Schooltool is a project to develop a school management system and release it under a free software licence. The UK is one of the initial targets. The core server is being developed in python. You can read Mark Shuttleworth's announcement of the start of programming at http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3065015&forum_id=...

Please forward this message as appropriate to interested people, but remember that this is only just starting.