FREE GUIDE
The MIS Buying Guide for schools
A practical, vendor-neutral guide to choosing a school management system — how to scope requirements, run a fair comparison, avoid the usual migration traps and build a business case your leadership team will approve.
- A requirements checklist you can take straight into a tender
- The questions vendors hope you won't ask
- How to cost migration, training and the switch-off of old systems
- Written by people who have implemented systems in real schools
Step 1 of 2
Where should we send the guide?
Trusted by 250 leading UK schools
What happens next
- 01
The guide lands in your inbox
One email, one PDF — no drip sequence and no sales calls unless you ask for one.
- 02
Use it in your own process
The checklists are designed to be lifted straight into your requirements document or tender.
- 03
Ask us anything
If you want a second opinion on your shortlist, reply to the email and we'll give you an honest read.
What a modern school platform actually looks like
The guide is deliberately vendor-neutral, but it helps to see what "one platform, one set of data" means in practice. These are real screens from Involve, not concept designs.
Most MIS decisions are made once a decade, under time pressure, on information supplied by the people selling. This guide is the opposite: a structured way to work out what your school actually needs, then hold every vendor to the same standard.
Scope before you shortlist
A short exercise for mapping every system you run today, who depends on it and what it costs — the single most useful page you can put in front of a governing body.
Compare like for like
A scoring framework covering data model, integrations, mobile use, support commitments and the real cost of the modules you'll be sold later.
Plan the switch, not just the purchase
Migration, parallel running, training and decommissioning old platforms — with realistic timelines rather than the ones in the sales deck.
Live attendance dashboards — every session, every year group, no exports.
“We have jumped in head first with our Involve journey and haven’t looked back once. Parent, teacher and pupil feedback has been incredible. We launched at the end of August and I can honestly say I couldn’t imagine ever going back to the multiple systems we used.”