MIS MARKET MOVES WINTER 2024: A Change Is Gonna Come

DISCLAIMER: I have past and possibly future commercial relationships with a number of MIS vendors and their investors. I'm also a co-founder of two assessment ventures - Smartgrade and Carousel - that exist in markets adjacent to the MIS. Nonetheless I aim to write this blog impartially, from the perspective of a neutral observer. This matters to me - it's basically the blog I wish had existed back when I was a MAT senior leader trying to get a handle on who the key players were in the MIS market. 

Anyway, when I'm not blogging or leading my ventures, I provide MIS market consulting and data to investors, and offer free, informal consultations on MIS procurement and assessment strategy to MATs. If you would like to discuss any of this, contact me via LinkedIn. 

There are basically two types of readers of this blog:

1. People who want to know the latest data on the English state school MIS market, because it's in some way relevant to their job.
2. People who have at most a tangential interest in MIS, but who enjoy niche puns and arcane musical references.

This Christmas, I'm feeling whimsical, and so I'm going to pander to the second group. But before I get into it, I just want to apologise to you if you're in group 1. Typically the members of this tribe are busy people: investors in edtech for example, or overworked data managers. The kind of people who are right now wondering if it's really too much to ask for hard data unadorned with silliness. So if that's you, I can only apologise in advance. 

If you're in group 2 however, I have excellent news, because this Christmas, I'm telling you the story of the latest MIS market data through song titles. First, as always, you get a pretty set of charts, followed by nine tunes that attempt to capture What's Going On.

1. A Change Is Gonna Come

Every time I write this blog I need to find new ways to say Arbor / The Key are bossing the MIS market. Arbor now sit at over 6,500 schools, and perhaps even more notably, if you tot up all schools purchasing a MIS from The Key (i.e. customers of Arbor, Integris and ScholarPack) you get 9,444 schools in total - just 142 short of the SIMS total! That means that barring a remarkable turnaround in fortunes, the next time I blog I'm going to be talking about The Key as the English state school market leader. They also keep broadening their offer: earlier this year they announced the acquisition of FEPS, providers of HR software and services, offering an indication that they see this as a strategic area for future growth. 

Now, to be fair, The Key's seemingly imminent coronation as market leaders is only the case if you're measuring the market by number of schools. If you instead consider market share in terms of the number of pupils at the schools served by vendors, SIMS is on 47%, vs 36% for The Key. On this measure, Bromcom also do better, with their share shaking out at 15% by pupils vs 11% by number of schools. So perhaps a more accurate (but less snappy) title for this blog would be: "A Change Is Gonna Come, Or Isn't, Depending On The Metric You Use". 

2. Half Yourself? A Merry Little Christmas.

In 2014, by my records, SIMS served 18,247 English state schools. In the latest data, they're at 9,586. So not quite half yet... but close. 

What's more, by my calculations they've lost a little under 1,500 schools in the past year, up from around 1,200 in the previous year. SIMS only need to lose another 500 or so schools to have fewer than half the schools of their 2014 peak. If current trends hold, that'll happen within the next six months. 

Now, that doesn't mean SIMS is doomed, of course. Trends can change, and the SIMS team are busy developing SIMS Next Gen, which they describe as "The best cloud MIS in education". The roadmap is available online, and it shows all modules being ready by the end of 2026. So I guess a lot depends on how their remaining customers - and future prospective customers - view this product, and it's certainly too soon to come to a verdict on that based on data alone.

But, as befits the song title of this section, let's be Frank: the loss of 13.5% of the customer base from the previous year does not yet indicate any form of renaissance yet. Moreover, there are other considerations that could foreshadow another difficult year ahead. Reportedly, lots of SIMS schools are on 3 year contracts which started in April 2022, meaning 2025 will bring about those schools' first chance to exit their agreements for some time. The big question for SIMS is therefore how many of these can they hold on to? I'll have data on that in summer 2025, so we'll know soon enough!

3. You Win Again.

The metric I always use to work out who's winning is what percentage of all switching schools schools did each vendor win? And for Arbor, the rate is 76%; (their best ever),. The savvy among you may wonder if this is artificially boosted by schools switching from other products owned by The Key, but I looked into that, and even if you remove those they're winning 73%. 

That's the sixth year in a row that Arbor have had the highest win % amongst vendors, and the fourth in a row where they've been over 50%. Truly, all they do is win win win no matter what what what.

4. Belfast Child.

The English state school numbers don't always do Bromcom full justice. Sure, they're by some distance the next fastest growing MIS after Arbor, with around 2,500 schools in this segment of the market and a decent enough win rate of 21%. But the Simple Minds who look at those details along will assume they're forever in Arbor's shadow - and they'd be wong.

That's because the biggest story of the past year for this company is how they've fared outside England. In January 2024, the Northern Ireland Education Authority announced that Bromcom had won a contract to provide a MIS to their 1,100 schools. Yep, Bromcom won a whole country! 

They've also made some important gains in Wales, with Wrexham announcing that they're moving wholesale to Bromcom. Surely it can only be a matter of time before renowned actor and Wrexham AFC owner Ryan Reynolds rocks up at BETT on the Bromcom stand? And with most other Welsh LAs still being on SIMS, Bromcom will be doing all they can to make further inroads west of Hereford.

One other interesting nugget about Bromcom is that they do best in England with large MATs. For groups with 25+ schools, Bromcom has a 30% market share, vs 39% for Arbor and 21% for SIMS. This reinforces the perception that they're most likely to win when the procurement exercise is bigger and more complex.

5. In Between Days.

It's hard to know what to say about IRIS. On the one hand, they're now a bona fide challenger MIS. They've had 100+ schools for over a year, and that's my benchmark for when a vendor has properly become established in the market. They're also still growing, so things are going in the right direction.

