UK Department for Education to schools: Maybe delay signing that 3-year licensing deal for MIS with Education Software Solutions

The UK government is advising schools in England to press pause before signing up to a three-year licensing agreement with Education Software Solutions (ESS). As we revealed earlier this week, ESS – formerly owned by Capita but sold to Montagu Private Equity last December for £400m and now in the same group as ParentPay – told …

[localzuk]

Mark Brant is wrong

His claim that people have a choice in February about whether to proceed is incorrect. The terms are, if we don't cancel by the end of December, we are bound to the 3 year contract. There's no option after that date to back out.

Sounds like the CEO of ESS needs to understand his own contracts better.

[lglethal]

Re: Mark Brant is wrong

A CEO lying? I can't believe it. Whatever is the world coming to... And so on and so forth...

To be honest, if you just assume that any words that come out of a CEO's mouth are lies or such a twisted version of the truth such as to be all but lies, then you'll be much closer to the truth than the CEO ever gets...

[SundogUK]

Re: Mark Brant is wrong

"To be honest, if you just assume that any words that come out of a union worker's mouth are lies or such a twisted version of the truth such as to be all but lies, then you'll be much closer to the truth than the union worker ever gets..."

FIFY

[Chris G]

Re: Mark Brant is wrong

That sounds like a nice, caring, sharing company giving such a short lead time to make a decision and possibly have to find and alternative in a couple of months.

Anyone who treats me like that is dropped, even if it means struggling to find an alternative.

[nematoad]

SOP

"Until now SIMS was very much the anomaly."

If all their competitors have three year contracts they could have sold the year long contracts as a unique selling point, but instead they have gone for the short term fix, presumably in order to recoup the cost of the purchase.

Having read a lot of the comments on edugeek it looks as if SIMS was falling behind the others and the new management has seen this and decided to sweat the asset before it slides into irrelevance.

It seems standard practice for these private equity types.

To quote Capt. Jack Sparrow; "Take all you can, give nothing back."

[Anonymous Coward]

The sane thing to do would be use eminent domain to take the company and turn it into a government department. £400 million doesn't sound like that much if it means the government never has to pay for another license.

Sometimes socialism IS the answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you end up with the sort of system most Scottish LA schools use. Layers of middle management and bureaucracy causes development to progress at a snails pace.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever used SIMS, or experienced its pace of development? It's hard to imagine what you describe could be any worse than the reality of actually working with SIMS.

[John Brown (no body)]

"development to progress at a snails pace."

So, an accelerated development schedule compared to SIMs? Where's the downside?

[Spamfast]

Layers of middle management and bureaucracy

So, like the National Health Service after the Tories & New Tory, sorry, Labour introduced the 'internal market'?

Certain types of infrastructure - law enforcement, health, education, rail, roads etc. - can't & don't operate in a competitive market. Pretending that they do just feathers the nests of ministers & civil servants and their pals.

A private business can be more efficient than a public department - although it's not a law of nature - but not if it is effectively granted a monopoly and massively state-subsidised. Then it just gets efficient at fleecing the public.

SWMBO has just taken early retirement from a UK state secondary school - or academy or whatever it calls itself now - partly because it is all HR departments, business development plans and PR. The top bod is called the Executive Headmaster fer Christ's sake.

And to return topic they are so reliant on the IT systems - including SIMS - that when it falls over they are unable to conduct lessons. They have ripped out all the perfectly serviceable overhead projectors and dry-wipe whiteboards and every classroom now has a vast electronic whiteboard because some educational IT company convinced the management that it would be a sensible way to spend the taxpayers' money that they claim is in such short supply.

[Tom 7]

I'm convinced the people who make these smart whiteboards go into schools and leave extra-permanent markers in the trays at the bottom of the white boards so they become illegible asap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like another out of touch teacher who doesn't like change to me. I'm surrounded by 'em. Thank goodness for some younger new blood with fresh ideas. As for "unable to conduct lessons" because SIMS isn't working - total rubbish.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Parts of SIMS date from the late 80's, Firing up Nova 6 is like going back to DOS.

There are still areas that don't know mice have scroll wheels.

There are windows that react badly to being resized

Snails pace development will be a vast improvement on the current glacial pace...

