7th January, 2011  

MIS

MIS stands for Management Information System, and in schools describes whatever electronic system the school uses to manage its staff and pupil data. As well as basic record keeping, it may also include electronic registration and finance functionality.

School MIS packages are usually bloody awful. The most commonly used one in UK state schools is SIMS, which is a prime example of the previous generalisation.

About The Angry Technician

The Angry Technician is an experienced IT professional in the UK education sector. Normally found in various states of annoyance on his blog. All views are those of his imaginary pet dog, Howard.

5 responses to “MIS”

  1. Tony says :

    Indeed, for every SIMS upgrade, one should also
    expect to apply a dozen or so ‘patches’.

  2. sparky says :

    We had sims and it was a bloody nightmare. I

    • sparky says :

      I have however, been plesantly suprised by iSams which we swtiched to a couple of years ago. It’s nice to place a support call in September and have someone get back to you within a day. With sims it would be more like October. (seriously)

  3. TheCrust says :

    We moved to SIMS from CMIS – despite Serco’s best efforts (and even they gave up in the end), it just never worked right for us and we found we couldn’t completely trust the information coming out of it.

    When asked by the Head if I thought SIMS would be any better, my answer was “the only thing the different school MIS systems do consistently well is drive school staff absolutely bonkers”.

    So far I have been proven wrong. Give it time. ;-)

  4. lordhavemercy says :

    urgh – sims – bane of my life at the moment. especially when trying to get the remote register software working.

    thankfully we’re ditching the server in july in preparation for the school move.