The long-awaited announcement today that the tender to replace the School Management System in all 1,100 Northern Ireland schools sees Bromcom as the selected partner for a new MIS.
The press release reads as follows:
In 2022, the Education Authority (EA) Northern Ireland tendered to replace the School Management System in all their 1,100 schools and expand to other educational settings. With the EdIS Strategic Partner and School Management System, EA has secured the implementation of a world-leading, cloud-based, functionally rich solution to replace the current on-premises solution. New benefits will be tailored and customised for Northern Ireland’s Education sector in order to enhance the functions that schools currently utilise.
The comprehensive procurement process completed in December 2023 sees Bromcom play a key role in the overall solution delivery alongside a range of partners.
The objectives of Bromcom’s One-Stop shop solution includes:
- Putting the learner at the centre of the service
- Enhancing stakeholder communication across the education sector
- Supporting improved collaboration across all schools and stakeholders
- Reducing duplication of data and the administrative burden of the system for all users in Northern Ireland
The goal of the project is to provide high quality, sustainable, core education technology services to schools and to ensure that they are appropriate to meet the current and future needs of school children, young people, teachers, school leaders, parents and guardians in Northern Ireland.
WhichMIS? comment:
The end to this procurement process has certainly been a long time coming, due to various issues including the fact that there has been no Northern Ireland Assembly for some time after the DUP refused to form a new executive in protest over the Northern Ireland protocol.
This should mean a wave of new schools moving to Bromcom MIS from their current SIMS platform and will almost certainly require a great deal of time and effort from all involved to both develop the Northern Ireland specific functionality and to manage the roll-out to schools.
Exciting times for Bromcom and yet another loss, and a very significant one, for SIMS.
