Continuing our series of edtech thought leader interviews, I recently caught up with Martin Hall, Senior Product Manager for MIS at RM.

Having spoken with almost all other major MIS suppliers in England, I’ve been wanting to speak with RM on their plans for the Integris solution for a while. RM Integris is the second-largest MIS supplier in England in terms of market share, and RM also offers an ecosystem of other school management solutions which work alongside their MIS, including their own finance solution.

In part 1 of this fireside chat, we discuss:

• How RM has changed over the years, having started as a couple of people building servers in their garage to becoming a global education company
• The 3 key pillars of business for RM, and their plans to invest in their Integris MIS and finance solutions
• How customers expectations have changed, and how RM works with them to allow them to focus on students’ progress – the most important thing
• Where RM are currently with their Integris MIS: how it works with RM Unify, what’s their partner strategy, plans for growth into new system areas (such as HR, compliance, safeguarding, etc.) and also into new phases and markets
• Their approach to future development

In part 2 we cover:

• RM’s focus on the MIS market and current competitor solutions
• What makes RM Integris different
• How the market might change in the future given recent consolidation and acquisitions
• How support has changed, especially as businesses such as SBS and Strictly Education have been acquired by one owner
• The role of LAs v the new role of Trusts: how MATs act and work differently, using data centrally and intelligently

Finally, in part 3 I ask:

• Where does Martin see the MIS market going in 5-years time?
• Can and should data be used to inform policy?
• How does RM work in partnership with schools and academies?
• How can edtech suppliers get better at delivering disruptive, and is this a good thing?

One of the biggest changes to happen to the world of school MIS was the introduction of academies, starting back in the 2000s under the then Labour government, and becoming widespread following the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition Academies Act in 2010. The concept of schools becoming their own entities as academies and leaving Local Authority control had an effect on their MIS and support choices (which we’ve touched on in a previous blog), but it also created a whole new set of stakeholders: the Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) central team.

MAT central teams need certain things from an MIS which have not really been required before. It’s always been possible to aggregate data through feeds (this happens between schools and LA teams all the time) but MAT leaders need something completely different. They need a complete view of students and staff across the trust to enable collaboration, streamline communication and effectively target resources.

As a result, MIS suppliers have started to build MAT-focused functionality into their solutions and now offer a range of resources and dashboards aimed at making the lives of the MAT central teams easier.

It’s now been more than 10 years since the first MAT was formed so we wanted to explore how well MIS suppliers were meeting the specific needs of MATs.

A recent survey¹ asked 92 MAT central teams to rate how satisfied they were with their MIS from 1-10, where 1 is “Extremely dissatisfied” and 10 is “Extremely satisfied”. Their scores are outlined below; you can see that satisfaction is generally pretty good with the majority scoring their MIS a 7, and only a few MATs giving a score of 4 or less.

Chart: MAT Satisfaction rating of their MIS from 1-10, where 1 is “Extremely dissatisfied” and 10 is “Extremely satisfied”.

The survey asked respondents to briefly explain why they gave that rating, and the running theme amongst those who gave a perfect 10 was ease of use.

The survey delves into more detail. When asked about how satisfied they were with their MIS’ ability to provide actionable information, which is so crucial to trust central teams, they appear to be largely happy in this area. The biggest group (37.6%) responded saying were satisfied with what their MIS provides. It’s worth noting though that around 19% said they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, and a further 26% combined stated they were Dissatisfied or Extremely Satisfied. Would this be a reason for an academy trust to look for alternate solutions in the future? Maybe.

Question: How satisfied are you with the extent to which the MIS provides actionable information?

However, when asked how satisfied they are with the Trust-specific functionality their MIS offers, the results tell a different story. The majority of respondents said that they were Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied (28.26%), followed very closely by those saying they were Extremely Dissatisfied (27.17%):

Question: How satisfied are you with the Trust-specific functionality your MIS offers?

The fact that over a quarter of all respondents said they were Extremely Dissatisfied with trust-focused functionality should set off alarm bells with MIS suppliers. Trust-focused functionality always forms a key part of the requirements when MATs go to tender for an MIS, and it feels like there’s still work to do in this area.

