Collecting data is heartily disliked by most teachers and takes up a significant amount of time and resources in schools. Well, unfortunately things are about to get worse and more expensive. Why? Education, like other professions, is moving rapidly towards evidence-based policy and decision making at all levels. This will mean that schools and teachers will have to collect more data and use more sophisticated systems to help collate, manage and analyse it. To achieve this schools and LEAs will need to deploy Information Management Systems (IMS). However the cost and choice of systems will be a difficult and financially important decision, because the system(s) selected must be capable of linking to a series of larger government databases containing information on all 11,000,000 young people in the UK aged up to 18.
The driver behind these new interlinked databases is the 2004 Children Act that is seeking to create closer ties between the educational, health, welfare, criminal justice and social welfare organisations at the frontline of delivering children’s services. According to estimates there may be over 150 of these databases that school systems will need to be compatible with. Unfortunately, there is little practical guidance about what systems are suitable and when and how they should be deployed.
About the only guidance for the education sector that exists, outside of promises from software vendors, comes from BECTA in a report they recently published called ‘School Management Systems and Their Value For Money’. While this actually contains recommendations for the provision of IMSs in schools the DfES has already recognised far more needs to be done and Lord Adonis has commissioned BECTA to ‘work with the DfES and private sector suppliers to take forward these proposals’. Rather than waiting for another round of consultation and report writing many schools and LEAs are starting to build IMS systems using products from vendors such as:
Whether any one or a combination of these will be able to meet all the goals of the new Act is impossible to answer, however perhaps a more pragmatic yardstick for decision makers will be to watch which IMS products are shortlisted by BECTA (in late October) in the Supporting Institutional Management category for the 2006 BETT Awards.
