KAMAR Update - October 2025

Released Wednesday 1st October 2025

The next big KAMAR update has been released! This news item gives you a taster of some of the cool things in the update.

Course Selection (public beta)

Announcing early access to the much-anticipated Course Selection area! We are sharing this area with you as a public beta!

What's a Public Beta?
We are still working on the Course Selection area, fine-tuning things and ironing out the last few wrinkles. We are at the point where we really want to hear from schools and get some feedback. Think of this as "early access" - if you'd like the chance to have a good poke around this new area ahead of the official release and give us some feedback, this is your chance!

Here's a quick summary of what you can do in this new area:

In KAMAR	On the school.kiwi Web Portal
Create Course Selection programmes for target year levels. Curate the subjects available for selection (existing and proposed). Make recommended and/or required selections on behalf of students. Keep tabs on student progress through Course Selection. Shift selections over to options lines in preparation for timetabling. Generate statistics about student selections.	Design the "look and feel" of Course Selection programmes. Students will browse your programmes and select subjects. You create the groups your subjects are organised into. Students can see how they are progressing with two "progress bars" at the bottom - one for preferred selections and one for reserve selections.

The guides for Course Selection are available for you to read over, too.

So... what about the existing Course Selection?
We realise that we are too late for schools to use this new tool for this year, so the existing Course Selection is still in place for this year. The existing Course Selection feature will be removed early next year, completely replaced by this new area!

Seating Plan

You asked for it, and we've delivered! We've added the ability for you to make a seating plan for your classes. You'll start by arranging the furniture. 

Then you'll add the students.

You can use the Seating Plan as another way to mark attendance.

NZQA's API

NZQA will be introducing an API which allows KAMAR to query and update student entries for the current academic year in real time. From next year, this replaces the monthly results file upload that schools have traditionally performed.

Please note - nothing changes this year, NZQA's API is for next year! More information about your ESL Machine Account and NZQA API key will be provided later this year.

Other Cool Things

In addition to these fantastic features, we have a few other cool things coming your way soon.

• Expanded 'publish to web' settings for Pastoral records.
• "Recently Selected" added to the student, staff and pre enrol search filters.
• Added more options to the Special Fields that can be added to markbook summaries.
• You can now toggle the subject codes on Relief's Schedule screen to un-clutter the view.
• Added two new staff roles.
• Added the ability to record student name audio and update student photos in KAMAR for Mobile.

For a full list of the changes in this update, please refer to the Release Notes.