Positive Behavioural Interventions and Support (PBIS) is a school-wide framework for managing learner behaviour proactively rather than reactively. Instead of only responding when something goes wrong, a PBIS school defines what good behaviour looks like, teaches it explicitly, and recognises it consistently when it happens.

Most South African schools already do some version of this informally through assemblies, merit certificates, teacher praise, etc. PBIS takes those scattered efforts and turns them into a structured, measurable system that runs across every classroom, every teacher, and every day.

It is not a curriculum. It is not a programme you "run" for a term. It is an operating framework for how your school handles behaviour, and it sits comfortably alongside your existing Code of Conduct rather than replacing it.

PBIS is not new or untested. It has been studied for over two decades internationally and aligns directly with the Department of Basic Education's Alternatives to Corporal Punishment guidance. The research record is clear:

• A meta-analysis of 32 PBIS impact studies found statistically significant reductions in disciplinary exclusions and problem behaviour, with improvements in academic achievement (Lee and Gage, 2020).
• A 2025 study across Quebec schools recorded a 78% reduction in Office Discipline Referrals three years into PBIS implementation (Bocquillon et al., 2025).
• South African research specifically identifies PBIS as well-suited to the SA context and aligned with existing DBE policy (Gagnon, Sylvester and Marsh, 2021, South African Journal of Childhood Education).

What has been missing in South Africa is not the framework. It is the day-to-day system to run it. That is what LearnerLink provides.

For full pricing, visit our pricing page.

A single 30 minute Google Meet call for the entire staff is all it takes. We provide a short video walkthrough and a one-page quick-start guide. The interface is a QR scanner and a Google Form. Any teacher who can use a smartphone and Gmail can use LearnerLink on day one.

The harder part is the habit, not the technology. It takes most teachers about two weeks to stop defaulting to "I'll log it later" and start logging as they go. That is a behaviour shift, not a training problem, and it is the single biggest predictor of whether a school gets good results.

About a week of calendar time, but only a few hours of your school's time. We handle the bulk of the setup ourselves: importing your learner list, mapping your Code of Conduct into the merit and demerit categories, configuring the teacher forms, generating QR codes, and connecting the parent email automations.

What we need from you is: a clean learner list (exported from SA-SAMS/Edupac or your admin system), a copy of your SGB-approved Code of Conduct, and a list of staff emails with their roles and class assignments. Most schools can pull this together in half a day.

Once you have sent us that, allow 5 to 7 working days before going live.

Google Forms works fine on slow or intermittent connections. Submissions queue on the device and send when connectivity returns. Teachers will not lose data if the school WiFi drops for twenty minutes.

For areas with persistent connectivity issues, most schools rely on teacher mobile data for the few seconds a submission takes. Each submission is a few kilobytes. A teacher logging 20 incidents in a day uses less mobile data than loading a single news article.

In practice, most teachers use their own phones because it is the device already in their pocket. However, you can use any device with internet access, as long as it has a camera and the teacher can sign in with their own PBIS Google account. 

Every learner gets a printable QR ID card generated by LearnerLink during onboarding. A teacher opens their phone's camera, points it at the learner's card, and the Google Form opens with that learner already selected. The teacher picks the merit or demerit category, adds an optional note, and submits.

The entire process takes under 30 seconds once a teacher has done it a few times. There is nothing to install on the phone: phone cameras already read QR codes natively on iOS, Android, and most feature phones with internet.

We include QR card PDF documents for every class that you can reprint at any time. 

In the event of a surname change, new learner, or a learner that has left the school, we can regenerate the full class set as one data maintenance request. 

Inside your school's own Google Workspace for Education environment. Every form response, every spreadsheet, every PDF report sits in your school's Google Drive under your school's administrator control.

We do not copy your data to a separate server. We do not mirror it to a third-party database. We do not have a backend where your data is aggregated with other schools' data. Your data is yours, in your Drive, behind your school's Google admin controls.

It stays with you. Because everything lives in your Google Workspace, cancelling LearnerLink simply means disabling the system and automations we installed. The Google Sheets, the historical data, the PDF reports, the learner records - all of that remains in your Drive for as long as you want to keep it.

There is no data to "migrate back" at the end of a contract because nothing ever left. This is a deliberate design choice. We think lock-in is a bad reason for schools to stay with a vendor. The right reason is that the system is working.

This is not exactly the correct question, though we understand why people ask it. Under POPIA, software is not "compliant" - organisations are. Your school is the Responsible Party for learner data, and compliance is always your legal responsibility.

What we can say clearly: LearnerLink is designed to support your POPIA compliance, not undermine it. Data stays inside your Google Workspace. Access is role-based through Google's native permissions. Every log entry is auditable. We do not collect data for marketing or any secondary purpose. Parent emails contain only the information relevant to their child's incident.

