BESA CORNER
This month in our ongoing feature highlighting the work of the UK education suppliers’ trade body BESA, we hear from KCS Education and ReadSpeaker.
E-Procurement made easy: unlocking the power of punchout As schools and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) increasingly adopt
digital tools to improve efficiency, one area that often lags behind is procurement. Ordering supplies can still feel like a slow, paper-heavy process involving multiple systems, manual data entry, and repetitive tasks. That’s where e-procurement and, more specifically, punchout, offers a practical solution. What is e-procurement?
E-procurement uses digital systems to purchase goods and services, with product and order information exchanged electronically rather than on paper. For schools, this means centralising and automating orders, reducing duplication, and minimising errors. Most suppliers and financial management systems (FMS) now support e-procurement as standard. What is punchout?
Punchout is a form of e-procurement that integrates a school or trust’s finance system directly with a supplier’s website. Staff browse a supplier’s catalogue online but place the order through their own finance system. Details transfer automatically, removing the need to manually enter every line item.
Think of it as a bridge: you “punch out” to the supplier’s site to select products, then the order information flows back into your finance system for approval and processing.
Ordering in education isn’t just about selecting supplies, it’s about maintaining oversight and compliance. Systems such as SIMS FMS, PECOS, IRIS Financials, Bromcom, Arbor, and Hoge100 play a central role in managing budgets, invoices, and approvals. But every purchase usually has to be logged manually.
For large schools or MATs, handling hundreds of orders each term, this is time-consuming and error-prone. Punchout simplifies the process by automatically transferring data into the finance system, saving time and reducing mistakes. It also supports approval workflows by keeping the whole process within the finance system, making reconciliation and oversight easier.
Case in point: IRIS Financials and specialist partnerships One of the most widely used FMS in UK schools is IRIS Financials, supporting more than 11,000 locations nationwide. Recognising the need for efficiency, IRIS has enabled direct punchout integration, allowing schools and MATs to connect seamlessly with suppliers. What makes this particularly effective is the partnership between IRIS Financials and specialist education suppliers such as KCS, who understand the challenges schools face in managing procurement. By combining a robust finance platform with sector expertise, schools access purchasing processes that are not only automated but tailored to their daily needs.
This approach – technology aligned with education-specific knowledge – means procurement becomes faster, more reliable, and easier to manage at scale. And the benefits aren’t just theoretical. Schools using punchout through IRIS Financials are reporting significant gains. Kieren Shepherd, Estates Manager, Cygnus Academies Trust, says: “The IRIS punchout system has drastically reduced the required time in our purchasing processes. The system’s ability to automatically enter correct product codes, details and costs has significantly streamlined the process for our staff but also, more importantly, dramatically reduced the total number of errors due to human error. It makes those larger orders (the dreaded summer holiday ones!) an absolute breeze as the purchase orders are automatically filled out, and the order sent to the supplier once the purchase order has gone through our approval processes. All in all, the Punchout system is a game changer.”
For many schools, adopting punchout will feel like a small step in digital transformation. Yet its impact is significant, freeing finance teams from repetitive tasks and enabling leaders to maintain tighter financial oversight.
As procurement continues to evolve, e-procurement and punchout are set to become standard practice across education. For schools and MATs seeking smarter ways to work, it’s an innovation worth exploring.
www.kcs.co.uk
Giving every student a voice: how text-to-speech supports assessments
Exams are high-pressure moments for all students. But for learners with dyslexia, ADHD, language barriers, or visual impairments, traditional formats often test literacy as much as subject knowledge. This creates inequities that have nothing to do with what students actually know. Text-to-speech (TTS) helps remove that barrier. By allowing students to listen as well as read, TTS ensures that assessments measure understanding, not reading speed. It’s a small change with a big impact: students focus on demonstrating knowledge instead of wrestling with text.
Research and policy both confirm that accessibility tools like TTS are not shortcuts or unfair advantages – they are accommodations that level the field. That’s why the UK’s Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) and other global examination boards now approve digital TTS as a valid support. Offering TTS more broadly, even to students without formal accommodations, brings additional equity benefits. For multilingual learners, hearing questions spoken aloud reduces the cognitive load of decoding a second language and helps with pronunciation and vocabulary building. Anxious test-takers benefit from a calmer, more flexible way to engage with content.
Teachers often worry about adding new tech into high-stakes exam environments. That’s why platforms like ReadSpeaker TTS are designed to transition with the learner from classroom into assessment or exam situations, ensuring consistency of assistive technology support throughout the learning process for better learner outcomes. Because the tool runs in the cloud, schools don’t need to install software on learners’ individual devices. The ‘Listen’ button appears directly within the digital exam, with synchronised highlighting to guide students’ eyes as the text is read. Set-up can be completed well before the exam day, too.
Teachers can use the listen button to speech-enable tests, exams, and quizzes within their own secure learning environment, e- assessment platform, and even locked browsers and proprietary proctoring
20
www.education-today.co.uk
systems. And since ReadSpeaker has full JCQ approval and is WCAG 2.2 compliant, educators can be confident they’re meeting compliance standards whilst giving learners equitable access.
Accessibility isn’t only for exam day – it matters during revision, too. Students who use TTS when studying can turn notes, practice questions, or textbook passages into audio files. Listening on the bus, reinforcing material through multiple senses, or hearing their own essays read back all help deepen comprehension.
Students can manage text-heavy courses and create their own revision materials by highlighting passages in various colours to later be collected as a summary of the text, and they can annotate long texts with their own notes. Teachers can also encourage recall by letting students replay key passages or download audio files for review – capabilities built into ReadSpeaker’s education tools.
Perhaps the most overlooked benefit of TTS is its impact on student confidence. Exams can heighten feelings of exclusion for learners who already struggle with text. Embedding TTS within assessments sends a clear message: every learner deserves the chance to show what they know.
Teachers report ripple effects in class participation and motivation. When students experience success in exams, they build belief in their own ability – carrying that momentum into coursework and future learning. Digital assessment is on the rise, creating an opportunity to rethink what “rigour” means. Accessible assessments are not less rigorous – they are more accurate reflections of student ability. By including tools like TTS, schools and universities align with principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), making learning and testing environments more inclusive for everyone.
TTS isn’t a silver bullet, but it is a proven, practical step educators can take right now. By ensuring that exams measure knowledge rather than literacy barriers, we set all students up for success.
www.readspeaker.com/education
November 2025
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
