On the back of a LOT of requests from schools, academies, partners and MATS, this September we were pleased to independently host a series of MIS Discovery Sessions.

Who were the Sessions for?

What did the Discovery Sessions cover?

Bromcom MIS Discovery Session

Arbor MIS Discovery Session

IRIS Ed:gen MIS Discovery Session

Next in the #FinnemoreFireside series is this brilliant chat I had last month with Mike Donoghue, CEO of John Taylor Multi-Academy Trust (JTMAT). It was a great conversation providing lots of insight into how MATs work and what is important to directors, leaders, governors, staff and learners.

To provide some background on Mike, he was appointed Headteacher at John Taylor High School in January 2010 and oversaw the first change to ‘converter’ academy status of an ‘outstanding’ school in Staffordshire in November 2010. That school plus 14 others now lie at the heart of John Taylor Multi-Academy Trust where Mike is CEO.

In September 2014 he became an elected member of the Regional School Commissioner’s (West Midlands) Headteachers Board, was re-elected in 2017 and elected to the newly-constituted Advisory Board in 2022. Mike has also been appointed to the DfE’s Secondary Headteacher Reference Group, an advisory panel assisting with policy and strategy decision-making.

It’s an insightful conversation which includes, amongst other things:

• What it means to be a teaching school, and how fulfilling and valuable it can be
• The challenges and opportunities that come with working outside your organisation
• Growing into a successful MAT, and how do you define the perfect size
• Equality of entitlement when it comes to professional development
• The sliding scale between autonomy and regulation/structure, and how to create that balance as a MAT: compliance-driven vs excellence-driven
• Co-construction and why this is so important across the Trust
• How the Trust is very similar to a cycling peloton!
• Using evidence in staff appraisals and the concept of quid pro quo and ownership
• What Mike would like to see more of from software suppliers, and how major investment in one area can actually stymie innovation in others
• Where Mike takes his influence from on which solutions to introduce to the Trust and why

Just before Bett this year, Nick caught up with Lawrence Royston, Founder of teamSOS, to talk all things edtech.

Lawrence is one of the true entrepreneurs of the Edtech market. Along with his partner Joanne, he started with GroupCall messenger, the first SMS messaging system for schools in the UK, then built Xporter, supporting Third parties to have a generic way to integrate with MIS data, before looking at how they could provide deeper insights in the data they were already transferring through GroupCall XVault. He’s also supported GDPRis and has recently started a new business in teamSOS, an incident management and compliance tool for staff in Education and NHS establishments.

We’ve split the interview into two parts to make it easier to digest. In part one Nick and Lawrence discuss:

• What it means to have an entrepreneurial mindset
• Working with partners (and family!), their symbiotic skills, and how this is a great asset in business
• The thinking behind teamSOS, where the idea came from, and the problem it solves
• The importance of listening and learning from users
• ‘Successive approximation’ and continually iterating solutions to help better meet the needs of your customers

In part two they talk about:

• What advice would Lawrence give budding edtech entrepreneurs based on his own experience?
• Getting work/life balance right
• The effect of recent market changes: how consolidation makes space for speedboats!
• The innovation bubbling away in the background within smaller businesses that lead on vision and integration
• Modernising technology (case in point: walkie talkies)
• Their approach to pricing and delivering value
• How making school staff feel cared for attracts and retains the best candidates

Enjoy!

Continuing our series of business thought leader interviews, I recently caught up with Luke Pargeter, Co-founder and CEO of iAM Compliant.

Every school has a legal duty of care to their staff, pupils and visitors to their premises. The problem can be that remaining within the law can be costly and time consuming if not managed efficiently, which is why Luke and his co-founders created iAM Compliant.

iAM Compliant is a web-based tool, designed to help schools with everyday health and safety compliance, reporting, eLearning and more.

In this fireside chat we discuss:

• What gave Luke the inspiration to create iAM Compliant and how the team was formed
• The relationship between safety, environment and learning
• The impact of compliance on wellbeing and staff retention
• What differentiates iAM Compliant from the competition?
• How Luke sees the edtech compliance market evolving in the future, and where iAM Compliant will be in 3 years time.

We’ve split the interview into 3 sections to make it easier to digest. Enjoy!

What’s the role of Management Information Systems in schools these days?  Something to save teachers time?   That’s what is was first invented for in the 80’s but it’s not what it’s about now.

Something to give the government more insight?  While government and academy chiefs want to know more about each child, teachers say data entry has become burdensome and a source of stress.

We work with MIS suppliers all the time but I wanted the opinion of a school leader, so I asked my headteacher friend what she thinks schools need from an MIS.  Her response was straight to the point:

1. Everyone needs to be able to use it whenever they want, however they want
2. It’s not just about school staff any more – it’s for parents and students too
3. You need to prove you’re getting value for money
4. It needs to make your lives easier every day
5. It has to support your School Development Plan
6. It can’t be unnecessarily complicated – people just won’t use it.

So what do you choose to achieve the above?

There are more choices available now than ever. Local MIS support units who traditionally only supported a single supplier now offer their customers a range of MIS contracts. They support the process, not the product.

MIS will continue to evolve as schools and academies evolve – it has to.  There’s no point in sticking with the old way of doing things purely because “this is what we’ve always done”.