In a previous thought leader session Nick recorded with Rowena Hackwood, CEO at Astrea Academy Trust, they discussed this topic in more detail. Rowena’s challenge for all suppliers, not just MIS, is for them to move towards creating solutions that work for a new customer base who need a different point of view:

“Increasingly in the sector, there is a move towards stronger and more sustainable groups of schools, which isn’t a national strategy for every school to be in a MAT, but it is a national strategy for every school to be part of a more sustainable group, as it were. And it’s absolutely critical that, in your thinking, you have that in mind.

The kind of MAT dashboards that I want to be able to share with trustees align academic attainment and attendance data on the one hand, with HR, finance, governance, performance, on the other hand, and I don’t have any means at a MAT level to really draw all of those different elements in together. So my challenge, I think, to you is to move away from a school by school understanding of the English school system towards one where a huge chunk of the customer base needs a different point of view.”

Rowena Hackwood, CEO at Astrea Academy Trust

Ultimately, most of the MIS have the ability to offer reporting and insight in one way or another, using tools such as Power BI; it’s more a question of how easy and integrated these systems are, and the extent to which they provide the data the central teams need. It’s the central management issue that MATs would really like to see supported by their MIS providers, and the better they are able to help with this, the more MATs will want to work with suppliers as long-term partners across the trust.

What do you see as the main differences between what academies need vs what MAT central teams need? Do you think there’s a need for an MIS which has been built with MAT central teams in mind as the primary user (similar to IMP in creating a finance system)?

¹The data was collected by The Key from a survey that went out to all multi academy trusts (with two or more schools) in England, by email. These surveys were split by trusts that had just one MIS across the group of schools, and trusts that used multiple MIS suppliers. It was not sent to trusts in the independent sector. The survey was completed by central team staff such as CEOs, COOs, CFOs and others involved in MIS operations, between 29 March and 27 April 2021.

Schools are choosing to move MIS more than they ever have before. There are plenty of options out there ranging from client-based to cloud, multi-phase to age-specific, and outcome-focused to all-in-one solutions.

The reasons schools choose to move in the first place are varied. Many convert to academies and sometimes they join a trust where a different MIS is in use so they switch as part of the joining process. Other times, they’ll use their change of status to academy as an opportunity to look at the MIS options available to them now that they are no longer under LA control.

Maintained schools are switching MIS too. For many, the traditional model of them being able to buy into an LA-purchased and supported MIS is disappearing as councils no longer retain budget or mandate solutions. For some, they never participated in the LA arrangement, choosing to do their own thing and looking at the market on a regular basis anyway.

But what it is that schools look for in a new MIS? What’s most important to them?

A recent survey¹ of 2,146 schools across England asked them to prioritise what they felt was the most important factor in terms of price, support, functionality, integration, partnership and reputation when looking for a new supplier. The results are outlined below:

Functionality was identified as the most important factor at just over 57%, with price coming second and integration a close third, within a couple of percentage of each other.

It makes sense that functionality would come out as the most important factor amongst schools. Ultimately there are certain functions an MIS has to perform to be fit for purpose, such as census which they all do, but there are a huge amount of processes and insights provided by your MIS which schools rely on every day.

The fact that the amount of respondents who said that price was the most important factor to them is fairly similar to the number of respondents who said that integration with other products was the most important factor to them tells an interesting story.

Without a doubt, schools are looking for best value when it comes to MIS, but this doesn’t necessarily mean cheapest. Equally, there is a drive to consolidate systems for sure, but schools don’t want this to at the expense of losing something else they might be using which is incredibly valuable to them; they want to be able to use the best of what’s available to them on the market so integration across solutions is important to them.

(It’s interesting as a similar survey was conducted amongst MAT leaders and, in that survey, functionality scored a much higher percentage; they seemed to be even less sensitive to price and gave more weight to how the product worked – presumably as there are specific MIS needs in trusts. We’ll cover this in another blog).

