According to a post on Edugeek, SCOMIS, one of the largest MIS support teams in the UK, have confirmed to their 850+ schools that they will no longer be supporting the SIMS MIS as from March next year.
This has apparently come about, according to the email posted in the Edugeek article, because SIMS Next Generation will be cloud-based and SIMS are not allowing it to be hosted by a third-party such as the local authority support teams. This means that the SCOMIS Hosting Services for ESS products will end in March 2025.
Additionally, SIMS has recently issued a new agreement to these support teams and SCOMIS have decided that they are unable to renew under the terms of the new agreement, which we are told is unduly restrictive compared to previous support agreements.
We have been hearing of unhappiness with the new SIMS support agreement from several support teams for some months, but SCOMIS are the first to come out and declare that they will not be renewing with SIMS.
Expert commentator, Nick Finnemore, has also posted about this issue on LinkedIn.
SCOMIS supports hundreds of schools across a large number of local authorities and this decision means that those schools now have to decide whether to move their SIMS support contracts across to SIMS directly, or whether to consider a change of MIS completely. It will be interesting to see which option the schools decide to take.
Support teams, whether local authority of commercial, provide valuable support services to their schools, often becoming valued and trusted partners, not least because of their local knowledge and experience of the schools themselves as well as their expertise with the various MIS systems. Schools have come to rely on these support teams for the ability to contact them easily and get swift responses – something they say they do not always experience when requesting support from larger corporate teams.
This really demonstrates how the MIS sector is becoming ever more disrupted, with changes coming from all directions. All support teams want to provide a high level of support to their schools, along with completely agnostic advice when schools ask them about MIS platforms, encouraging their schools to choose the MIS solution that is best for their specific circumstances.
At WhichMIS, we wholeheartedly support independent advice to schools to ensure they are able to make their own choice of MIS based entirely on their specific needs and our services around MIS procurement ensure that this is the case.