That said, the pace of growth in the past year is likely lower than they'd have wanted. They're now at 113 schools (121 if you include iSAMS, their sister MIS), up from 105 (115 inc. iSAMS) the previous year. That's a significant slow-down in the annual rate of growth (8% increase in the past year vs 40% the year before). So while they're not exactly looking sickly, they still need to find The Cure for this year's relative stagnation to cement themselves as a viable alternative to the big 3.

6. I've got schools, they're multiplying.

In Spring 2023 I wrote about how Compass Education had achieved an eye-popping 300% term-on-term growth rate... by growing from 1 to 4 schools. Building on my past experience as a management consultant, I did some whizzy maths and projected that at this rate "in 2028 they will be working with over a billion schools." Well, you might have laughed at me then, but this year has seen them grow from 7 to 30 schools. That's a growth rate of over 300%, so I feel VINDICATED. Admittedly this is an annual rate whereas previously I was citing a termly metric, but still, I maintain that Compass's race to 1 billion is still on.

7. Papa's got a brand new bag.

Hoo boy, am I glad to see Satchel enter the MIS market! You can only imagine how much time I've wasted over the years trying to come up with puns for Arbor and Bromcom - but there's really just not much there to work with. Satchel, on the other hand, offer a whole world of bag-themed plays on words to explore. 

And more importantly, if you're a MIS purchaser, they give you another intriguing alternative to build into your procurement process. A significant chunk of secondary schools already use Satchel One, the homework and learning platform, so the company has an inbuilt advantage when launching their MIS product, in that they already have a commercial relationship many prospective customers. I'll be intrigued to see how their market share evolves in the coming years.

One other mildly interesting thing to note about Satchel is that they originally burst onto the UK scene under the Show My Homework brand. Their pitch as I remember it was that they DIDN'T have lots of modules, unlike the sprawling and clunky incumbent learning platforms of the day. They did one thing, but they did it jolly well. Over time that strategy evolved as they became Satchel, a platform combining lots of modules. Now, they're having a crack at competing in the broadest edtech category out there: a full MIS! I think their story tells you quite a lot about how edtech has evolved over the past decade. There was a time when it was ok to be a narrow product doing one thing well, but increasingly, customers, management teams and investors are backing fewer, broader vendors to do a range of things for them.

8. I'm still standing.

It's not been an easy few years for Juniper in the MIS market. They acquired Pupil Asset in 2020, and then launched a new MIS called Horizons in 2022. The combined Pupil Asset+Horizons share of schools now stands at 284, down from 467 in 2021. However, they're very much still in the fight, having launched a brand new MIS called Juniper MIS this term. Come back next year to see how that product has fared in its first year on the market...

9. Ready to die.

... But when you do come back, you won't find me talking about Advanced Learning anymore. The company announced almost two years ago that they would go end of life by August 2023, so honestly, I was surprised it took until now for the last of their schools to disappear from the England state school dataset. But they are now gone, so I guess the last time I'll mention them. Let's have a minute's silence for their ill-starred products: Facility CMIS and Cloud School (formerly Progresso). CMIS in particular will be fondly remembered by some veteran data managers out there, who enjoyed building MacGyver-esque customisations on top of their flexible (if anachronistic) database. Still, it's fair to say that their days have been numbered for a while. There was once a time when it seemed like they would be a Biggie, but in the end they didn't even manage to sustain being Smalls.

MIS MARKET MOVES (Spring 2024): good news for Bromcom; bad news for lovers of dataviz

DISCLAIMER: I have past - and who knows, maybe future! - commercial relationships with a number of MIS vendors. I'm also a co-founder of two assessment ventures - Smartgrade and Carousel - that exist in markets adjacent to the MIS. Nonetheless I aim to write this blog impartially, from the perspective of a neutral observer. This matters to me - it's basically the blog I wish had existed back when I was a MAT senior leader trying to get a handle on MIS and edtech. I also now provide MIS market consulting and data as a service and offer free, informal consultations on MIS procurement to schools and MATs. If you would like to discuss any of this, contact me via Twitter or LinkedIn. 

I love a good data visualisation: a revealing chart can really make a story pop. That's why I usually like to prepare these blogs using Tableau.

But this term, the UK MIS biggest story doesn't lend itself so well to charting. In January 2024, Bromcom announced that they'd been selected to replace SIMS as the MIS for all 1,100 schools in Northern Ireland. There's currently no other opportunity in the UK that covers 1,000+ schools in a single contract, so this was a BIG DEAL in MIS-world and the win is a credit to the Bromcom team. They're showing signs of being the front runner when bigger, more complex deals come up, like the 2022 West Sussex procurement, for example.

But bringing things back to me for a second, selfishly, this news makes for terrible dataviz. I mean, I could do a bar chart, but I don't think that's going to help you grasp what's going on. A Sankey would be fun, but not that informative. So for once I'm going to forego the dataviz and just let the numbers speak for themselves. Before this deal, Bromcom had around 2,000 English state schools (I'm guessing there have been a few other private and international schools, but my assumption is that the large majority of their customers are in the English state sector). This deal therefore grows the company's customer base by maybe 50% in one fell swoop. Nice work, Bromley Company!*

Turning now to the English state school market (because I just got my hands on the January 2024 data), here are my three biggest takeaways.

