MIS MARKET MOVES SUMMER 2022: SIMS lose 1,471 schools in a term

Disclaimer: I have past and present commercial relationships with many MIS vendors, including an ongoing involvement with Compass, an Australia-based MIS that is launching in the UK. 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.

After buying SIMS in the summer of 2021, new owners ParentPay had some big calls to make. With customers moving to competitors at an increasingly rapid rate, they had to make both technical and commercial decisions: 

1. Technically, should they persist with SIMS Primary, the pre-existing cloud initiative, or ditch it and build something new from scratch? 
2. Commercially, how should they present to the market? A charm offensive, perhaps, or discounted pricing to keep schools onside? Or could they find a way to somehow keep schools and raise prices?

Well, as we now know, SIMS chose to: 

• Shelve SIMS Primary and replace the project with SIMS Next Gen. 
• Move all customers on to 3 year contracts by March 2022*.
• Raise prices (in their own words, by offering "the certainty of a fixed cost for the first year and a capped price increase for years two and three"). 

I don't want to get into the ethics of such an approach in this blog, but I do want to reflect on what you might have hoped for if you were the management team behind such a move? SIMS had lost 6% of its schools over the previous year, and so you'd surely be bracing yourselves for an increase on that. It follows that you'd probably bite someone's hand off for 7% churn in the following year? Maybe you'd even take 10% if you felt what you gained in return was valuable enough? 

Well, we now have data covering English state schools over the crucial period up to May 2022, and we can see that this is what they got:

What you're looking at in the first tab of that viz is SIMS's annualised churn (the number of schools leaving in the past 12 months as a percentage of total customer base a year ago), recalculated each term. And what jumps out is that between January 2022 and May 2022, churn more than doubled (to 13% from 6%). That equates to a loss of 1,471 schools over the term, and 2,024 schools over the past year. The only other major MIS in recent times to churn at that level is Advanced Learning, and they've dropped from around 1,300 schools a decade ago to under 200 schools today. The leading cloud vendors, in contrast, all churn around 1% these days. So I think it's fair to say that 1,471 schools in one term is a lot by any measure!

Anyway, this is not just a story about SIMS, so let's move on from churn and take a look at the overall market data:

As always, these Tableau vizzes are designed to let you explore the data yourself; but here are my reflections having had a proper rummage through:  

1. Arbor remain the leading challenger and are now the second largest vendor overall. Arbor won 1,033 schools in one term, taking their total to 2,913. That's happened less than two years after they passed 1,000 schools in total. They also won the most schools in each of the following categories: primary, secondary, PRU&Special, Academies and LA schools. The performance with LA schools was particularly eye-catching, acquiring 447 schools over the period (the next most was Bromcom with 65), bolstered by their prominent position on the Herts for Learning MIS framework.
2. Bromcom are also making big strides. In any other term, Bromcom's numbers would have made them the box office performer. They added 367 schools - more than Arbor has won in any previous term, and similar to the number Bromcom won over the previous five terms combined. And this only includes a handful of the schools they expect to join following their success with the recent West Sussex tender - so we know there's more to come. It's also notable that Bromcom are now the third largest vendor when the market is measured by pupil numbers, with RM Integris dropping down to fourth.
3. Other challengers are picking up the pace. IRIS Ed:Gen (a version of iSAMS for state schools) gained 40 schools and Juniper Horizons (a reworked version of Pupil Asset) gained 31. For IRIS the change is particularly noteworthy, since they only started the period with 18 schools.** Both will find reasons to be cheerful in that performance.
4. ScholarPack aren't going anywhere either. Given that ScholarPack and Arbor now share an owner (The Key), it's reasonable to speculate as to whether ScholarPack schools will be migrated on to the Arbor platform at some point. Well, the data shows us no sign of that happening yet, with ScholarPack gaining a healthy 93 schools during the term and losing just 2. So it looks like the company is committed to dual-running both products for the time being. 
5. SIMS are down to a 60% market share. I know I already banged on about SIMS' churn above, but it's worth taking time to acknowledge their overall performance too. Beneath the 60% headline figure, what stood out to me is that SIMS are down to 50% of all academies (you can see this for yourself by using the checkboxes on the first tab of the viz to select academies only). SIMS dropped below a 50% share of large (30+ school) MATs in autumn 2019; and as I've said before, larger MATs lead the way in terms of how smaller MATs behave. I'll dive into the various different MAT size categories in more detail when I look at annual data based on the Autumn 2022 census.
6. What to make of RM Integris? I have lost count of how many times I've written a paragraph about Integris that can be summarised as "they didn't lose that many schools, but they didn't really win anything either". If ever there was a term to break that trend, this was it. And you know what...? They didn't lose that many schools, but they didn't really win anything either! 🤷‍♂️ 
7. Advanced are in serious trouble. As was to be expected after losing the AET contract to Arbor, Advanced dropped from 244 to 186. Their annualised churn is at almost 40%. It's hard to see a way back from here.
8. Faronics are gone... I married a Canadian, so I was kind of excited when Vancouver-based Faronics came to the UK in 2018. Well, it's time for me to get un-excited because they're now officially out of the English state school game after their lone school migrated to Bromcom. I'm honestly a bit sad aboot it.
9. ... But new names are coming. I was interested to hear SIMS founder Phil Neal big up the ET-AIMS team on a recent fireside chat with Nick Finnemore - so I'd expect to see some schools for them in future updates. And Compass, the Australian MIS I work with, have a healthy pipeline of schools to onboard in the coming months too. When you put those two alongside IRIS, Juniper, Bromcom and Arbor, it means there are now six legitimate growth cloud options. If I was a school procuring an MIS I'd want to take a quick look at all of them before kicking off a procurement exercise - you've got more choice than ever before!

