Suffolk County Council intends to conduct a procurement exercise during 2023 to procure a MIS system for all LA Maintained schools. See tender info here.
As part of this market engagement exercise they would like to hear from organisations offering Management Information Systems (MIS) and associated services to gain an understanding of the systems available.
The Schools MIS will be required to include – but not be limited to – the functionality below:
- Enable schools to comply with statutory requirements (census)
- Attendance recording
- Attainment recording
- Record student data
- Record school meals
- Timetabling
- Financial recording
- School calendar
- Exams timetable
- Staff CPD and CPD tracking
- Project management / oversight / tracking for whole school projects
- Collaboration tools for: within school / with parent / with colleagues in other agencies
They also specify technical requirements including, but not limited to:
- Cloud based
- Data integrity (with separate db areas for each school/academy)
The current contract is due to expire in 2025 and Suffolk County Council state that they would require the new system to be on site in April 2024.
Given that these schools (303 primaries plus 101 secondaries) are currently using SIMS, this procurement surely presents both opportunities for other MIS providers but also, potentially, a concern for SIMS.
Obviously, SIMS may well bid for and win the procurement, but if they were to lose it then a loss of so many schools in one go would be a serious blow. Equally, a win for any other MIS would catapult their market share significantly.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of this one…