So, given that the majority of schools cite functionality as the main thing they’re looking for in a new MIS, the next question is: how happy are they with their existing MIS and how likely are they to move?

The survey asked respondents to rate how satisfied they were with their MIS, on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being extremely dissatisfied and 10 being extremely satisfied. The results are below, and the vast majority of suppliers got an average score of 6 or above:

It also asked how likely respondents are to move in the next 12 months, as outlined in the pie chart below:

Around 64% in total said they were either ‘unlikely’ or ‘very unlikely’ to move MIS in the next 12 months, so it seems almost two-thirds of schools are either happy with what they’ve got, or don’t see moving MIS as a priority in the next 12 months.

That said, 311 respondents, which is just over 14%, said they were either ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to move in the next 12 months – if this is a reflection across the whole market then we can expect lots of movement from one MIS to another in the next year or so.

Ultimately, if schools are citing functionality as the main thing they look for in a new MIS, how confident are MIS suppliers that their functionality is truly meeting the needs of schools? Aside from the basics, what makes one stand apart from the other?  We’ll be exploring this, amongst other things, in more detail in subsequent posts and would love to hear your views; what do you think users are you looking for in their MIS?

¹The data was collected by The Key from a survey that went out to all primary, secondary, special schools and pupil referral units in England, by email. It was not sent to independent schools. The survey was completed by Headteachers, Deputy and Assistant Heads, and School Business Managers / Leaders between 29 March and 27 April 2021.

As part of the survey, respondents were asked which MIS they use. The results are outlined below:

2020 was a busy year in the world of MIS!

Juniper Education Group acquired Pupil Asset and SISRA amongst others.  The Key Support Services has bolstered its position in the school MIS sector by adding Arbor Education to their portfolio alongside ScholarPack.  IRIS Software Group has acquired iSAMS Ltd which is a great addition to the solutions they already offer the education sector. And finally, Montagu announced they intend to acquire SIMS from Capita, and also invest in ParentPay with the goal of bringing SIMS into the ParentPay Group.

Following on from our initial chat in the Spring, Phil Neal and I caught up towards the end of the year to discuss the various changes that had happened across the sector, and get his views on what might happen next.

We’ve broken the interview down into parts to make it easier to digest. Enjoy!

How important is human contact?

When lockdown happened back in March, like many other businesses, our business lost all in-person contact with the outside world (and it was hard!).

But as humans we all want to deal with other humans; it’s so important to have a real face and a real person behind your solutions.

It’s for that reason we set up online chats with various people in our industry to talk trends, try to make future predictions in a changing world, and generally shoot the breeze. We’ve been sharing the recordings and the response has been great, I think everyone wants to get to know the faces behind the companies too!

So thank you James Weatherill, Richard Harley, Ali Guryel, Winston Poyton and Barry Anns for giving us an insight into the school MIS market which has seen some big changes this year.

Thanks to Mark Tadman, Guthrie Denniston and Martin Baker for talking to us about all the things you do alongside the MIS solutions and the ways in which you help schools.

And finally thank you Phil Neal, Joshua Perry and Graham Reed for your views and ideas on what might happen next and the big trends in edtech.

Nick and I have thoroughly enjoyed making the series, here’s to many more in 2021!

Last week I took the opportunity to have a virtual get together with thought leader Graham Reed to talk all things edtech.

Graham has a diverse background and knows the MIS and epayments sectors particularly well. Amongst other things, we discussed:

• What made Graham start Omega Pegasus
• What’s driving more market movement than ever to challenger cloud solutions
• Views on recent acquisitions, and Graham’s predictions for the future of MIS
• The future of the e-payments sector which Graham knows well, including potential new players and innovations
• Graham’s separate app projects, and the thinking behind creating them

Please note: We chat about the future of MIS and how challenger solutions might look to compete by working with adjacent solutions, in particular epayments systems. However, this was recorded a few days before it was announced that Montagu intended to acquire/invest in both SIMS and ParentPay so things have changed!

Lots of insightful stuff was discussed so we’ve split the interview out into separate parts below – enjoy!

