This is a subject that’s engaged me for many years. Unlike
almost all the other posts in this blog this one isn’t inspired by a report or
piece of research I’ve read. There seems to me to be several key issues in this
area.
The first of these is the monopoly that Capita’s SIMS has
over the schools’ MIS market. In 2013 SIMS was still used by 80% of schools in
England and Wales (see here).
This monopoly hasn’t been significantly affected by the appearance of
competitor products, for example Progresso and
Arbor. This monopoly and market
domination is the primary cause of other key problems. Capita SIMS sits astride
the schools’ MIS market without any competition significant enough to drive
down their prices. As a result Capita SIMS costs are very high. Not only are
their costs high for the schools using their software but they also charge
other suppliers for the right to write to their data systems. These costs suppress the development of innovative
add-ons to SIMS.
Innovation is also suppressed because of the high costs of
market entry and the difficulty in getting any market share when up against
such a dominant competitor. School MIS systems are very complex. They need to
include data fields relating to a wide range of student assessment items across
phases and sectors (primary, secondary, special, independent and state). Data
fields relating to parents and families, to staff and students are very
numerous. Alongside these are the complexities of timetables and financial
management. There are also behaviour data, attendance and systems to track
students’ performance in these areas. Most of these need to be customisable to
varying degrees to suit the local policies and systems of individual schools.
New competitors also have to cope with the rapidly changing
demands of government regarding data reporting from schools. Teachers, Heads
and MIS providers all suffer from the ever moving goalposts that the DfE have
on wheels. Probably the recent change in Secretary of State will soon yield a
new set of requirements. Every time that the DfE decides they need a new data
item reporting, for example a phonics score for every year 2 student, suppliers
of MIS systems have to update their product. This is an overhead that must be
challenging to manage.
Right from the very beginnings of SIMS as an amateur development
project the interface has always lagged behind the best software. The origins
of the product were focused on providing schools with ways of collecting,
holding and understanding the main datasets that related to school performance,
and not to empowering teachers in the classroom with solutions that
significantly reduced their workload and increased their efficiency. Some
developments have done so. The introduction of e-registration (led by Bromcom
originally I believe) made life much easier for teachers and administrators.
Instead of having to trawl through paper registers each morning looking to see
which students are absent it’s now pretty much automated process to identify missing
students and message parents. But it has been painfully slow. Only in the last
few years have tablet apps that allow teachers to quickly record behaviour
incidents appeared. The potential to do so has been with us for at least 4
years on tablets and more like 10 years with laptops.
Local installations are still extraordinarily common for MIS
systems. This makes it much more difficult for schools to ensure the
availability of their MIS. Even small primary schools need local technical
support expert enough to maintain the MIS server, update it and back it up. A
number of years ago I went to a local primary who had lost their SIMS server to
hardware failure. They had a local support contract but had never checked that
included back up of the SIMS database. So not only had they lost the server but
they also had lost all historical data.
The potential for MIS systems to transform the ways schools
function is enormous, the surface has only be scratched. When data is in the
Cloud there is potential for schools to learn from others in the same
system. How helpful would it be if your
MIS was able to point you at other departments in other schools where students
with a very similar profile (in terms of prior performance, social
characteristics and attendance) were achieving better outcomes? Wouldn’t it be
great if you could see what strategies had been successful before with a
student who was misbehaving in your class? I’d like to see seating plans and
behaviour systems showing you which students have the best chance of working
without incident together. It would be very useful if teachers were able to
track the effectiveness of homework. If
they could assign a category or tag to a homework, for example as extended
writing or reflective writing and then look back over the term they could see which
types had the best completion rates. They might be able to see what types of homeworks
led to better results in end of module tests. Including lesson planning in an
MIS would also allow tracking of results; in other words which categories of
lessons had the highest or lowest rates of behaviour incidents, or best end of
module test outcomes? Obviously this kind of data wouldn’t always provide clear
answers but aggregated across departments it might lead to some very useful and
well informed professional discussions. In the 15 years I spent as a teacher
all these professional discussions were always based on hunches and anecdotes
not data.
Teachers are the very best source of ideas about how to
innovate MIS. But you have to ask them the right questions. If you ask them how
their present MIS might be improved you’ll probably get some good ideas about
enhancements to the interface, shortcuts that reduce the number of steps to
complete a task and complaints about illogical nomenclature. But ask them what
takes up inordinate amounts of their professional time or what they would
really like to be able to do with data and with a good understanding of both teaching
and data you could begin to develop some exciting innovations.
So how can this situation be unpicked? At the level of government policy intervention in the marketplace might be very helpful. With our present administration with its high opinion of the power of free markets this seems unlikely.
Competitors need to find ways to offer a very compelling
alternative to Capita SIMS. Schools are generally pretty conservative (small ‘c’)
so changing their MIS isn’t something they consider very frequently. The
present pressure on school budgets might make this happen a little more as schools
get around to looking very critically at all their areas of spending. A big barriers
is the institutional costs of changing. Unless the new system is very intuitive
and simple there will be very big costs both for staff training and lost
productivity when staff need help remembering how to use this new system. If Capita didn’t take a fee from systems
building on theirs there might be ways to stealthily eat out SIMS from the inside. You provide one compelling add-on after
another until there is very little the school uses of the original SIMS system
below your products. Then they are ripe to be transitioned completely away from
SIMS. Another big problem for the kind of Cloud based opportunities I mentioned
earlier is that they become more and more powerful as the user base increases.
With several thousand schools there are very real benefits from being able to
learn from other schools, but that isn’t true if you are the third to use it.
Perhaps a far sighted capitalist will see the opportunities
here and invest in the development of a product that takes more than a decade
to produce real returns? If so we could see some very exciting innovations in
MIS functionality.