Last Tuesday I was fortunate enough to be invited to the SNUG MIS day (thank you to John and Dave from OSMIS for inviting me) which gave me the ability to directly compare MIS cloud-based solutions for the UK Edtech market. I have to say a lot of the solutions have moved on and are now direct competitors to SIMS, and it certainly appeared to be the feeling within the room of support team colleagues.  

I have always highlighted to Capita the need to bring out their SIMS8 Primary solution ASAP or the competitor solutions would catch-up and overtake what SIMS is offering schools/MATs (both during my time with SIMS and now as an independent consultant). This has now become a reality!!  

More and more customers are starting to realise this and have either decided to move or are challenging the status quo. You can see with Josh Perry’s analysis that SIMS are losing customers, especially in the Primary market.  This trend is only going to increase over the next 2-3 years in my opinion. 

The different MIS solutions major on different things to support schools, but what all of them are offering is a fully integrated solution where the e-payment (Scholarpack is an exception here) and communication solutions are just part and parcel of the MIS, they are not bolt-ons or third party solutions. In my view, here’s how they differ: 

Arbor

• Highlight how much they want to support the education of students by taking away the administrative burden of staff (incl. teachers).  
• A very clean UI/UX and had a strong MAT offering around analytics 
• The data analytics was not only MIS information, they were also drawing on national data to enable national comparisons.  
• The message coming from the company was very much “we want to work with you” and all about partnership. Great message and one that resonated with the audience.

Bromcom

• Major on their integrated BI analytics, it looks really strong.  
• Their message was a little more corporate.  
• Very simple looking solution (which is a positive!) and had adapted their solution to provide a strong UX and UI for Primary and another UI for Secondary. That said, some of the screens were a little busy. 
• They are definitely listening to their customers, which I am not sure the industry had felt up to this point.  

Pupil Asset

• Major on their tracking solution which is very well received in lots of schools across the country, and many schools go on to switch to the full MIS as a result of their good customer experience 
• Strong reporting functionality with their ‘School On A Page’ and ‘MAT On A Page’ reports 
• They also have something innovative (which, to be honest, I feel they should focus on more) in their ‘Live School’. This gives a visual view of the school e.g. if there is a behaviour issue in the school, in a visual model of the school you can see where the incident occurred. 

Scholarpack

• This is a solution focused purely at the primary school market and this is their strong brand, providing a solution that fits the primary schools. 
• It may not be as deep in functionality as some of the other solutions out in the market, but that light MIS is what primary schools want in my experience (most primary schools don’t use half of what is included in the deeper MIS) 
• Their MAT offering was light.  However, they are bringing out more MAT functionality soon. 
• I think they have hit the Primary segment spot on. They will need to look over their shoulders a little as Bromcom and Arbor also have a Primary solution and as MATs get larger with multi phased schools.  My experience is that they look for a single offering for all phases (most large MATs have either gone to Arbor or Bromcom) so this may become an issue for them in the longer term. 

Now for my request from the different MIS providers (and this includes SIMS): a lot of what I saw was very similar functionality to SIMS7 but it was either implemented better or the UI/UX was a lot stronger.  However, all the presentations continued to refer to SIMS as the standard.  I feel everyone should look to be further on than this. They are already comparative to SIMS – I think schools and academies need them all to think about what the true next generation of MIS is! 

I’d like to see more on workflows, reducing the need for manual intervention. I’d also like to see more on Data Analysis and the use of AI/machine learning to provide true insights as to what is occurring in the school/MAT.    

It’s one thing answering the questions where MATs and schools know they need an answer. But how do you answer the questions they don’t yet know they need to ask??