Schools have never collected so much information. Getting it back out is another matter.
By Miss Direction | The FAIL Files
The Department for Education has apparently been considering building its own school management information system.
I confess to having mixed feelings.
On the one hand, the prospect of a government-designed school database fills me with approximately the same confidence as a government-designed school funding formula.
On the other, I’ve used SIMS and Arbor.
How much worse could it realistically get?
At Fallowmere Academy, we have experienced several generations of educational technology, each introduced with the promise of reducing workload, improving communication and transforming the way we use data.
The transformation has largely involved moving information from one place we couldn’t find it to another.
SIMS was clunky, dated and apparently constructed according to a logic system nobody had ever fully documented. It took several years to learn which menu contained the information you needed, and another three to discover that somebody had built a report for it in 2009.
When we moved to a newer, shinier system, there was optimism.
Some time later, I have occasionally found myself quietly wishing we could have SIMS back.
Nobody is proud of this.
All the information. Some of the functionality.
The particular frustration of working in schools is that much of what we need to know is information we already hold.
Take SEND interventions.
We identify pupils who need additional support. We arrange interventions, allocate staff, register attendance and review progress.
It isn’t terribly complicated in principle.
Our management information system allows us to register pupils attending intervention groups.
Excellent.
It allows us to see attendance for those groups.
Also excellent.
What I actually need, when reviewing an individual child’s provision, is to establish which interventions that child attended over a particular period, how many sessions they were offered and how many they received.
This is where things become interesting.
Not interesting in the sense of discovering something useful. Interesting in the sense of wondering whether a database has been designed to prevent you asking questions of it.
The information exists. It has already been entered.
I simply want it arranged by pupil rather than by group.
This should not require a second spreadsheet, a substantial quantity of coffee or the intervention of a minor deity.
Meanwhile, the system can automatically notify parents when their child receives a behaviour point.
Adding a pupil to an intervention? Changing their SEN register status? Those don’t necessarily come with the same straightforward communication options.
Apparently we’ve made greater progress in automating bad news than good support.
Would you like to upgrade?
There are, of course, other products.
There are always other products.
Provision mapping software. Assessment platforms. Communication tools. Data dashboards. Analytics subscriptions.
Each promising to solve a problem that the previous system has left unsolved.
Some are genuinely excellent. Dedicated provision mapping software, for example, can be enormously useful.
But there’s a point at which you start wondering why the management information system doesn’t manage the information.
Schools are expected to demonstrate the impact of interventions, quantify provision, identify unmet need and make evidence-informed decisions.
All perfectly reasonable expectations.
Less reasonable is the amount of work involved in extracting the evidence from systems into which we have already entered it.
We are asked to become increasingly sophisticated in our use of data while being sold increasingly elaborate ways to access it.
FALLOWMERE ACADEMY
The finance team has suggested exploring whether existing software can meet our requirements.
The SEND department has suggested that it would be helpful if the existing software allowed staff to retrieve the information they had already entered.
Discussions remain ongoing.
An unexpected unicorn
I have a confession.
I can code.
I understand databases. I can write scripts. Give me appropriately authorised access to structured data and I could build a perfectly serviceable report showing a pupil’s intervention attendance history.
I realise this presents an unexpected challenge to the established educational technology ecosystem.
A teacher who understands data?
Someone in a school who can actually write code?
Yes, I know. A unicorn.
I’m real. Check out my rainbow mane.
But this isn’t really about technical skills.
Teachers shouldn’t need to know how to write database queries. They should be able to ask a sensible question of their management information system and receive a sensible answer.
And those who can build their own solutions should have a secure, documented way to access the data they’re authorised to use.
Not unrestricted access. Not an invitation to export sensitive pupil records onto somebody’s personal laptop.
Proper permissions. Appropriate safeguards. Audit trails.
The entirely unremarkable ability to use information responsibly.
Data protection and data usefulness are not opposing ambitions.
Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve accepted that the system holding our information should also determine which questions we’re allowed to ask about it.
And whether we need to pay extra for the answers.
A new system for the system
According to reporting in Schools Week, DfE officials have considered developing an in-house MIS as part of efforts to address the cost of commercial systems.
Considered. Not commissioned.
That distinction matters, although it hasn’t stopped me imagining the launch presentation.
There is a slide about efficiency. Another about transformation. Someone has written interoperability in very large letters.
At some point, there will be a demonstration.
I hope someone asks it to produce a pupil-level intervention attendance report.
The DfE’s wider interest in reducing MIS costs is understandable. Better procurement, fairer pricing and systems that communicate with one another could make a genuine difference.
But the discussion needs to go beyond what schools pay for software.
We should be asking what that software actually allows schools to do.
And who was consulted when those decisions were made.
Not just trust leaders and procurement teams.
The attendance officer who needs an answer before nine o’clock.
The receptionist trying to locate a parent contact.
The teacher looking for a pupil’s support strategies.
The SENCo who needs to demonstrate what provision was delivered, not merely what was planned.
And the administrator who knows exactly which seven clicks are required to complete a task that ought to take one.
These are the people who understand what a management information system needs to manage.
They also understand the hidden costs of one that doesn’t.
The reports recreated manually. The information entered twice. The spreadsheets maintained alongside systems that were supposed to replace them. The professional time spent coaxing answers out of tools that already hold the data.
None of which tends to appear in the procurement comparison.
We measure the price of the licence.
We rarely measure the hours lost trying to make it useful.
And if the DfE does eventually decide to build its own system, there’s another question worth asking: will it give schools better access to their information, or simply give Whitehall better access to it?
Because those are not necessarily the same thing.
Fallowmere Academy looks forward to the next generation of school management technology.
We have just one request.
Please make it possible to manage the school.
And if that’s too ambitious, perhaps just let us have our data back.
Further reading
Schools Week: DfE pondered launching in-house MIS to save schools cash — 29 October 2026.
Arbor Help Centre: Student Profile — Interventions — Arbor’s documentation on the pupil-level interventions overview and its listed fields.
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