Section 6 of the SMT Strategy Pack covers what LearnerLink does to support compliance and what remains your school's responsibility. We recommend your principal or Information Officer reads that before signing anything.

Yes, in the same way they consent to any other data processing your school does. Most schools already have a POPIA consent framework in place covering admissions, photographs, and academic records. Behaviour data fits into that framework.

We provide a template communication you can send to parents before go-live, explaining what LearnerLink does, what data is collected, who has access, and how they can query or request correction of records. You adapt it to your school's tone. Your SGB or Information Officer signs off on it. Standard POPIA process.

Yes, on request. POPIA gives data subjects (and in the case of minors, their parents or guardians) the right to access their personal data. Because every incident is logged with a timestamp and the submitting teacher, producing a full record on request is straightforward.

In Pro, end-of-term behaviour report cards are generated automatically for every learner and can be sent home alongside academic reports. This pre-empts most data access requests by making the information routinely available rather than requiring a formal query.

Role-based access is enforced through Google Sheets permissions. The default setup is:

• Class teachers: their own class only.
• HODs: their phase or grade.
• SMT (principal, deputy): whole-school.
• Admin staff with learner data access: the specific sheets their role requires.
• Parents: their own child's record only, via email notifications and termly report cards. No general dashboard access.

Your school can customise this at onboarding. Some schools add a Grade Head layer between class teachers and HODs, for example. Others restrict demerit visibility to SMT only while keeping merits broadly visible.

Definitely not. SA-SAMS/Edupac and LearnerLink do different things. SA-SAMS/Edupac is your national reporting and admin system for marks, attendance, and learner registration. LearnerLink is a dedicated behaviour tracking system.

Where they intersect is that LearnerLink's data can be exported and referenced at disciplinary hearings or included in reports to the District. But LearnerLink does not try to replicate what SA-SAMS/Edupac already does, and SA-SAMS/Edupac does not try to track behaviour at all. They sit alongside each other.

It does not directly integrate with them, but it does not conflict with them either. Schools using D6 or Fundisa for general parent communication can continue to do so. LearnerLink handles behaviour-specific parent notifications automatically through the school's Gmail account.

In practice, most schools we speak to keep using their existing parent communicator for general announcements and let LearnerLink handle behaviour emails. Parents receive two streams: routine communication from the communicator app, and behaviour-specific emails from the school's dedicated PBIS Gmail.

Google Workspace for Education is free for qualifying South African schools. 

If your school needs help with this, we offer professional configuration for R2,500 once-off, including domain verification, admin console setup, and staff account provisioning.

Getting it set up and verified is a one-time process that typically takes a few days. (Note: this is dependent on Google and we're unable to give an exact timeline).

Many schools already have some version of Google Workspace in place - if your teachers use Google Classroom for instance, you're already set up.

If you are not sure, send us your domain and we can check whether it is already configured.

Foundation Phase at Alberview uses LearnerLink with some adjustments. The merit and demerit categories are simpler and shorter. Parent emails are phrased slightly differently to suit the age group. The QR ID cards are kept by class teachers rather than the learners themselves.

We have a specific Foundation Phase configuration template for onboarding. If your school is primary or includes early grades, we will set this up as part of the initial deployment.

Because building and maintaining LearnerLink took a lot of time and effort. LearnerLink is work, and the work is ongoing. Every term brings new learners, teacher changes, feature requests, bug reports, and support conversations. That work does not pay for itself out of goodwill.

The pricing is deliberately set to be affordable for South African public schools (R1.20 per learner per month for a Pro-tier 1,200-learner school) rather than priced for private-school IT budgets. We are not trying to extract maximum revenue. We are trying to run a sustainable system that will still be here in five years.

No. We looked at offering one and concluded it would be bad for schools. Free-tier schools tend to get poor support, use the system half-heartedly, and then decide "digital behaviour tracking does not work for us" when what actually did not work was a free-tier version of it.

The 2026 Pilot Programme is the closest equivalent: reduced pricing for early-partner schools, with direct developer support and the option to withdraw with no penalty. That gives you a low-risk way to validate the system without the failure modes of a free tier.

Yes. On monthly billing, you can cancel any time after the second full term with 30 days' notice. On 24-month annual billing, you are committed to the two-year term, but you keep your data regardless and the pricing is locked in for that period.

We do not hold your data hostage. Because everything lives in your Google Workspace, cancellation means we stop providing support and updates. Your sheets, reports, and historical data stay with you.

Because the results are not immediate. Behaviour culture shifts over a term, not a week. Schools that try LearnerLink for three weeks and quit because "nothing changed yet" are not experiencing a product failure - they are experiencing the normal pace of culture change.

The two-term minimum exists to set fair expectations on both sides. We commit to supporting you properly during the critical onboarding phase. You commit to giving the system enough runway to actually work.