1. Arbor's win ratio keeps going up up up
By my calculations, Arbor won 454 schools in the period between October 2023 and January 2024. The other vendors combined won 53 schools. I think the best way to illustrate what's going on here is to look at Arbor's win rate compared to everyone else:

In 2019, Arbor won 30-40% of schools each term. In the last 4 terms, they've never been below 69% and in the most recent term they achieved a somewhat remarkable win-rate of 90% of switching schools. My first thought was: maybe these are mostly Scholarpack and Integris schools moving over? If so, it would have been less noteworthy given The Key owns all three systems and you'd imagine that over time they'll all end up on the Arbor platform. But on closer inspection, that's not really what's going on. Here's a chart of Arbor's wins, colour-coded by the vendor the school is leaving:

What jumps out is that over 300 schools have joined Arbor from SIMS in each of the past 3 terms. ScholarPack and Integris switches are growing in volume, but they still only account for 25% of the total number. So however you look at it, those Arbor folks are doing a lot of winning of schools that were up for grabs to allcomers.

2. For the first time since (my) records began, SIMS are serving under half of England's state schools.

In 2018, 78% of English state schools used SIMS. That share is now down to 49%. Contrast that with The Key, who over the same period have risen from 5% (at that time they had recently acquired ScholarPack but didn't yet own Arbor) to 39%. It's therefore no longer accurate to describe SIMS as the dominant market participant. They're still the biggest, but not by that much, and they no longer have a majority.

3. Horizons are in a bit of a slump
I can't see any schools won by Horizons since the summer term of 2023, and in the most recent term they lost another 25 schools, taking them to 404 in total. That's their third consecutive term of decline, having peaked at 503 schools in early 2023. 400+ schools is still a solid base (the closest challenger is IRIS, with 118 schools), but the team there will no doubt be aiming to reverse their fortunes asap. 

* I often get asked "Why are they called Bromcom?" Well, my understanding is that it's because their HQ is in BROMley, and they make software for COMputers. So I'm afraid it has nothing to do with the subgenre of films that includes Superbad or Dude, Where's My Car?, despite what you were perhaps hoping.

Bad Blood (MIS's version)

I made a new year's resolution to write less about MIS this year, because I have two very cool assessment ventures (Smartgrade and Carousel, thanks for asking) and they're growing fast and keeping me busy... and so imagine my delight when everything started kicking off in MIS world over the past two months. I've held off from blogging about it until now because, look, my comfort zone is writing about - and producing - pretty charts containing data. This blog is not called "Bring More Legal Disputes" for a reason. 

But as Taylor would say, now we got problems, and I'm not sure how we're going to solve them. And neither are you, because people keep DM-ing me to ask me what the hell is going on. So I've decided to set out a timeline of the key events in the words of those who are either directly involved or who I judge to be best placed to comment (Ms. Swift does not make the list). I'm not going to provide my own analysis since there appears to be open and ongoing litigation around these issues, and I think it’s important to let that play out. I'd encourage you to read the statements for yourselves and draw your own conclusions.

So, the timeline:

• In December 2023, SIMS put out a statement saying that "It has recently come to our attention that some customers moving to other MIS suppliers are being incorrectly advised to provide copies of (or access to) their SIMS and/or FMS database to the new provider for the purposes of migrating data to the new system." They went on to say that any third party encouraging usage of backup files "will be inducing [the customer] to breach their contract(s) with ESS."
• This month, Arbor and Bromcom put out their own statements in response. 
• Arbor's said that "many schools feel unable to switch MIS" as a result, and so they're offering an "Arbor Switching Guarantee" that means "Arbor will take legal responsibility when you transfer your school data to us via backup file" and "Arbor will cover the cost of your MIS license until your SIMS contract ends in March 2025".
• Bromcom's said that "If ESS initiate any legal action against schools, Bromcom will offer an indemnity to cover approved legal costs for these schools. Furthermore in the unlikely event that a damages payment to ESS materialises, Bromcom will also take responsibility for this payment." They also said that "Bromcom has applied to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and is applying to the High Court for an injunction to halt this anti-competitive behaviour by ESS Ltd." 
• SIMS swiftly responded with a blogpost the same day entitled "MIS migrations – setting the story straight". It started by saying "ESS’ intellectual property (IP) is being systematically and unlawfully misused by certain competitors, who are trying to conceal their misuse of ESS’ intellectual property through a smokescreen of allegations of anti-competitor behaviour." It also firmed up the timescales that led to their announcement, stating that "In October 2023, ESS obtained actionable evidence that its IP was being unlawfully used by certain competitors, who have subsequently tried to excuse their actions on the basis that this misuse was required to migrate customers from SIMS to their MIS. Specifically, we established that competitors were inducing our customers to breach their contracts with ESS by providing them with full backup copies of their SIMS databases, which in addition to customer data contain over 1.5 million lines of ESS program code and other valuable ESS IP."
• Bromcom's Chief Commercial Officer Chris Kirk then took to LinkedIn referring to this SIMS blog, and also citing ESS SIMS's submission to the Competition and Markets Authority in 2022 which included these words about the migration process from SIMS to Bromcom: "the Bromcom migration process is made up of .. a final week in which the Bromcom system goes live, data having been copied across from a backup of the school’s SIMS database". Kirk also cited the part of the submission that said "Implementation and migration to a new MIS is an organised and standardised process" and asked how this could be reconciled with SIMS's assertion that they only established that competitors were requesting backups in October 2023.
• SIMS published part 2 of their "setting the story straight" series, which stated that "It suits others to suggest we are making things difficult, but this is not true", and "For more than a decade migrating data from SIMS has been possible using SIMS Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Alternatively, a school can use our reporting facility or work with aggregators such as Wonde or Xporter (previously GroupCall Xporter) to extract the data for them." It also responded on Chris Kirk's point by saying "As long-standing users of the SIMS APIs, ParentPay reasonably assumed that anyone wanting to extract customer data from SIMS would be following the rules and either use SIMS reports, write programs that used the APIs, or engage with aggregators. Our understanding of the migration process was that schools made a backup copy of the SIMS database and then either produced XML reports from this copy or provided an ESS technical integrator with API access to the copy for the purposes of programmatic extraction."
• James Randall (Chief Architect of the SIMS suite from 2011 to 2014) wrote two LinkedIn posts with his views on the SIMS approach. He commented that "I understand what SIMS are doing here is not just banning sharing a backup but also the running of scripts and third party tools and so even doing a data dump is not allowed. The defence to this being that SIMS are "protecting schools" from bad and misinterpreted data. That, to put it bluntly, is the new MIS vendors problem - not SIMS. And is something that could still occur with the "official" API usage (it does get misinterpreted by Partners, of course it does)."
• Schools Week have also been tracking the issue. Their article  includes comments from Stone King, who say they “have been approached by a number of very concerned clients in relation to this issue”. The article quotes Tony Pidgeon, a partner at the firm, saying: “We believe the stance taken by ESS will have a significant impact throughout the sector on the ability of schools to successfully switch provider and we are in the process of reviewing the matter in detail with those clients.”
• Other notable comment has been made by the Finnemores (both previously SIMS employees under the previous owners) and WhichMIS, who have published three recent blogs on the subject.

