A connected school will benefit every pupil

Taxis were a pretty standard thing. They took you from A to B and if you were lucky there might be one nearby when you needed it.  

That was the way it had always been - probably since the day the horse-drawn cart got superseded by something faster and less prone to lameness. 

But then came Uber. A truly digital company with richness of data at its fingertips. Data that enabled it to make educated decisions about where to focus its resources, to more effectively take people from A to B.  

Time and time again we are seeing the provision of cloud software transforming industries and sectors, by connecting up the dots of information that would otherwise have remained unknown. 

The education sector is no different. The old ways of running schools kept data out of the hands of the people who needed it, but cloud technologies are bringing innovations in digital capabilities to large multi-academy trusts right through to teaching staff and students themselves.  

I believe we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible and I’m so excited about what IRIS can contribute to this area. 

Every school must effectively store, manage, interpret and communicate the wealth of information it generates in order to run at outstanding levels as a public service.  

• It must be able to easily access the data in real time.  
• It must unshackle teaching staff from the swathes of mundane admin they currently do.  
• It must have the tools to forge a better connection with parents.  

This sort of digital capability has the potential to contribute to significant improvements in pupil outcomes, but even the best schools can be constrained by their current, outdated set up and reporting in particular has become a crippling burden. 90% of school leaders now say report data and analysis is a huge issue impacting their workload.  

We want to change this and there is no limit to how far cloud-native software can go to achieve this.  

Today, our best-of-breed fully integrated cloud tools support 12,000 of our schools across the UK including 65% of Academies and 75% of Academy Trusts.  

The IRIS platform provides software to automate processes across finance, assets, budgeting, human resources, parent payments, school-to-home communications and more. Four million parents and guardians currently use our applications to connect with their children’s school and we process over £15m in financial transactions on behalf of our education customers each month.  

Crucially, our data warehouse layer acts as a reporting engine across our application suite, bringing real-time MIS data together into a connected system for a single source of truth. 

There are so many real-world examples of the positive change to educational outcomes that modern EdTech unlocks. With IRIS, educational leaders and their staff are empowered to look ‘at’ and ‘for’ trends in the numbers, rather than merely trying to organise data into something meaningful. Everything from absence, behaviour, wellbeing, safeguarding, attainment, progression and assessments can be joined up, scrutinised and mined.  

This is the place where human stories come to life. 

However, research suggests that almost half of school leaders still do not have digital tools to capture work and assessments, and only 39% have the capacity for parents to view their child’s data.  

Our cloud-based systems offer internal messengers, planners and registrations while tools like voice-to-text dictation remove the pain of term-end reporting. Live notifications mean no more needless notes, errands or calls and, like the Uber model, we are working hard to deliver a superior, consumer-grade user experience; the standard we now expect in our daily lives.  

The shift to cloud means systems are secure, easy to deploy, resilient and agile to change. With these credentials, it’s no wonder some of the older desktop-based Education software vendors, unable to offer connected or real-time insights, are feeling the pinch! 

We continue to listen intently to schools about their needs. We now have 120 schools participating in our User Groups and are seeking Educational Vanguards to inspire the blueprints for our future software development operation.  

This contribution is much needed and will help the sector as a whole move forward. I believe that the right technology will shape the entire culture of learning. By working together, you can help us develop the roadmap for future generations.