[SundogUK]

Socialism is never the answer.

BRING ON THE DOWN-VOTES!

I reckon I'm on for a record with this one.

[Mike Tyler]

So what is?

I suppose all those PPE contracts for the government - fast tracked to their chums is the way to go forward.

Test and trace so astonishingly bad that we note WE are still paying a £1M a week to contractors.

If taxpayers are fully funding state schools and all schools need a management system, yes you do, just keeping track of where everybody is, is difficult enough let alone all the reporting that has to be done for government. Why not have one mandated system funded directly by government and reap the benefits of scale, or for those who want something custom or different, they can pay for it.

Training costs would be reduced, all data would be easily interchangeable between schools and governement.

Perhaps if it cost the department of education money to change their mind every six months about what data was required it would make them thing hard about the changes.

Then again it could be like the failed test and trace and just be an expensive exercise in poor quality and money shoveled to ministerial mates.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe not directly relevant but it does seem sort of familiar...

I work shifts in the Broadcast industry.

Many years ago I would get paid time x1.5 for overtime and time x2 if it was a a bank holiday.

Sky entered the market and offered time x1 (i.e. no extra payment) for overtime.

Many broadcasters then trotted out the line that time x1 is now the industry standard overtime rate.

I still work in broadcast, I no longer do overtime.

[SundogUK]

Re: Well, maybe not directly relevant but it does seem sort of familiar...

Which is the correct response to this. Demanding a socialist takeover of the economy to stop businesses doing this is not the correct response.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Well, maybe not directly relevant but it does seem sort of familiar...

usually you have a liberal government takeover of the industry with a mandate to impose overtime...

like in France for Y2K where the "Code du Travail" was modified to ensure that IT workers would have to work overtime for no more pay to remove all the bugs.

[Ashto5]

This cannot be right

You have to opt out or your automatically tied in???

That cannot be legal, I could email millions of people telling them to opt out of my new billing system or they are tied in for 20 years.

No I don’t believe that can be legal.

[Stuclark]

Re: This cannot be right

As a school, you *HAVE* to have a MIS - it is a regulatory requirement.

Moving form one MIS to another is not the action of a moment - it typically takes a year of planning and months to implement.

SIMS is, and always has been, a complete mess of software, but because most schools still use it, Capita (and now ParentPay) merely sit on their hands and watch the cash flowing in

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This cannot be right

Having worked for a company previously owned by Montagu, they'll be wanting their recurring revenue for minimal upfront investment. And knowing a thing or two about SIMS, the direction of travel will be away from SIMS to cloudy solutions like Arbor, Bromcom etc, but that (as you've said) takes time. The inordinate amount of time they've taken over getting a more modern solution, would also back up the argument that they're sitting on their hands as the money comes in.

As for ParentPay, it's fitting they both now share the same owner... when I had to setup PP when my daughter started secondary school, I got a full on yellow screen of death .NET debug error (on a production server) telling me they were having problems with their SMTP mail.

It didn't seem prudent to store my card details with them...

[WhoAmI?]

Re: This cannot be right

I once worked for a company that wanted to change the date that we got paid ("merger" with another bigger company meant we had to capitulate to their system). Obviously, we had to agree to this change so they sent an online form around.

The form had a single tick box saying "I agree to this change" and NOTHING ELSE. The only other thing on the form was a note saying that if we didn't complete and return the form they would take it that we had agreed to the change. There was nowhere to say no, give feedback etc.

That was back in the late 90's. Looks like not a lot has changed since then

[jtaylor]

Re: This cannot be right

This change in contract terms is so abusive, I wonder if it would hold up to a legal challenge.

In the US, a contract has several necessary parts: Offer, Consideration, Acceptance, Mutuality, and Competency. US law is often similar to UK law.

On the face of it, this change seems to lack both Acceptance (it takes effect without action) and Mutuality (it's imposed by one party and it's not obvious that schools have the ability to refuse. This is sometimes called "adhesion.")

[localzuk]

Re: This cannot be right

The big issue would be that any court case would take years to deal with. So, in the meantime, the schools still get the rough end of the stick, for a potential ruling of "yeah, that was bad, we'll fine you the equivalent of £100 per school as punishment"