So that's where we are. I'm not planning to write about every twist and turn as this story develops - when more happens I'm hoping Schools Week will report on it and I'll merrily repost them on all social platforms (with the possible exception of Instagram - my output on there is mostly weak puns and photos of bread I have baked. You probably don't want to follow me on Instagram). Instead, I'll look forward to covering future changes in market share, which of course may well be influenced by how this whole thing plays out...

MIS MARKET MOVES WINTER 2023: Has SIMS stabilised?

DISCLAIMER: I have past commercial relationships with a number of MIS vendors. I'm also a co-founder of two assessment ventures - Smartgrade and Carousel - that exist in markets adjacent to the MIS. Nonetheless I aim to write this blog impartially, from the perspective of a neutral observer. This matters to me - it's basically the blog I wish had existed back when I was a MAT senior leader trying to get a handle on MIS and edtech. I also now provide MIS market datasets as a service and offer free, informal consultations on MIS procurement to schools and MATs. If you would like to discuss any of this, contact me via Twitter or LinkedIn. 

A year ago, reflecting on the news that 18% of SIMS's schools had left them over the previous 12 months, I wrote:

In some senses the MIS market data for the next year tells an even more important than this batch of data from the past year. 2022 was about seeing how big the decline was; but we've known for some time that a decline was inevitable. The big question now is: can SIMS stop the bleeding and return to a relatively stable market share? Come back next Christmas to find out! 

I said this for two reasons:

1. ParentPay (owners of SIMS) had imposed three year contracts on SIMS customers, at considerable reputational cost, and if all had gone well with the strategy they would have meant that schools became locked in over the past year, stabilising their market share.
2. I am a canny storyteller and I wanted to give you a reason to keep coming back for jovial MIS market analysis and pretty data visualisation.

So the news you're all waiting for is: did SIMS stabilise?

Nope:

This chart shows the percentage of a vendor's schools that left them over the preceding 12 months. SIMS churned 9.9% of their schools this past year, after losing 18.2% in 2022, taking them down to an overall market share of exactly 50% of English state schools. So while the rate of decline is lower, it's still a major drop compared to any other historical benchmark: healthy MIS generally churn at 2% of less. It's also particularly concerning for SIMS given that their 3 year contract initiative was presumably designed precisely to stop schools switching. 

So what's happened? Well, first, the 3 year thing didn't get implemented cleanly - the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigated, and then came to an agreement with SIMS that allowed certain schools to apply for a 12 month break clause, which may have led to a group of delayed switchers. Second, the main MIS challengers all have policies now that mean schools won't pay until their existing MIS agreement ends if they switch while in contract. And third, the SIMS cloud product (Next Gen) is being released module by module, and according to the latest plans it won't be "fully complete" until 2026.

But there's another thing that shouldn't be overlooked: when you're talking to your customers about controversial contract changes, it's hard then to pivot to discussing with them why they should be loyal to you. You see quite a high turnover of staff in edtech account manager roles across the sector, but the people buying MIS may have spent years - even decades - in a MIS commissioning role. What's more, buyers have long memories, and in my experience the stickiest memories are the negative experiences (which is a point that other vendors would also benefit from bearing in mind). So while I've heard some recent noises about the company opening up and softening their messaging, in order to change market perceptions I think they'd need a sustained multi-year charm offensive that helps customers to move beyond the headlines of recent times. 

Anyway, there are plenty of stories other than SIMS's decline, so let's get to those shall we? First, here's the data; my analysis of what it shows is below. 