A final thought about SIMS: while this set of data is noteworthy, I'd argue the next 12 months will actually be a better indicator of the product's long term health. I guess 13% churn is bearable if it stops there! But if schools continue to leave in high volumes this autumn, and then more switch away from SIMS in 2023, it'll become increasingly hard for ESS to complete a turnaround. In theory I assume the three year lock-in was designed to prevent further churn beyond Easter 2022, but with that arrangement under investigation by the CMA, and leading MIS vendors publicising policies that only charge schools for a new MIS once their old contract has expired, I don't think we should see it as guaranteed that the SIMS switching will stop anytime soon.

* Schools were subsequently offered a six month break clause, but the broader strategy has essentially remained unchanged.

** Those 18 pre-existing schools were technically on iSAMS, but I group them together for the purposes of this analysis since the products are close relations.

The latest on SIMS Next Gen

Disclaimer: I have past and present commercial relationships with many MIS vendors, including an ongoing involvement with Compass, an Australia-based MIS that is launching in the UK. 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'll soon be getting hold of the May MIS census figures from English state schools, and it's a big release for SIMS-watchers. Why? Well, in November last year the company announced that schools would be required to move from their previous annual contracts to mandatory 3 year contracts, and, let's just say the news wasn't universally well-received by their customers! SIMS contracts run from 1st April to 31st March, so the immediate effect of this change was that schools had to decide whether to stay and accept the longer contract, or go elsewhere fast. (A couple of months later SIMS did offer a six months break clause after what Schools Week describes as a "backlash" from schools, but still, you'd assume that if there will be an increase in switching, we'll see evidence of that in the May data.)

So to help make sense of the imminent data release, I thought I'd investigate how SIMS are presenting their offer almost a year after the acquisition by ParentPay. But before we check out the latest announcements, here's some context. In September 2021 Mark Brant (Group CEO of ParentPay) set out his highlights from the first 5 weeks of owning SIMS. This included announcing that they were "massively out-investing all our MIS competitors" and that they would "spend more than £40 million to modernise the product portfolio and radically improve the quality and breadth of the services ESS delivers". He also talked about a culture of "less bureaucracy and fast decision making".

Then In October 2021, Brant announced Next Gen SIMS, offering "Cloud-based, continuous improvement from Spring 2022". This was newsworthy for a couple of reasons: 

• It sounded like a tacit admission that SIMS Primary, their pre-existing cloud initiative unveiled in January 2018, was being shelved.
• But it also sounded like there was a Big New Plan - "Next Gen will be deployed as pure cloud-based applications and will sit alongside existing SIMS features", says Brant. This appeared to mean that existing SIMS would be available in its current form via a browser, alongside new native-cloud modules. In an approach described as "Evolution, not revolution", the implication was that the user would get all of SIMS in a browser, with the old bits being replaced one by one with new cloud SIMS. The article implied a quick rollout - Brand says "Best of all, these improvements will begin to be delivered for all our SIMS schools at no additional cost, starting in Q1 2022."

