A school is not an office with smaller people in it

Access control in an office is a theft and confidentiality problem. In a school it is a safeguarding problem, and that changes almost every decision. The question is less "what is behind this door" and more "who is allowed near the children, and can we show it".

The gate is where that starts. Most Kenyan schools already control the gate with a person and a book, and the person is doing the hard part well. What the book does badly is recall: it cannot tell you at four in the afternoon who is still on site, and it cannot be searched. A reader for staff and a visitor record that is legible and timestamped fixes the recall without replacing the judgement of the person at the gate, which you want to keep.

Inside the site, the doors worth controlling are the ones where a child should not be and where something dangerous or confidential is. The laboratory and its chemical store. The kitchen. The plant room and the water tanks. The server or comms cupboard. The records office, which holds every pupil file in the school. The sick bay and its medicine cabinet. None of these needs a card because of theft. They need one because an unlocked door is an accident waiting for an unsupervised afternoon.

Boarding introduces a harder version of the same problem. Dormitory access has to keep the wrong adults out without ever keeping a child in, and that is a fire strategy question before it is a security one. Every controlled door on a boarding site must release on alarm and must be openable from the inside with no card, no code and no power. We will not design it any other way, and any installer who is relaxed about this is the wrong installer.

Rights should follow the timetable, not the person. Teaching staff get the blocks they teach in during the hours they teach. Kitchen staff get the kitchen from early morning. Contractors get the one area they were engaged for, on the days they were engaged, and the card stops working when the job ends without anybody having to remember. Schools have high staff turnover and long holidays, and a system that needs somebody to remember is a system that quietly decays over a term.

The record is worth as much as the lock. When a parent asks who collected a child, or when something goes missing from the records office, the value of the system is that the question has an answer at all. That is also why the log has to be kept properly and seen only by people who should see it: a list of which staff member was where, minute by minute, is sensitive in its own right.

Start with the gate and the two or three genuinely hazardous rooms. That is a small installation, it answers the questions a board will actually be asked, and it can grow building by building as budget allows.