1. The Key, led by Arbor, now have 37% of all English state schools. Following a year during which The Key completed the purchase of Integris from RM, the company now boasts 3 products with a combined market share of 37%. If the rate of change from the last 12 months continues, The Key will have comfortably more schools than SIMS within two years. Or to put it another way, by 2026 when SIMS Next Gen is a fully fledged cloud MIS, their position as market leader may be a thing of the past. 
2. Arbor's share of wins in 2022/23 was its best ever. Arbor won 1,212 schools in the past year - 71% of the 1,706 schools who switched. Last year the equivalent number was 61%; before that they were never above 50%. Admittedly, they were helped by 150 or so schools moving from products that are now within the group (i.e. ScholarPack and Integris), but even ignoring those, by my calculations Arbor would have won a record two thirds of switchers. This is, unarguably, a dominant position. 
3. Bromcom are up to a 12.5% market share when measured by pupils. The only challenger achieving notable growth is Bromcom. They added 368 schools this last year, which would have looked like a chart-topping number in just about any year prior to 2020. What's more, their share of secondaries is just shy of 20%, putting them in second position in this segment ahead of Arbor (16%) and behind SIMS (62%). That's impressive by any standard! All that said, it remains a head-scratcher as to why they're not closer to parity with Arbor. Clearly lots of schools like and trust the system, but I do wonder whether reputational issues linked to their high profile legal action against two MATs continue to hold them back. They did win the case with United Learning - and in fairness to Bromcom it is clear from the judgment that significant mistakes were made during the procurement process - but then again (to quote Schools Week) 'the judge also said that no rule breaches were "deliberate" or in "bad faith".' So if you're a MIS commissioner reading that, are you more likely to see Bromcom as being vindicated, or do you see a business that might come for you if you unwittingly don't get your process right? Or, to put it another way, I feel like a charm offensive could benefit Bromcom too! 
4. Ed:gen is over 100 schools. When I looked at the termly data from May 2023 there was not much evidence of recent growth for IRIS's Ed:gen, with just 4 schools added in the first two terms of the academic year. But it turns out that didn't tell the real story of their year, because a strong summer took them to 115 schools (2022: 86). Personally I think the 100 school threshold is significant - at that point you've proven that a significant number of schools want what you're offering, and you have an established customer base giving you feedback that helps you to improve your product. Ed:gen also have a notable foothold with secondaries (which is a harder segment to serve than primaries), meaning they're well-placed for further expansion across the board.
5. Juniper had a tough year, but it's not all bad news. Juniper's two MIS (Horizons and PupilAsset, which I group together for the purposes of analysis) dropped from 503 to 429 schools. That gives them a higher churn rate than any of the established vendors (15.5%). Obviously that's not the trajectory you want to see as a challenger MIS, though there is some mitigation in the fact that most of the losses link to three largish MAT contracts (Broad Horizons, Diocese of Norwich, White Horse Federation). Set those aside and there were just 12 losses alongside 4 wins. So while Juniper are presumably facing tough competition for their largest MAT contracts, smaller MATs and standalone schools may still be happy enough to hang around. Now clearly that's not nearly as good as demonstrating a growth in the customer base, but it does leave hope that there's a foundation from which to grow if they can improve their go-to-market strategy.
6. Compass are up to 7 schools. A year ago, Compass (the Australian HQ-ed MIS) notched their first English school. Since then they've added 6, taking them to 7. So there's some way to go to follow Ed:gen into the 100+ club, but then again, it took Arbor 5 years and Bromcom 7 years to get to that mark. Building a MIS business is a long-term game. 
7. The Key are starting to consolidate onto one platform. 183 schools left ScholarPack and Integris over the past year, but only 30 of those moved to a competitor; the rest stayed within The Key (mostly moving to Arbor, naturally). I've been keeping an eye out for this kind of managed move since ScholarPack was acquired in 2018, but until this year there was little sign of any formal corporate initiative to consolidate the customer base. I think the caution was wise - you don't want to rush customers to change their MIS until you're confident you can keep them happy during the process - and even now, it doesn't feel like schools are being pushed particularly hard into switching. So taken together with Arbor's low churn (0.4% over the past year), there are signs that The Key will be able to hold on to most of their schools during a possible product rationalisation process.
8. Advanced are... still here? 51 schools are still using Advanced products, despite their MIS going end of life in August 2023! 109 did leave them this year though, and interestingly, Ed:gen snagged a healthy 23 of those (Arbor: 46; Bromcom: 30). I guess what this shows you is that while it's hard to win schools, it can also be hard to lose them! No wonder people are fighting hard to enter the market. On which note...
9. There's no sign yet of other challengers breaking into the market. Satchel, ET-Aims and Go4Schools have all announced their intentions to sell MIS to English state schools, but they're not showing up in this dataset yet. That's not to say they don't have schools in other markets, or customers piloting modules short of a full MIS, but they're not yet fully fledged MIS vendors.

How to think about Oak

I’ve been struggling to work out how to think about Oak. It’s an initiative that has sparked a lot of debate, and so much has changed since the plucky beginnings that a new framing feels necessary. Indeed, there are people who believe ideologically that Oak should not exist. I am not one of them, for reasons I’ll outline below, but I do think the debate is legitimate, and the nay-sayers have made some fair points that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. 

So here’s how I suggest we should now be thinking about Oak: 

• Forget about the acorn. Oak is no longer the organisation it was in its first year. When Oak was first dreamt up, it was a hastily pulled together Covid response with a charmingly Challenge Anneka feel to it. Its first iteration was put together with £500,000 of startup funding. But now it has £43m over 3 years, plus a recently announced additional £2m to develop AI tools, and that just makes it a fundamentally different organisation, albeit with key leaders still in place. To be clear, I don’t think this is a good or bad thing; I just think it’s important to assess what Oak is up to now through a different lens from the original incarnation. So let’s consign “Old Oak” (or surely: Acorn) to history, and turn our attention to “New Oak”. 
• Oak is neither independent nor free. Oak describes itself as “an independent public body”. This has been a source of irritation to some, who make the point that the Oak’s articles of association describe a sole member, and that member is the Secretary of State for Education. There are some protections and operational realities that I imagine make it feel more independent than other parts of government - the Reach Foundation is still a “Guardian Member”, and the framework agreement does say “DfE shall not prescribe or approve the content of curriculum packages or educational resources” - but that’s not the same as being constitutionally independent. I’m also not sure that “free” is the right lens through which to view them either. Of course it’s correct that teachers can use their resources without paying, but £43m over 3 years equates to around £700 per English state school per year. Now, if the resources are high quality and widely used that may prove to be great value - but it’s not a trivial amount of money. 
• It’s annoying when you own a business and the government competes with you… but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Oak’s existence means that the government is effectively now both a publisher and a provider of education resources and technology. So if you too are a publisher or provider of education technology, that could feel jolly annoying! 

