreds of kilometres away, the student information system cannot be a silo. It has to operate as a data backbone, connecting enrolments, timetables, learning platforms, wellbeing records, finance systems, and analytics so staff can focus on students, not spreadsheets.
That’s the reality for OneSchool Global Australia, established in 1994 and now with more than 2,300 students, 556 staff, and 635 volunteers. It’s a board‑directed independent school system with 31 campuses across the country. Globally, OneSchool operates across 20 countries.
OneSchool Global’s class groups often combine students from multiple campuses, and teachers may appear on timetables in several regions at once. Lessons are delivered through Zoom and the learning management system rather than a single classroom.
“It is a very complex environment,” says support specialist Adrian Harriott from OneSchool Global’s Regional Support Office in Sydney. His role sits behind the scenes: taking manual processes, from enrolments through to markbooks and analytics, and designing ways to make them flow cleanly through the school’s systems.
Sentral sits at the centre of that work.
OneSchool Global uses most of Sentral’s core modules – including school and student administration, finance, communications, attendance, scheduling, wellbeing, assessment, and insights – as its main record of student information. Learning is used more lightly, with Canvas remaining the school’s core learning management system.
For Adrian, that breadth matters, but the real strength is Sentral’s ability to share data with other tools.
“What I really like about Sentral is its API – how we can get data in and out and have it communicate with external systems,” he says. Those systems include the Canvas LMS, EdVal for timetabling, a dedicated automation platform (Identity One) and a new enrolments platform that replaces paper‑based processes across all Australian campuses.
Sentral’s development team, he notes, has been responsive to feature requests and API access needs, including after direct conversations about OneSchool Global’s use cases.
Adrian’s view of Sentral is highly technical: he sees it as the data layer that keeps information moving between platforms without adding noise for staff.
Meanwhile, Sentral administrator Annabelle Coombes sees the same system from the front line.
From the campuses’ perspective, Sentral is the everyday workhorse. Teachers mark rolls, enter marks, and access reporting data, while office staff use Sentral to manage contact information and stay in touch with parents. Annabelle, a former teacher now working as Regional Education Systems Administrator, is the first point of call for staff using Sentral. She handles troubleshooting, staff access, academic reports, markbooks, timetabling for Victoria and Tasmania, attendance setup, and annual rollover.
“Not many schools have the capacity to have someone like her, and we’re really fortunate that we do,” Adrian says.
Because many day-to-day questions are handled in-house, only the bigger, system-level problems tend to reach Sentral’s support team. When they do arise – such as problems with roll marking or report printing – Adrian says Sentral’s response has improved, with one recent reporting issue fixed within about three hours. That has changed the tone of internal conversations. According to Adrian, executive discussions when he started at the school about “whether we need a new SMS” have fallen away. Sentral is now more likely to be seen as a tool that does its job in the background rather than something that gets in the way of work getting done.
OneSchool Global’s structure brings a level of complexity that will feel familiar to many multi-campus, hybrid, or highly networked schools. Teachers are shared across regions and campuses, with classes often combining students from two, three, or even four locations in a single online lesson. Timetabling has to account for different campuses, shared staff, and a highly online learning model, all while supporting students’ self‑directed learning.
In this environment, out‑of‑the‑box automations inside any student information system will only go so far. Sentral’s built-in automations are designed for more straightforward “one class, one course” structures. OneSchool Global’s model is more complex, with shared teachers and mixed classes of students joining lessons from multiple campuses.
Rather than expecting Sentral to do everything, OneSchool Global uses it as the anchor and extends it through integrations and custom automation. Identity One acts as the connector between Sentral and other systems, handling data exchange with Canvas, EdVal, Microsoft, and the school’s enrolment and analytics platforms. Sentral’s API is the access point that makes this possible.
For other schools operating multiple campuses, satellite sites, or hybrid programs, this approach offers a practical pattern: choose an SIS that can cope with the core requirements and then design the rest of the stack around it, instead of looking for a single product that promises to solve every problem.
The impact of this approach is most visible in areas that used to rely on manual effort. Markbooks are a good example. With more than 1,000 courses in the system, every markbook once had to be configured manually by an administrator – a process that could take weeks of careful data work. Adrian has been working to automate that process using Sentral’s API and Identity One, with the aim of creating and updating markbooks programmatically instead of course by course.
Enrolments are another case in point.
Until recently, OneSchool Global relied on paper‑based or paper‑like digital processes that still called for significant manual handling at each campus. A new platform for enrolments now collects information through an online form and passes it straight into Sentral, easing the administrative burden and giving leaders a clearer view of prospective and current students across all campuses.
For Annabelle, the value of integration is practical. Supporting about 1,200 staff across 31 campuses means small points of friction can quickly become large support tasks. Where data can move cleanly between systems, and where repetitive processes can be reduced, campus teams spend less time double-handling information and more time using Sentral for the work it supports best: attendance, reporting, markbooks, contact records, and student-related information.
Adrian is the first to say there is no “perfect” student information system.
“In my interview for this role, the panel asked what the best student management system is,” he recalls. “I just laughed and said there’s no such system that can be everything for everyone in a school. Every school has unique needs.”
From his experience across different products, he puts Sentral “in the top tier” of Australian student management systems. That’s not because it does everything, but because it is robust, flexible, and, in his words, “plays nicely” with other platforms. For him, the differentiator is the combination of API access, responsiveness to feature requests, and a clear understanding of what Sentral is designed to do.
Annabelle’s view is grounded in day-to-day use. She describes Sentral as “a one-stop place for anything student-related”. Staff use it for timetables, academic reports, markbooks, rewards, meeting records, and parent contact notes.
Her reservations are practical rather than philosophical. Some workflows could interlink better, and some module names cause confusion. The Canvas-to-Sentral markbook integration also does not yet operate at the scale OneSchool Global needs.
When issues arise, Adrian says they are now resolved more quickly, with fewer major problems disrupting staff workflows. He also points to the value of having deep Sentral knowledge inside the school. Many day-to-day questions are handled before they need to reach Sentral’s support team, while larger system-level issues can be escalated more clearly. Together, that has helped reduce the “noise” around Sentral and made the system feel less like something staff have to manage.
Adrian sums it up this way: “In IT, the tools shouldn’t get in the way. Sentral does what it says it will do, and we can build the rest around it.”
For Annabelle, that lesson extends beyond OneSchool Global. After joining a Sentral discussion with Department of Education schools and a large Catholic diocese, she realised their setup was not as complex and unique as it first seemed. Other school systems were managing similar questions about access, scale, and system configuration.
In a complex school network, the best technology is not the system that tries to do everything; it is the system that makes everything else work better.