The school MIS market has changed enormously over the last decade, but arguably we’re now entering an even more interesting phase.

For years, much of the story was about schools moving away from SIMS and the growth of cloud-based alternatives. That movement hasn’t stopped, but the latest figures suggest the conversation is beginning to change.

Arbor is now used by more than half of English schools. Bromcom continues to grow and is undertaking a significant rollout across Northern Ireland. SIMS is progressing its transition to Next Gen. Smaller providers are trying to establish a foothold.

At the same time, AI is beginning to change what an MIS can do, suppliers are expanding beyond the traditional boundaries of MIS, and the Department for Education is becoming much more involved in how academy trusts procure these systems.

So, what does the market look like now, and perhaps more importantly, what should we be watching next?

 

Arbor passes the halfway point

The latest May 2026 census analysis from WhichMIS? puts Arbor at 11,787 English schools, representing 53.58% of the market. That’s a remarkable position for a company that held only a tiny proportion of the market a decade ago.

There is some important context behind the latest increase. Of the 823 schools Arbor gained between the January and May census returns, 345 were migrations from Integris and ScholarPack. Both products are part of The Key Group and are being phased out, with schools moving across to Arbor. But that still leaves another 478 schools gained from competitors during the period, almost exclusively from SIMS according to WhichMIS?.

Looking over a longer period makes Arbor’s growth even more striking. Joshua Perry’s analysis of the October 2025 data shows Arbor at 9,677 English state schools, having taken five years to reach its first 100 schools and another four years to reach 1,000.

Product development is moving too. Arbor launched Ask Arbor in 2026, an AI assistant embedded within the MIS. It allows authorised users to interact with the system using natural language and is part of a wider move towards using AI to make school data easier to access and understand.

That gives us an early indication of how the definition of an MIS itself may be changing.

 

Bromcom continues to gain ground

Bromcom also continues to make sizeable gains.

WhichMIS? reports that another 282 English schools moved onto Bromcom between the January and May census returns, bringing its total to 3,872 and its English market share to 17.60%.

Again, the school count doesn’t tell the whole story.

Perry’s autumn 2025 analysis found Bromcom was being used by schools educating around 20% of English state-school pupils, reflecting its comparatively strong position in larger secondary schools. Its retention figures are also worth noting. Perry calculated Bromcom’s churn at around 2%, and remarkably it had remained between 1.9% and 2.1% for four consecutive years.

But some of Bromcom’s most interesting recent growth is happening outside England.

Wales has become an increasingly important market for the company. Bromcom says it is now the chosen MIS provider for six of the last eight Welsh local authorities to have selected a new system, supporting hundreds of schools across Wales. They’ve invested in bilingual access, Welsh statutory returns, Welsh-language resources and engagement with Welsh educators rather than simply taking an English product into a different market.

Northern Ireland represents an even larger implementation. The Education Authority is rolling Bromcom out as part of the EdIS programme across more than 1,100 schools and education settings. By June 2026, more than 400 primary schools were expected to be live before the end of term, with further migrations continuing through 2026/27.

2026 also marks an interesting milestone for the company itself: Bromcom is 40 years old. Founded in 1986, its history provides a useful reminder of just how much the MIS market has changed. There is something slightly counterintuitive about one of the industry’s longest-established suppliers positioning itself around cloud and AI, but that is exactly where Bromcom appears to be placing its next bet.

All of this makes Bromcom interesting to watch for reasons beyond its current market share.

 

SIMS is at an important point

No discussion of the MIS market is complete without SIMS.

Ten years ago, SIMS was used by more than 18,000 English schools and had a market share of more than 85%.

The May 2026 figures reported by WhichMIS? put it at 5,782 English schools, or 26.28% of the market, following a further reduction of 802 schools since the January census.

Perry’s earlier autumn 2025 analysis calculated SIMS churn at 28% over the preceding year, compared with 14% in 2024 and 10% in 2023.

Those are significant numbers, but this isn’t simply a story about decline.

ParentPay Group is continuing to develop SIMS Next Gen and move functionality into its browser-based environment. Its roadmap shows functionality already available across areas including attendance, cover management, communications and administration, alongside further enhancements and new functionality being developed.

The challenge is an unusual one.

SIMS has enormous experience, a substantial remaining customer base and a brand that has been part of school administration for decades. But it is simultaneously modernising a major established platform while competing with cloud-native suppliers that have spent years persuading its customers to switch.

Data also shows that SIMS’ position isn’t uniform across the market. In autumn 2025, it remained considerably stronger among standalone academies and local-authority schools than among schools belonging to larger MATs.

That makes the development and adoption of Next Gen particularly important to watch.

 

The next battle may be retention, not switching

This is perhaps the most interesting question in the current MIS market.

For several years, competitors have benefited from a substantial pool of SIMS schools prepared to reconsider their MIS (over 4,000 schools switched MIS during 2025 alone). But what happens as that pool gets smaller?

If Arbor and Bromcom customers are churning at around 2%, winning schools from those platforms could be considerably harder than winning schools from a supplier experiencing double-digit churn.

