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This is what a silo problem looks like. A new student joins the school. His teacher creates an Excel spreadsheet for her class. She enters his name, date of birth, parents’ names, email addresses and phone number. Nothing unusual. It takes a few minutes. A few weeks later, another teacher needs the same information for […]

Education technology has spent the last decade in an expansion phase. Every administrative headache got its own app: one for admissions, one for the gradebook, one for parent messaging, one for forms and consent, one for events. The next phase of EdTech isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about bringing those tools together into a

A head of school starts researching new software with a simple goal: find something to run the school on. Within an hour of reading vendor sites, that simple goal has splintered into three acronyms: MIS, SIS, and LMS. Nobody defined them clearly, the definitions overlap depending on which vendor you ask, and the search that

Every school already has a management information system. The question is whether it’s a purpose-built one or an improvised version made up of spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, a filing cabinet, and whichever member of staff remembers where last term’s attendance data went. An MIS isn’t an optional upgrade. It’s the operating layer that school life runs

Ask most IT teams what worries them about a new system, and they’ll list the obvious things: access control, data handling, what happens if it goes down. Ask what worries them about the tools already running at their school, and the list gets longer and quieter. A shared spreadsheet nobody remembers creating. A WhatsApp group

Why summer isn’t recovery time. It’s the most consequential operational window in your school’s calendar. For most school leaders, the summer term feels like the finish line. It’s the wrong mental model and the cost is paid in October. The schools that walk into September feeling rested are the ones that used summer strategically. Because

A 2024 survey of school leaders found that 67% described their current assessment data as “difficult to interpret quickly.” The most cited barrier: results stored in formats that require manual analysis to reveal trends, rather than surfacing them automatically. There’s a difference between a school that collects assessment data and a school that uses it.

7min read Most school leaders who switch their MIS don’t plan to do it the way they end up doing it. They plan it carefully and without realising it, the timeline compresses. A contract takes longer to negotiate. Data migration gets deprioritised. Staff training gets pushed to the first week of term. And what should

What a demo can’t tell you A vendor-run demo cannot answer the questions that actually matter. It can’t tell you what happens when a staff member who isn’t particularly tech-confident tries to use the system on a Tuesday afternoon in week six of term. It can’t show you what the parent adoption rate looks like

Parents Are Your Biggest Stakeholder. Are You Communicating Well? When schools think about stakeholder management, the conversation usually gravitates toward boards, regulators, and accreditation bodies. But there’s one stakeholder group that shapes a school’s reputation more than any other and they’re checking their phones right now, wondering why they haven’t heard back about last week’s