When we say MIS, what do we actually mean?

I'll buy dinner for anyone who can show me their MIS does more than 41% of what they need management software to do.

When people talk about their MIS, what do they actually mean? MIS means something different for an independent school and a state school, a primary school and a secondary school.

So what is an MIS, really? It's surprisingly hard to find a definition. Going right back to basics, every school in England must keep an admission register, which ties each child to the school, and an attendance register, marked every morning and afternoon. Alongside that sits the single central record of safeguarding checks on staff, which, admittedly, plenty of schools keep in a spreadsheet anyway. That's the statutory core, but interestingly none of it actually has to live in an 'MIS'.

Schools do differ over what has to flow out. A state school has to share attendance data with the DfE every day and file a pupil-level census each term, so its MIS becomes the government's reporting pipe. An independent school has none of that. Its census is a single school-level form.

So the core functionality you could arguably say defines an MIS is this:

• For a state school, it's getting the twice-daily attendance register to the DfE. Technically that data could come from somewhere else, but realistically it comes from the MIS.

• For an independent school, it's, well… nothing. The registers have to exist, but they don't have to live in an MIS.

With the logical definition of an MIS set (ish), the next thing to look at is what we mean by an MIS in practice. I think the feeling behind the MIS is that it's the main platform in a school: the system that holds more of the things than anything else. To test this, I compiled a list of around 180 activities that schools complete across their management systems, and checked it against what's possible in the available MISs. Even the most comprehensive covers only around 41% of a school's daily needs. Controversially, given its reputation, that's SIMS.

The rest sit elsewhere: trips, consent, clubs, music lessons, cover, parents' evening booking, medical notes, the minibus, and many more areas. Often in additional systems or home-brewed workaround spreadsheets and docs.

I think this should change a familiar pattern of school behaviour, which runs something like this. We have an issue or a hope that feels big (data unification, software sprawl, parents complaining about disorganisation, central admin), so we assume it can only be solved by looking first at our MIS. But as we've just established, the MIS doesn't even hold the majority of your school's activity.

Switching MIS feels like what you're meant to do when you want to make a big, dramatic change, doesn't it? But I think it's actually the easy option (no, really!) It already has a budget line, and only one, not several. And there are multiple similar providers to compare. The remaining 60% of non-MIS management activity has neither, so nobody takes it on. So after an epic MIS change over the course of a few years, the best case is that you end up having successfully moved to a slightly different 40%, with not too much harm done. Worst case, you go through the pain of changing MIS, break all the additional platforms and systems you were using, and have to replace those too. All the pain, very little gain.

I think we generally consider an MIS to be a 70%+ sort of tool, but I'm convinced that starting with a delusional hope for what an MIS could ever offer is the root cause of so much software pain in schools. So take the challenge. List every activity you need management software for, including spreadsheets, and paper and pen. (I see you, timetablers.) If your MIS gets above 41%, I'll come and take you out, and it's on me. If you'd like my list of 180 to start from, message me and I'll send it.

Once you see the MIS as a minority player in the complete picture, albeit often the largest minority, two things change. Your digital strategy stops being all about the MIS. You stop expecting an MIS change to solve all your hopes and dreams, and you might not even have to change at all. Imagine the grief you could spare everyone in school. And much of the frustration with your MIS goes too, because most of it comes from expecting it to do something it was never built for. MISs were built to record basic data, not to run school life.

And yet, time and again, we make it the top priority. New leaders wanting to make a splash lead a charge into the promised land of the next MIS. Every conversation about management software in schools seems to start and end with it.

This is particularly true of expanding school networks. They often gain a school and say "we must now unify our MIS", usually to unify their data for analysis. But have you ever heard from a network that hasn't eventually come to the following conclusions:

• It turns out the MIS doesn't hold most of the data we wanted to compare.

• All our schools are logging their data in different places and in different ways, so we can't compare it despite being on the same MIS.

• We're really bad at capturing high-quality data.

Did you know many school networks even employ people to run the project of choosing an MIS? Not only that, but they might then recruit someone to manage the change from one 40% to another. All because they haven't yet asked: What is an MIS, again?

So start somewhere else, with one question: which platform do we want to make our main platform? In other words, which platform can cover the most of our daily operational needs, in the best way?

That's the question that matters for real digital progress. Not which MIS is least unpopular right now, or which has a slightly less ugly interface. Which platform can we bring the most of what we do into? That's where the real change lies: consistent data, analysis that cuts across management areas, teachers going to fewer platforms each hour, and parents getting ordered communications that don't make the school look like a shambles.

We'll only start making good software decisions in schools when we understand what our software is.

(And don't get me started on data lakes.)