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.
Indeed, for every SIMS upgrade, one should also
expect to apply a dozen or so ‘patches’.
We had sims and it was a bloody nightmare. I
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)
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. ;-)
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.