Bellmont College SIS
A Student Information System that took a London college from paper-based processes to a fully digital academic platform.
01 / the problem
Bellmont College managed its academic lifecycle — enrolment, attendance, progression, results — largely through manual, paper-based processes. Records were slow to retrieve, easy to lose, and impossible to report across. Verifying the authenticity of a certificate meant a manual archive search.
The college needed a single internal system covering the entire student journey, built for registry, faculty and finance staff who are not technical users.
02 / what I built
I lead development of the Student Information System on Laravel: an internal platform covering enrolment, batches, attendance, progression, courses, results, and cross-cohort reporting — plus a forgery check that verifies whether a presented certificate was genuinely issued by the college.
Alongside the SIS I've designed API-driven services for authentication, scheduling and financial workflows, and act as the technical point of contact across the engineering team.
03 / architecture & key decisions
Laravel modular monolith
For an internal academic system with one deployment target, a well-structured monolith beats microservices — faster to build, simpler to operate, easy for any PHP developer to pick up.
Workflows modelled on real roles
Registry, faculty and finance each get purpose-built views and permissions rather than one generic admin panel — adoption came from the system matching how staff already work.
Certificate forgery check
Issued documents are verifiable against the system of record, turning a manual archive search into an instant lookup.
Performance as a feature
Cross-cohort reports touch years of records — query optimisation, indexing and caching keep them fast enough for daily use.
04 / scope
05 / outcome
The college's academic record-keeping now runs end-to-end in one system — from a student's first enrolment to graduation — with reporting that used to be impossible and certificate verification that takes seconds instead of an archive search.