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Welcome to the Compass Education blog! Our General Manager, Pete Collison has put some words together to discuss the power of choice in response to the recent investigation into ESS SIMS 3 year MIS contracts.
As many of you will be aware, the Competition and Markets Authority have recently concluded their investigation into the actions of ESS SIMS. The investigation was in relation to the mandatory enforcement of 3 year contracts which tied many thousands of schools into a SIMS agreement until March 2025. We believe that many schools would not have been able to properly consider if a 3 year contract with SIMS was right for their school, prior to becoming tied in. We worry that this may have resulted in many schools having an MIS that is not best serving their needs or the needs of their school community.
The outcome of the investigation is that ESS SIMS are now offering schools a new option to exit their contract early if they meet the eligibility criteria. This is great news and we very much welcome this intervention. Any school wishing to take advantage of this offer does not have long to act though - February 10th is the deadline to apply.
While this is good news, we worry that the number of schools which qualify for this new break clause is potentially quite small. We also worry that the number of schools that have the bandwidth and resources available to follow the prescribed application process may be even smaller.
At Compass, we believe that choice is powerful. We believe that the education of our young people is too important for all schools not to have choices. And we believe that a school’s MIS is too critical to be letting you and your pupils down.
If you’re tied into a long term contract with an MIS provider, be it SIMS or otherwise, and you wish to choose something better, then Compass can help. We promise that, for as long as you’re paying for your current MIS, you can switch to us and Compass will be completely free until your current contract ends. No eligibility criteria, no application forms, no deadlines. We call it the Compass Choice Commitment, but you can call it having a choice.
Watch the video below!
So if innovation is not exactly gushing forth from SIMS, where do we look for it? Well, I took on an advisory role at Compass, the Australian HQ-ed MIS, two years ago precisely because I was keen to see more new thinking in this space. And now that their first English schools have gone live it seems like a great time to catch up with UK General Manager Pete Collison to find out more about the identity they’re carving out for themselves. Here’s a rundown of our conversation.
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Here at Compass, we are delighted to launch our brand new, integrated data visualisation tool for schools: Pulse. We know as schools you are swamped with unproductive tasks that burn through your precious time, with endless reports, exports, OfSted documentation writing impact statements and reporting back in Local authority meetings. So we got to work making sure the data you collect already can be easily repurposed and transformed into intuitive reports and data visualisations (graphs, pie charts etc.) for all your needs, and no additional workload.
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Today’s largest and most successful organisations use data to their advantage when making high-impact decisions. This can be even incredibly powerful in education, as we can incorporate data analytics into the decision-making process to promote and track student growth.
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