Now, I must declare an interest here, in that I’m co-founder of two edtech businesses that are at the very least adjacent to Oak, and we partner with education publishers who are at least somewhat in competition with Oak. So clearly I am a candidate to be annoyed by Oak. But honestly, I’ve never really objected to their existence philosophically. I guess I see government intervention as conceptually legitimate in a taxpayer-funded sector. That doesn’t mean I usually think that government intervention will be a good use of taxpayer money; but in principle I’m ok with the government being a bit interventionist if they see a reason to do so. The Teaching Vacancies Service is a good case in point: I guess if you’re TES you’d rather the government stayed out of this part of the market, but as a taxpayer I’m fine with the government weighing in here. The way I see it is that it’s down to the sector to innovate and differentiate in response. Instead of being angry at government intervention, I’d prefer to focus on being different and/or better. 

 

That said, Oak doesn’t get a permanent free pass to expand however it wants. Trade associations (most notably BESA and the Publishers’ Association) have been understandably upset at Oak, for example for allowing their content to be made available for free globally. I have some sympathy here too: while technically I can’t quite see how geo-blocking could have worked in practice, it clearly wasn’t the government’s intention to undermine the thriving UK curriculum export market when they decided to back Oak. And yet, that may be exactly what happens once their resources are freely available everywhere. So we should all keep an eye out for overreach, and call it out when it happens. 

• The above points don’t have much bearing on whether “New Oak” will be good. Now, a lot of the public debate I’ve seen about Oak has dwelt on points 1-3 above. I think they’re interesting, but honestly not that important for how we see the future of Oak. We all come from somewhere, but that doesn’t define our future; Arms Length Bodies (which is what Oak is) can do good things without being independent; and services that disrupt sectors can still be good, even if they annoy incumbents. So I’d prefer to focus on other points when thinking about Oak. On which note… 

• Oak is optional. One common complaint about Oak is that it will become a de facto national curriculum with implicit Ofsted backing, given the organisation’s subject advisory role. Oak refute this narrative strongly - they describe themselves as “entirely optional” in their 3 year strategy document. Still, I don’t think it’s silly to worry about Oak being somehow imposed on schools - and no doubt there will be some who feel pressure to use Oak resources as a “safe” option compared to doing your own thing. 

But our education sector has a rich tapestry of heads, MAT leaders, LA staff and teachers, who all get a say in what a school’s curriculum looks like. I just can’t imagine any world in which this complex, ideologically diverse sector comes to a shared agreement that Oak is the clear gold standard in all subjects. Instead, I see it as a bit like the quest for a “winning” standard in many parts of the technology world - and that usually ends up this way. 

 

We can even see some evidence for how some will steer clear of Oak from the reaction of United Learning (UL), which has set up its own paid-for alternative. The UL CEO Jon Coles has been pretty forthright in his disapproval for New Oak, and I think this shows clearly that MAT CEOs aren’t just going to roll over and accept the imposition of a fully resourced national curriculum. 

• It’s too early to decide how good New Oak will be. It’s important to remind ourselves that Oak is rewriting everything right now, so basically none of us knows how good their stuff will be across the board. (There are 17 early release units on their website at the time of writing, and the early comments I’ve seen about those are positive, but so far it’s a very small sample size.) I also think it’s a stretch to expect all Oak’s resources to be equally good - their procurement process means that a wide range of curriculum partners are right now beavering away to produce New Oak’s new materials. I’d be surprised if some of these aren’t seen as good given the number of credible organisations involved; and I’d be equally surprised if there aren’t holes to be picked. 

Another factor here is that public procurement is a somewhat untested way to develop this kind of product. While I’d expect Oak to have careful Quality Assurance processes, it’s just a big undertaking to generate content in this way. So let’s not jump to too many conclusions before we’ve had a chance to see their new stuff. And certainly, let’s not judge them because of whatever preconceptions we might have. 

• But we do know that Oak’s tech is good (and limited). One reason I remain optimistic about Oak is that they’ve played a blinder with their tech. The reputation of government-funded technology is, shall we say, not great; and yet from day 1 Oak have made a bunch of really smart decisions that mean they have a fast, intuitive, and (crucially) limited tech product. I would describe Oak as a Lesson Delivery Platform (and I think they’d call it something similar too). It’s certainly not a full Learning Platform - the system doesn’t contain student details, for example - and I see no evidence that they’re likely to change this approach. That leaves space for the education technology sector to do things that Oak aren’t attempting, while Oak ensures that its resources are quick and easy to access. You can even use their code if you want, as it’s all available with an MIT open source license. 

My eyebrows were raised somewhat by the government passing them £2m to spend on AI tooling - if the government wants to intervene here, personally I’d have preferred to see a public competition to solicit innovations in the field of AI. One of my ventures, Carousel Learning, got its first £75k of seed funding from a highly competitive COVID-response funding round run by Innovate UK, and we’ve grown to work with over 2,000 schools without any other public support - so you really shouldn’t underestimate what the UK edtech scene can achieve with a bit of government support. That said, my understanding is that alongside their own AI-powered products, Oak is also looking to index and make their curriculum content usable by third party products as a reliable education foundation for AI models. If that’s the case, it has potential to be useful; if they go much beyond that remit, well, I guess that could be a sign of overreach. But we’re not there yet. 

