COMPUTING & IT RESOURCES
Are you getting the most out of your MIS?
free school meals and English as an additional language, among other metrics.
For most schools and settings, sending off key returns and pulling off data for Ofsted and school development purposes is the extent to which the MIS is used. But this is scratching the surface of what an MIS can do. It is a very powerful data management system, and with a bit of knowhow, it has the potential to deliver cost and time savings, and positively impact your school, its students and the wider school community.
Functionality H
FL Education’s Head of Data Management Services, Tracy House, explains how most schools are just scratching the surface of what their Management Information System (MIS) system can do for them. Time, cost and efficiency savings await.
Management Information Systems (MIS) are a necessary entity in any school office, providing the tools to communicate important data to the government on pupil numbers, attendance,
MIS offers so much more than statutory returns. Using the data you have already inputted, your MIS can create local authority reports, send out newsletters and end of year reports to parents, set homework, allocate sets in secondary schools, and organise bookings for parents evening for example. The exam and assessment data it contains can also be analysed and tracked, so teachers can see in an instant which students are coasting, which are flying and who is struggling. It’s a whole world of data at your fingertips, and it can be used to improve educational outputs and make your day-to-day operations run much more smoothly.
Consolidating apps
There’s likely to be a few items on the list above that you already have covered by a separate app or single-purpose programme – for example,
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ParentPay to handle trips and lunch monies. Each of these add-on apps and programmes costs extra money in subscriptions, so by streamlining things and maximising the use of your MIS – a piece of kit you need to have anyway – you can start making cost savings. Consolidating your apps can also save you time, because you don’t have to input data in multiple places or flit between different programmes. It also has a benefit for parents and families, who can get overwhelmed with the number of apps they need to download and monitor each day.
Having one centralised system simplifies life for everyone, and ensures important information and notifications don’t get missed.
Cost
Collating all your functions within one system is one way to save money using your MIS. Another way is to shop around for a better deal. There are a number of MIS providers out there that offer different packages and they are competing with each other to provide the best deal to secure your business. To simplify the process, we offer special rates for three providers through our MIS framework to help schools get a better priced package and to expedite procurement.
A lot of newcomers to the MIS market offer cloud-based solutions so you could upgrade your service, as well as get a better price from a new
September 2025
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