That changes the competitive dynamics.

The market doesn’t suddenly stop moving, of course. Today’s market leader can become tomorrow’s incumbent.

But it does mean the next stage of MIS competition may look quite different from the last.

Retention, product development, service quality and the ability to increase the value delivered to existing customers could become just as important as winning another wave of switchers.

 

There is life beyond the big three

Arbor, Bromcom and SIMS account for the overwhelming majority of English schools, but they’re not the whole market.

Other providers are also trying different approaches to the market. Some are targeting particular school types or specialist needs rather than attempting to recreate the traditional broad MIS proposition.

The difficulty for challengers is scale.

If fewer schools are switching and the two largest beneficiaries of recent market movement have strong retention, reaching the critical mass required to compete sustainably becomes harder.

It isn’t impossible, but new entrants may need a much clearer answer to the question: why should a school move?

 

The future of MIS may be much bigger than MIS

An MIS contains some of the most important operational data within a school. It sits at the heart of attendance, assessment, safeguarding, communications, reporting and administration, and connects with an increasingly large ecosystem of other products.

Thinking of the MIS simply as a database or administrative system therefore feels increasingly outdated; it is becoming a platform.

Potentially, it becomes the operating layer around which a much broader collection of school technology is organised.

That has important implications for standalone edtech suppliers too. As the large MIS groups broaden their portfolios and deepen integrations, independent products will need to be very clear about the distinctive value they provide and how easily they fit into that ecosystem.

That suggests the strategic opportunity may no longer be simply about owning the school’s MIS. It may be about what owning that central relationship allows you to do next.

 

AI could change how schools interact with their MIS

AI adds another dimension.

For the last few years, much of education’s AI conversation has centred on teaching, learning and content generation. But some of the most immediate opportunities may actually be administrative.

Schools already hold enormous amounts of data, the difficulty has often been getting useful information out of it. Historically, answering a question might involve finding the correct report, applying filters, exporting information to a spreadsheet and manipulating the data before somebody can interpret it.

Natural-language interfaces could fundamentally change that relationship. Instead of navigating the MIS, a school leader could increasingly ask it a question.

• Which pupils are becoming at risk of persistent absence?
• Where has behaviour deteriorated this term?
• Which groups require closer attention?
• What has changed since last month?

We’re only at the beginning of this and there are obvious questions around accuracy, permissions, data protection and human oversight. The direction is interesting though; the MIS has traditionally been a system of record. Increasingly, suppliers will want it to become a system of insight and, eventually, perhaps, a system that can initiate or automate more of the actions that follow from those insights.

 

The DfE is about to become a much bigger influence

Arguably the biggest structural change in the market isn’t coming from a supplier at all.

It’s coming from the Department for Education.

The Academy Trust Handbook 2026, which takes effect from 1 October 2026, says academy trusts must ensure their MIS contracts are aligned with the DfE’s MIS framework by September 2027.

Where a contract expires before 1 September 2027, an extension or replacement must generally be limited to 12 months as a transitional arrangement. Trusts must then use the DfE MIS framework when awarding their next full-term MIS contract.

That’s significant.

It means procurement itself becomes a much more important part of the MIS story.

For suppliers, inclusion and competitiveness within the framework will clearly matter.

For trusts, however, the existence of a framework shouldn’t remove the need for proper discovery and due diligence.

An MIS isn’t a commodity purchase.

It affects how thousands of people work, how data flows around an organisation and, increasingly, how a trust connects the rest of its technology estate.

Price and contractual terms matter, but so do implementation, migration, support, interoperability, usability, roadmap and the ability of the platform to support the organisation’s future operating model.

Changing MIS is a procurement exercise, but it’s also a major change-management programme.

 

So, what should we be watching next?

The MIS market today looks completely different from the one we were discussing ten years ago.

Arbor has moved from challenger to clear market leader in England. Bromcom continues to grow and is demonstrating its ability to deliver at significant scale. SIMS is at an important stage in the development of Next Gen. Compass is beginning to establish itself as a credible challenger, while other providers continue to explore different niches.

But market share alone may no longer tell us the most interesting part of the story.

I think there are three bigger shifts to watch.

The first is where the next wave of switching comes from as the number of SIMS schools reduces and more of the market sits with suppliers currently experiencing much lower churn.

The second is how far MIS providers expand beyond MIS, using their position at the centre of school operations to move into finance, HR, compliance, workflow and other areas.

And the third is how the DfE’s growing involvement in procurement and data shapes the market, particularly as academy trusts begin aligning contracts with the new framework.

Alongside all of that sits AI, potentially changing the way users interact with school data altogether.

For schools and MATs, that means selecting an MIS increasingly requires looking beyond the product that exists today.

• Where is the supplier investing?
• What does its roadmap tell you?
• How open is the platform?
• How easily can data move between systems?
• What does it genuinely remove from staff workload?
• How well can it support a growing trust?
• And does the supplier’s view of where school technology is heading match your own?

Because choosing an MIS isn’t simply choosing a piece of software. Increasingly, it’s choosing the technology ecosystem you want to be part of.