• Oak should be at most a set of foundations; not the whole building. Essentially then, I think New Oak will be a slick but minimal technology stack containing good-but-not-perfect content. No doubt some schools will use their resources extensively; but I imagine more will dip in and out. Oak will be used for cover; for future unexpected periods of remote learning; and as a reference point when developing, refining and filling gaps in a school’s existing curriculum offer. Teachers will still want to produce their own booklets and slides, and they will no doubt remain keen to buy in innovative non-Oak curriculum materials. 

To put it another way, my hope for Oak is that it becomes a minimum baseline for acceptable curriculum quality. Schools and curriculum providers will be free to take different approaches, but content creators will need to be able to explain how their stuff is better than Oak. And honestly, if you’re worried about Oak becoming the sole national curriculum, I think you’re being way too pessimistic about the ingenuity and independent-mindedness of our sector. No government edict is going to make two English teachers tackle An Inspector Calls in the same way. Rather, I think the process of teachers producing high quality stuff will be considerably easier once Oak exists as a reference point. Which leads me on to my last point… 

• Oak had to be free! My biggest concern about Oak was that there would be limitations on the use and reuse of their materials. I blogged about this last year, and I continue to be firmly of the belief that the only “good” Oak is a free Oak. Curriculum isn’t the kind of thing where you can produce something, publish it and use it forever more without any changes. Every year we evolve our understanding of how to teach, how technology can help with that teaching process, and what knowledge and teaching techniques will lead to the best outcomes in terms of student learning. So to make the most of Oak we need everyone - including edtech vendors and curriculum providers - to be able to reference, reuse and ultimately improve Oak. It would have been awful if we spent £43m creating all this content, and then didn’t allow every part of the sector to play a part in maximising Oak’s potential. It was brave of Oak (and no doubt complicated in terms of licensing arrangements) to agree to an open license, and now they’ve done so, we can all think about how we make the most of their existence. It’s also not just a national initiative - I’m not aware of any publicly funded and fully resources open curriculum anywhere else in the world. So if you work in a school or an edtech venture, whether you like it or not you’re now part of this experiment. 

I’ll certainly be looking at how Oak’s resources can work with my edtech products, and I’m going to approach the question of partnership positively. The bottom line is that if Oak’s resources are good, and if they can avoid overreach, then I continue to think we’ll end up being grateful as a sector that they exist.

MIS MARKET MOVES SUMMER 2023: fewer than half of primaries are now using SIMS

UPDATED DISCLAIMER: I have past commercial relationships with a number of MIS vendors. I'm also a co-founder of two assessment ventures - Smartgrade and Carousel - that exist in markets adjacent to the MIS. Nonetheless I aim to write this blog impartially, from the perspective of a neutral observer. This matters to me - it's basically the blog I wish had existed back when I was a MAT senior leader trying to get a handle on MIS and edtech. I also now provide MIS market datasets as a service and offer free, informal consultations on MIS procurement to schools and MATs. If you would like to discuss any of this, contact me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

In autumn 2018, SIMS was the chosen school Management Information System (MIS) for 76% of England's state primaries. At that time, Bromcom and Arbor's combined market share was 2%. In the five years since then, we've witnessed the kind of shift that happens rarely in the often slow-moving world of edtech. The summer 2023 data, which I just got my hands on this week, shows that SIMS's market share is now below 50% of primaries for the first time since I've been tracking the market. What's more, The Key (who now own Arbor, ScholarPack and RM Integris) are up to 40% between those three brands. So it's not even really accurate anymore to describe The Key as a challenger: on current trends, The Key will be the largest supplier of MIS to the primary sector within a year.

As always, here are some pretty charts summarising the latest data, followed by a few more observations:

1. Arbor is steadily catching up with SIMS. Arbor is up to 4,240 schools overall, compared to 11,545 for SIMS. Nobody else breaks 2,000. They've now been the fastest grower for at least ten terms in a row.
2. Bromcom keeps growing too, with 1,851 schools and 11% of the market in the latest data when measured by pupil numbers. They've captured 14% of academies, and they're now up to 4% of LA schools following some notable procurement successes. Arbor remains the faster grower, with over twice the number of schools on its books, but Bromcom is doing a good job of maintaining a growth trajectory, and stands out as the clear third place vendor. 
3. It was a poor term for the other challengers. I was pleasantly surprised to see IRIS Ed:gen rise from 18 schools to 86 schools during 2022 (incorporating schools still on iSAMS). While they were no doubt helped by SIMS's bummer of a year, that's impressive growth by any standards, and marked them out as a potential breakout candidate in 2023. Well, that hasn't happened yet. In the past two terms, they've added just 4 schools net to be serving 90 schools in total. And things have been even worse for Juniper Horizons, which has 487 school customers (including those still on Pupil Asset), down from 510 at the same time last year. Three terms without growth might be considered something of a warning sign, and I wouldn't be surprised if other MIS are starting to eye up their customer base. In Norfolk, for example, where Juniper have over half of their schools, Horizons/Pupil Asset lost 10 schools in the last year. I'll keep an eye on market share in this LA as it seems like a bellwether for the broader performance of the MIS.
4. Compass came from Ireland, and now they're doublin'. As I've mentioned in previous posts, until recently I was an advisor to Compass, the Australia HQ-ed MIS who established a strong presence in Ireland in recent years before winning their first English school in late 2022. In the January 2023 dataset they were up to 4 schools (from 1 the previous term), and that number has now doubled to 8. Compass are the first truly new entrant to the market since Pupil Asset, SchoolPod and iSAMS a decade ago, so they're offering us a fascinating real-time case study in whether it's possible for outside players to break through in England. For a first year in a very competitive market, this is a solid start.
5. Plenty of schools are still switching. When SIMS moved to a "3 year lock-in" strategy in late 2021, their hope will presumably have been that after a brief flurry of switching, schools would stick with them on longer contracts while they got a cloud alternative to their core locally-hosted product to market. Yeah, that's not happened, though. Progress is being made with SIMS Next Gen - some primary assessment features were recently announced, for example, but it's some way away from being a finished all-phase product. In the meantime, 601 schools switched MIS between the Spring and Summer 2023 terms, and fully 474 of those were moving away from SIMS. Or to put it another way, more schools left SIMS last term than switched from any system in any full year between 2010 and 2013. I'd say we're on track for 1,300 to 1,600 switchers during the academic year, the majority of which are leaving SIMS.
6. Advanced still have 149 schools on their books. Earlier this year Advanced announced that their MIS products were going end of life. So far, only 9 schools have left them this year, meaning that 149 need to find a new MIS home by September 1st. So alongside SIMS leakage, this is another factor keeping the switching market buoyant in 2023.
7. Finance is now firmly part of the MIS equation. LAs are increasingly procuring a new finance system at the same time as a MIS. Bromcom have been proudly announcing big LA finance wins. The Key have rebranded RM Finance as Arbor Finance. IRIS is growing a state school MIS business off the back of its popular MAT finance system. So while you clearly can sell a MIS without a finance system, you'll increasingly find yourself in the minority if that's what you're doing.

