The announcement was made this week that Cardiff Local Authority, the largest in Wales, has awarded the contract for a new schools’ MIS and Finance platform to Arbor. The contract, awarded through the KCS – Education Management Systems framework, is estimated to be worth around £2.5m over a five-year period.
This follows the award to Arbor by the Vale of Glamorgan earlier this year. Cardiff’s primary, secondary and special schools will migrate to the Arbor platform, a total of 128 schools. Added to the 53 schools in Vale of Glamorgan, this brings the Arbor Welsh schools total to 181 schools, a creditable 12% of the Welsh market.
This award means that six of the twenty-two Welsh local authorities have now moved away from the ESS SIMS MIS platform to a new provider, continuing the trend we are seeing across the UK where the churn in MIS has increased dramatically over recent years.
Having reported on the current state of the MIS market just 3 days ago, following the release of the latest English school census, where Arbor took the coveted ‘market leader’ position away from SIMS, we now see that picture moving slightly yet again.
On Monday we reported that, across the UK, Arbor had 31.6% of the UK schools’ MIS market – that has now increased a little to 32.1% whilst at the same time, SIMS UK market share has dropped from the reported 30.1% to 29.6%, further strengthening Arbor’s position as the largest MIS provider.
With 27% of the Welsh local authorities, accounting for 32% of the schools in Wales, moving MIS already, we have to believe that more will follow in the coming months. The only questions left now are ‘when will they move?’ and ‘who will they choose?’
