Schools have asked us about the roll out of SIMS NextGen so we asked ParentPay Group and this is what they said………
12 October 2026
Since acquiring SIMS in 2022, ParentPay Group has invested more than £75 million in rebuilding SIMS as a cloud-native platform.
Today, nearly 72% of SIMS schools and almost 100,000 users rely on SIMS Next Gen, with adoption increasing significantly each week. The majority of SIMS schools now trust the new SIMS to manage their daily attendance processes, making it an increasingly important part of everyday school operations.
The autumn release schedule follows a busy start to the academic year, including the launch of Manage Attendance, one of the most anticipated additions to SIMS Next Gen. Developed with Attendance Officers, it provides a single place to review, maintain and act on attendance information, helping schools tackle one of the sector’s most important priorities.
A comprehensive look at autumn term releases
Helping schools understand pupil progress earlier
As the SIMS Next Gen redevelopment programme enters its final phase, Assessment remains a major area of investment this term.
Primary schools gain Statutory Assessment, enabling staff to import and export statutory assessment data, set and monitor Key Stage 2 targets, and use past paper marksheets to support progress reviews and reporting.
Alongside this, Assessment Administration allows schools to manage assessment policies directly within the MIS, helping create a more consistent approach to tracking attainment across year groups and subjects.
The new List Builder capability extends the Reporting and Insights suite, enabling staff to create tailored lists across multiple domains using more than 100 data points. This helps schools surface key information more quickly, identify emerging issues earlier and support more informed decision-making.
Reducing the administrative burden on office teams
With 94% of school leaders identifying administration as a barrier to strategic improvement, many of this term’s releases focus on simplifying everyday operational processes.
New statutory returns support PLASC, School Workforce Annual Census (Wales), Attendance Data Collection, ISC Return, SLASC Return and Catholic Census, helping schools simplify compliance and reporting activities.
Additional releases support key start-of-year processes. Academic Management and Admissions Groups help schools manage classes, teaching groups and applicant data more effectively, while Define Timetable Cycle provides secondary schools with the foundations needed for timetable planning.
Strengthening security, governance and connectivity
As schools continue to strengthen their cyber security posture and manage access across an increasing number of digital systems, SIMS Next Gen is introducing new capabilities designed to simplify identity management and improve security.
ParentPay Group Single Sign-On (SSO) enables staff to access SIMS using their existing Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace credentials, providing a simpler and more secure sign-in experience. By supporting centrally managed school accounts, reducing password management and aligning with Department for Education, ICO and National Cyber Security Centre guidance, SSO helps schools strengthen security while making everyday access easier for staff. Beyond simplifying access, SSO provides a gateway to the wider ParentPay Group ecosystem, making it easier for users to access market-leading solutions across payments, parental engagement, finance and catering, alongside support, training and educational resources, through a single secure sign-in.
New governance capabilities include Audit Trail, which records changes made within the MIS, and Subject Access Request (SAR) tools, which help schools locate, review and provide information required to fulfil GDPR requests more efficiently.
Schools can also benefit from improved connectivity through Group API, a modern cloud-based integration framework that enables seamless and secure connections between SIMS Next Gen, other ParentPay Group products such as ParentPay and Schoolcomms, and third-party systems. It makes integration simpler and faster by providing consistent API access, improved developer documentation and a clearer onboarding experience. Integrators can use modern authentication and connection management, reducing reliance on locally installed components and helping make integrations easier to build, support and scale.
Creating a more connected parent experience
Parental engagement remains a growing challenge for many schools, with 61% of school leaders describing parental expectations as unrealistic.
The new Schoolcomms App brings key school information together into a single experience for parents and guardians, while the new Parental Engagement Back Office provides schools with a central place to manage engagement and communications.
Together, these developments help schools communicate more effectively with families, reduce administrative effort and create a more connected school-home experience.
Delivering the future of exams management
Exams remain a significant area of investment within SIMS Next Gen, this term.
Exam Room Seating, already available to schools, helps exams teams create and manage seating plans more efficiently, including the ability to clone room layouts and reuse existing arrangements.
Manage Access Arrangements is also receiving positive feedback from schools, enabling Exams Officers and SEND/ALN Co-ordinators to work more collaboratively through a single view of key information.
The next phase of development, including Exam Entries and Results Management, is currently being tested with schools. Early feedback has been encouraging, representing another important step towards delivering a comprehensive cloud-native exams experience.
Helping staff act faster
Keeping staff informed and ensuring timely action can be taken remains an important part of effective school operations.
MIS Alerts and Notifications automatically inform staff when key changes take place within SIMS, including updates to attendance, conduct and staff records.
Helping trusts operate more consistently at scale
Trust leaders face many of the same pressures, with only 4% of MAT leaders in our research saying their organisation is functioning well.
Group Hub, SIMS Next Gen’s centralised trust management solution, already provides central teams with a single view of performance, people and compliance across every school with a single login. Other existing capabilities include trust-wide reporting and insights, census auditing, Single Central Record management, clusters, and centralised control of users, settings and lookups.
New capabilities include Assessment Pushdown, enabling central teams to create assessment grade sets and marksheet templates once and deploy them across multiple schools. Catholic Census Audit extends Group Hub’s existing statutory returns monitoring capability, providing trust-wide visibility of completion progress, errors and warnings to help central teams identify issues early and target support where it’s needed most.
Together, these capabilities help trusts standardise processes, improve oversight and operate more effectively at scale.
The next chapter for SIMS
The autumn releases mark a further leap forward in the transformation of SIMS.
As adoption continues to accelerate, ParentPay Group’s investment in the Next Gen programme is evolving beyond platform transformation and towards a broader ambition: creating a platform that automates routine tasks, surfaces meaningful insights and connects the people, systems and services schools rely on every day.