One final thought on what it might take for a newer challenger to break through. I don't think it's enough to be "another solid cloud option" anymore - Bromcom and Arbor are too-well established and will be perceived by many as a safer option if there's no clear and compelling differentation. So instead I think you need to focus on breakthrough features to stand out from the crowd. That's hard in MIS world, when you may feel a pressure to have an extensive list of modules just to participate in the market (and that number seems to go up all the time). But I can't see a tonne of other ways to get heard in such a competitive market.

MIS MARKET MOVES SPRING 2023: The Key are now in a third of English state schools

Disclaimer: I have past and present commercial relationships with many MIS vendors, including an ongoing role as an advisor for Compass. I'm also a co-founder of two assessment startups - Smartgrade and Carousel - that exist in markets adjacent to the MIS. Nonetheless I aim to write this blog impartially, from the perspective of a neutral observer. This matters to me - it's basically the blog I wish had existed back when I was a MAT senior leader trying to get a handle on MIS and edtech. I also now provide MIS market datasets and reports as a service and offer free, informal consultations on MIS procurement to schools and MATs. If you would like to discuss any of this, contact me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

I recently got hold of the January 2023 census data. Truthfully, the release at this time of year is never earth-shattering - it tracks schools who move MIS between October and January, and that's just not a super-popular time to switch school systems.

But there were a few things of interest in the numbers, so I'm cranking out a blogpost regardless. As usual, here are the charts, with my analysis below.

1. SIMS had their worst winter since (my) records began. SIMS lost 242 schools over the period. That may not sound like much, given they lost over a thousand in each of the preceding two terms, but it's more than they've ever lost over that part of the year since I started tracking things over a decade ago (the next highest was last year, when they lost 228 schools). That's significant, in that it indicates that SIMS's move to 3 year contracts (and associated break clause controversy) hasn't stemmed the tide yet.
2. Arbor had their most dominant term ever. 301 schools switched MIS over the period. 236 of those (76%) moved to Arbor. This may in part be because other vendors don't encourage schools to switch over the Christmas period; but still, it's clear that Arbor remain the leading challenger.
3. Once the RM Integris acquisition is finalised, The Key will be serving over a third of English state schools. The Key are buying RM Integris, and providing that sale completes following the current CMA investigation then the group will be providing MIS to 34% of the country's state schools. SIMS are at 55%. So I think we can all officially stop referring to SIMS as the dominant market player - there are now two big fish, and only one of them is growing. To misquote the Urban Cookie Collective, they are The Key and they've got the secret.
4. Compass grew by 300%. In the autumn census Compass had their first school show up. Well, now they're up to 4, giving them a 300% term-on-term growth rate. If they can keep this kind of growth rate up for the next five years then it is a statistical fact that in 2028 they will be working with over a billion schools. (This is the kind of quality analysis I provide to companies who come to me for advisory services.)
5. Spare a thought for Rufford Primary School, the most recent Advanced adopter. Since this data was captured, Advanced have announced that they're shuttering Cloud School this summer. That leaves their 158 schools just two terms to find another home. The news isn't in itself that surprising - the writing was on the wall once their largest customer Academies Enterprise Trust switched to Arbor a year or two ago - but the short timeframes for customers to find a new home is somewhat eyebrow-raising. Which brings me to this blog's "Gah That Sucks" award winners of 2023: Rufford Primary School! Rufford joined Invictus Learning Trust - a MAT-wide Advanced customer - in September 2021, and switched to Advanced last autumn, presumably so that the Trust could have all schools on the same system. So do spare a thought for the poor folks in that school office who trained up on a new system, only to find that they'll have to move to their third MIS in the space of a year by the summer. Ouch.

To conclude, I'd just say that the next set of data (based on the May 23 school census, which I usually get hold of around August time) will be a biggie. It's traditionally been the period when you see the most SIMS switches in a year, because SIMS contracts used to run until 31st March. So if the move to 3 year contracts is going to help them, we should see that reflected in the May data. In 2021 (before the three year contract drama kicked off), 456 schools left SIMS, so if they can keep their losses below that threshold then I guess that's a win for them? But if they lose say 500+ then it'll be hard to see how all the suboptimal publicity has been worth it.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm hiring for a customer support associate at the moment to work with me at Smartgrade / Carousel. Edtech / customer service experience would be great, though it is not essential - the ideal candidate will be smart and quick to learn and as geekily excited as I am to work in the world of school assessment. Pay is £22-30k. If you think that might be you, or you know someone who could be interested, then apply here.