You know what's a good feeling if you're a niche school data blogger? When people you admire agree to do reciprocal guest blogs with you, that's what! Which is a roundabout way of saying that Justin Menard, the Canada-based founder of LISTedTECH, has written the the following very cool piece about the English SIS market, and allowed me to post it here (you'll also find a copy on his blog). He has a way of visualising the movement of customers from legacy to new solutions that I think you're going to like - it helped me discover things I hadn't noticed before.
LISTedTECH measures and tracks systems used in educational institutions throughout the world - check out their website for more information. But for now, read on...
Back in November, I got the chance to meet Joshua Perry, writer of the “Bring more data” blog. Joshua has been following the Management Information System (MIS) used in the UK K12 market. Have a look at some of his posts http://bringmoredata.blogspot.com.
After discussing our mutual interests in educational systems’ market trends, we thought it could be interesting for the two of us to swap data and write a post using the other’s data. So this is my attempt.
Joshua's data is very granular. LISTedTECH looks at K12 data from the school district level, while he looks at it from the school level (using governmental data).
I created four historical graphs (2010-2014 to 2015-2019) of primary vs secondary level trends where every line represents a school. The left side shows the previous campus Student Informations System (SIS), measured by the number of institutions, and the right side shows the new SIS.
A few observations:
Primary level
- Pearson e1, followed by SIMS, lost the most customers in the 2010-14 timeline.
- SIMS, followed by Advanced Learning, lost the most customers in the 2015-19 timeline.
- SIMS had the biggest customer increase in the 2010-14 timeline. However, they not only lost this advantage in the 2015-19 timeline, they actually came last as uptake in customers.
- Overall, ScholarPack, RM Integris, and Arbor are the three companies with the most new customers within the 2015-19 time frame.
Secondary level
- SIMS and RM Integris had the biggest customer increase in the 2010-14 timeline.
- Advance Learning, followed by SIMS, lost the most customers in the 2010-14 and 2015-19 timelines.
- Overall, SIMS and Bromcom are the two companies with the most new customers within the 2015-19 time frame.
Another interesting tidbit is that the systems used in the UK are completely different - as in I don’t recognize a single system used in the UK that would be used in North America.
A PDF version is available to help you zoom into the graphs.
For any questions about the data used for the graphs in this post, please contact Joshua Perry, writer of “Bring more data”.