So where are SIMS now? Well, this recent sponsored post in Schools Week provides something of a progress report. First, it reiterates the £40m development pledge, and says of Next Gen that the "first slice of technology is Take Register for primary school teachers", which has been piloted in "dozens of schools". Here's the part about new functionality in full:  

Cover teachers can now take registers when the regular teacher is absent; users can view notes against attendance marks; and we’re working to ensure users can add and edit new notes, too. Our development teams are also making progress in adapting Take Register to make it suitable for secondary schools. You can find out more about Take Register by clicking here. 

  

I’m also very pleased to report that another slice of SIMS Next Gen has recently gone into pilot mode. Teachers need quick and easy access to the contact details for parents and/or guardians of their learners. We’ve been developing our Learner Contacts functionality to do exactly that. Look out for an update on where we are with this in our next piece!

I also found this April 2022 article from the SIMS blog useful to understand how the company is coping with the tricky technical challenge of running Next Gen and SIMS 7 side by side. It says:

        It takes just five minutes for Take Register’s data to be synchronised back into SIMS.

Or, to put it another way: Take Register doesn't update the SIMS database in real time; there's seemingly a process it goes through before committing any changes.

Then the latest article on the SIMS website includes further details on planned developments:

Our next slice, which is currently in pilot, is Pupil Contacts functionality. The ability to use Pupil Contacts on a mobile device has proved popular, due to its accessibility for activities that happen outside the school building.   

The team is now focused on moulding enhancements around the insight and feedback that they’ve received from the pilot. In fact, changes have already been made – such as improved search functionality to support more flexible inputs, or ‘fuzzy’ search and design improvements to make it easier to move around the various features. There’s more to do to, such as optimising Pupil Contacts for tablet screens, before we roll out the slice to all Primary Schools. 

And we’re delighted to announce plans to take our latest slice, our MAT reporting tool, into pilot later this year. This is powerful technology, which harnesses AI and Machine Learning, to identify areas of concern surrounding attendance.

My interpretation of all this is:

1. The pace of SIMS Next Gen is ramping up - we're getting more and more information shared with us, and there are now several areas either in development or being piloted.
2. That said, the only thing that will be live at any scale for the new academic year is "Take Register". And even then, that's currently in pilot for primaries only, though a wider rollout is planned for the summer. 
3. SIMS aren't rushing to release Next Gen screenshots (I can't find any on the blog or elsewhere).
4. Users can't yet add and edit new notes via Take Register (which may be linked to the technical complexities of running a local database and a cloud module side by side?). 
5. The rollout of Next Gen will be a long-term, multi-year thing. After all, SIMS has *lots* of modules, and plenty of them (like behaviour and attendance, say) are not mentioned yet.
6. Improving the experience on phones and tablets is a priority - though the expectation is seemingly for such access to be via a browser with responsive design rather than through native apps; otherwise it wouldn't make sense to say "optimising Pupil Contacts for tablet screens". I'm not clear what that means for the future of the SIMS Teacher App.
7. MAT Analytics is a new focus area, presumably to improve MAT retention, which has been a particularly challenging area for SIMS in recent years. That's very much my thing, so I'll be watching for further announcements in this area with interest. In particular I'll be looking for specifics on how they plan to bring in AI and ML to attendance analytics. Or to put it another way, what will AI do that a rules-driven report ("show me pupils who have <95% attendance") couldn't? As I've blogged about before, AI is only the answer in edtech if you have a clear understanding of the question you want it to answer, and why traditional approaches aren't up to the job. Don't get me wrong, SIMS could have great answers to these questions! I just don't know what they are yet, so I'll be excited to find out more...

Will this be enough to stop schools and MATs from switching away from SIMS? Well, I prefer data to speculation, so hang tight for my imminent blog about the May 2022 census data to find out!