Nick

Last month IRIS Software Group, one of the UK’s largest privately held software companies, announced it has acquired iSAMS, a leading, fully integrated, online school management system. I caught up with Winston Poyton, the Senior Product Director there, to talk about their education strategy and their most recent acquisition.

IRIS already has 11,000+ school customers, and their overall goal is to take the pain out of processes and let professionals working in schools focus on the work they love.

Some of the things we discuss include:

• What’s important to IRIS right now, and what are your plans in the education sector?
• What’s your strategy for IRIS and iSAMS? How does it sit with the other solutions you offer to schools?
• Who do you feel is your main threat, and what makes you different?
• How do you think the forthcoming sale of Capita ESS (SIMS) will affect the education market?
• Where do you see the future of MIS, what will make the difference, and what needs to change?

Over the summer holidays, Nick caught up with Scholarpack CEO, Richard Harley, for the next in our series of Q&As with edtech business leaders.

Scholarpack is the only MIS created specifically for primary schools. In this interview, Nick and Rich discuss why creating a unique MIS to meet the specific needs of primary schools has worked so well, and how the MIS educations sector might change in the future.

We’ve split it into three parts to make it easy to digest.  Enjoy!

There was a time when LA teams provided pretty much all IT solutions and services to their schools and the schools bought into them without question. They tended to be the only local solution available and, historically, this is what had always been done.

But, as the way authorities and schools were funded was gradually changed (and mostly reduced), the dynamic between schools and support teams changed. Sadly some LAs decided they no longer wanted to fund support teams at all and I know there were cases where teams were disbanded altogether or acquired by a third party. Independent teams started to form out of the old authority-schools-only teams and they were happy to work with schools outside of the traditional LA boundaries.  This was great news for schools for two reasons:

1. For many schools, the relationship they had with individuals at local support teams would have been a key part in their school development plan and dynamic. They wanted to be able to keep working with the same colleagues that they have for 20+ years and this meant they were still able to do so.
2. For other schools, they wanted a support choice and they finally had it! Geographical boundaries stopped being an issue. E.g. if you were a school in the South East who wanted to use a service in the North West as they had a good reputation it was now possible.

By and large, the evolving support team dynamic worked.

What it did do, however, is leave a big question mark over the MIS services they provide and the options open to schools. A big chunk of LA teams were SIMS support teams. This meant that, each year, they committed to Capita to provide SIMS support for all their maintained schools and, in return, their maintained schools were able to access the authority-owned SIMS licence for a certain amount of money (each support team then traded their own SIMS licence and support SLA with their own schools, Capita did not get involved in the support of these maintained schools).

When academisation started to happen it meant schools were no longer maintained, LA-led schools but individual entities in their own right. They could no longer access the LA-owned SIMS licence so had to purchase an MIS themselves. It caught many off-guard to begin with, having done the same thing the same way for so long, but it wasn’t long before MATs and academies started to use the opportunity to look at ALL the MIS available out there and modernise their systems. It’s easy enough to procure a new SaaS MIS, and many saw an opportunity for change to an easy-to-use, cloud-based solution.

And change is exactly what they have done. According to their websites, Bromcom is in over 50 MATs and Arbor work with 73 MATs and groups. On the primary front, Scholarpack have 27 MATs listed on their site and Pupil Asset work with 20% of the largest MATs in England.

So where does this leave the SIMS support teams?  MATs and academies often still want to buy into local support (they still want to work with the colleagues they’ve built such great relationships with) but they want a choice of MIS.

At the end of the day, the progressive support teams understand that it doesn’t really matter which MIS a school or academy uses and they offer multi-MIS support.

As they will tell you, they “support the process not the product!”.  Their priority has always been helping their schools achieve their goals, and it’s something they plan to continue to do in the future – irrespective of the systems they use.

P.S. All the cloud-based MIS suppliers above welcome local teams getting involved with the support for their solutions and have created support partnership programmes. They’re all exhibiting at Bett London in Jan 2020 next month if you’d like to chat with them, or we can put you in touch with them if you’d prefer – just drop us a line.

Sarah & Nick

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??