One of their headline findings was around the current cost of MIS infrastructure, rather than the cost of the software itself. In Primary schools this amounts to £66.03m, or £3,796 per school per year. RM claim that an ‘Enterprise’ system such as IntegrisG2 significantly reduces infrastructure and administration costs, with their research showing savings of around £1,500 per year for every primary school.
Enabling Access
In today’s society, we think little of using the internet to log in securely to monitor our bank balance, interact with government agencies or manage financial affairs. Educational stakeholders also require the removal of the ‘walled garden’ approach to school data. By sharing the valuable information a school holds, the care of a child can be much better coordinated and support compliance with the Every Child Matters agenda.
Providing secure access for different stakeholders will increase the accuracy and wealth of information held for each child to give practitioners and parents a better view of a child’s progress.
Even within the school, limited access to the school MIS is commonplace. In the 2007 RM Primary School Management Survey*, RM found that only 14% of primary schools use their MIS to take attendance in the classroom. Worse still, 16% routinely do not follow up pupil absence on the same day that it occurs. The more we ease the flow of data between classroom, office and home then the more we have the opportunity to address these problems.
Finding the balance
So, schools are faced with the necessity of ensuring their pupil data is secure, whilst at the same time, making it more accessible to authorised stakeholders. Does this need to be a contradiction in terms? With an Enterprise MIS such as IntegrisG2, schools can take advantage of remote data back-ups securely held by a central hosting service, whilst providing different levels of access permissions to authorised stakeholders. With this wider, authorised accessibility to pupil data, come many more additional benefits from better attendance rates through the use of electronic registration, to a very welcome reduction in infrastructure costs.
*933 School Administrators, Bursars and Managers, Nationwide survey carried out by Brahm Research.