No. Pricing is tiered by school-size band (under 500, 500 to 999, 1,000 to 1,499, 1,500+). Within each band, you pay one flat rate regardless of whether you have 200 or 499 learners. If you add a new class mid-year and cross a band threshold, we will give you warning and work with you on the transition.

Configuration work that is not automated:

• Mapping your school's Code of Conduct into the merit and demerit category structure.
• Importing and validating your learner list.
• Setting up teacher and HOD permissions.
• Generating and delivering printable QR ID cards.
• Customising parent email templates to match your school's tone.
• Setting up live dashboards with your school's branding.
• A live walkthrough with your SMT before go-live.

The Setup Fee is R3,500 once-off on monthly billing. On 24-month annual commitments, this is reduced to R1,250.

Every January, we refresh your LearnerLink system for the new school year: new class lists, new teacher assignments, new learner intake, departing Grade 7s or Grade 12s, promotions between grades. This is significant work and happens over a compressed period (usually after the 10-day cycle ends).

On monthly subscription the Annual Reconfiguration fee is R1,500.

On a 24-month annual commitment, it is R750.

WP van der Merwe, a South African primary school teacher with eighteen years of classroom experience. I currently teach Computer Sciences at Alberview Primary and I built LearnerLink because I got tired of watching the quiet kids go unrecognised while the few disruptors consumed all the admin energy.

LearnerLink is built by a teacher, for teachers. This is why it works the way it does, and it is why it does not look or feel like corporate edtech. I am not a software vendor. I am a teacher who learned to code well enough to fix the problem.

Fair question, and we take it seriously. Three things protect your school:

• All your behaviour data lives in your school's Google Workspace. Nothing goes offline if we do. Your sheets, your reports, your historical records are yours regardless.
• The system architecture is documented in the LearnerLink Function Reference Guide, which is provided during onboarding. This means a qualified developer could understand, maintain, or extend the system if needed.
• We are building LearnerLink as a sustainable commercial operation, not a side project. The 2026 pilot intake, the pricing structure, and the development roadmap are all designed around long-term viability.

In the worst case, your data is safe and the system documentation exists to support continuity.

LearnerLink is a product of Storyboreds (Pty) Ltd, a South African company registered with CIPC (Registration 2025/553612/07). It is a commercial operation with a deployed production system running at full scale at Alberview Primary (1,387 learners), active sales and marketing, and a development roadmap.

It is small - one developer, direct-to-school sales, SA-focused - but it is real, it is registered, and it is designed to be sustainable.

What it is not is a funded startup looking to scale fast and exit. The commercialisation strategy is deliberately measured: a handful of partner schools in 2026, a larger intake in 2027, and genuine sustainability before any expansion beyond the Google Workspace version.

Yes, planned for 2027 onwards. The Google Workspace version works extremely well for schools under about 3,000 learners, but a native full-stack SaaS version (Node.js backend, React frontend, PostgreSQL database, PayFast billing) is on the roadmap for schools who want a PBIS mobile App, with features Google Workspace cannot easily support.

Important for existing schools: the Google Workspace version is not being deprecated. Schools using the Workspace version in 2026 will continue to use it unchanged. The SaaS version is a parallel offering, not a replacement. When it launches, existing schools can choose to migrate, stay on Workspace, or evaluate both.

Because the trust is not actually in us - it is in Google Workspace. Your data lives under Google's infrastructure, Google's security controls, and your school's admin permissions. LearnerLink is the layer of automation sitting on top, not the data custodian.

If we were asking you to trust a custom backend that we built and maintain, the question would be harder to answer. We are not. We are asking you to trust the Google environment your school already trusts with its email, its shared drives, and its Classroom data. That is a much shorter leap.

We would rather answer a question directly than have you guess at an answer from a FAQ.

If your question is not covered here, or if you want a longer conversation about how LearnerLink might fit your school specifically, email info@learnerlink.co.za with a brief note on your school's context (approximate enrolment, public or private, current behaviour tracking setup) and what you are trying to work out.

You will get a reply from the person who built the system. Usually within 24 hours, often much sooner. No sales funnel. No scheduled call with an account manager. Just a conversation.

Fair question, and we take it seriously. Three things protect your school:

• All your behaviour data lives in your school's Google Workspace. Nothing goes offline if we do. Your sheets, your reports, your historical records are yours regardless.
• The system architecture is documented in the LearnerLink Function Reference Guide, which is provided during onboarding. This means a qualified developer could understand, maintain, or extend the system if needed.
• We are building LearnerLink as a sustainable commercial operation, not a side project. The 2026 pilot intake, the pricing structure, and the development roadmap are all designed around long-term viability.

In the worst case, your data is safe and the system documentation exists to support continuity.