The average UK school pays annual licences for eight to fifteen separate software products and owns none of them. We build one connected system around how your school actually works.
A school is simultaneously a statutory reporting body, an employer of hundreds of people, a finance operation with audited accounts, and a safeguarding organisation with legal duties towards the children in its care. The software that runs it has to reflect all of that.
The core is a Management Information System (MIS): the operational backbone that holds pupil records, runs the attendance register, manages admissions, tracks SEN, records behaviour, and generates the three DfE School Census returns every state school in England must submit each year. But a functioning school needs more than a MIS. It also needs:
Most schools cover this by buying eight to fifteen separate tools, each with its own licence, its own login, and its own data silo. None connect properly. The staff time spent reconciling data between them is a cost that never appears on any invoice.
Around 16,000 of England's 24,499 schools are primary schools. Their core software requirements centre on EYFS tracking (Early Years Foundation Stage assessment), Key Stage 1 and 2 statutory assessment, and parent communication that is more intense than secondary school by expectation: primary parents expect daily updates, reading records, and direct access to class teachers. Timetabling is simpler, but wraparound care is now standard. Government childcare expansion means many primary schools run provision from 7:30am to 6pm and need dedicated session booking, capacity management, and funded-hours tracking. Most are doing this in spreadsheets that do not cope at scale.
Secondary schools run the most operationally complex timetables in the sector: hundreds of teachers, hundreds of rooms, dozens of option combination groups for Years 10 and 11, plus sixth form if applicable. Timetabling is almost always a separate specialist tool. Behaviour management at scale needs more structure: merits, sanctions, isolation rooms, fixed-term exclusion paperwork, and a longitudinal record per pupil. Exam management (GCSEs, A-levels, internal assessments) adds another data layer that has to connect to student records, parent communication, and Ofsted evidence. Cover management for absent staff is a daily operational problem most secondary schools handle with yet another system.
48.2% of England's schools are academies, serving 60.4% of all pupils. Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) need everything a single school needs across every school in the trust, plus a consolidated view: attendance rates, exclusion numbers, and safeguarding flags for the whole organisation. They need trust-level financial reporting to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), HR management for staff who may work across two or three schools, and benchmarking between schools. Standard single-school MIS products treat each school as a separate installation. A MAT running five schools on a commercial MIS has five separate systems with no native roll-up view.
Independent schools sit outside the local authority system and have different regulatory requirements. They need fee management (invoicing, collecting school fees, bursary administration, sibling discounts), boarding management where the school has residential pupils, and admissions processes with their own timeline and criteria. Inspection is by the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI), not the standard Ofsted Education Inspection Framework. The operational complexity is at least as high as a comparable state school and the data requirements around individual pupils are often greater.
KCSIE is statutory and updated annually by the Department for Education. It requires every school to appoint a DSL who holds records of all safeguarding concerns and actions taken. Those records must be timestamped, securely held, and instantly retrievable. An Ofsted inspector arriving with two hours' notice will ask for them. Most schools use a dedicated safeguarding platform (CPOMS is the most widely used) because standard MIS products do not have adequate DSL record-keeping built in. That means a separate system, a separate cost, and data that cannot cross to the MIS without manual work.
The system we build is different at the architecture level. Every write across the whole system, regardless of which module it came from, is recorded automatically in an immutable event log. Not configured to record. Not dependent on a staff member opening a separate application. Every attendance entry, every message to a parent about a concern, every access to a pupil's record, every referral logged, every action taken carries an author identity and a timestamp and cannot be altered. When Ofsted asks for the complete evidence trail for a safeguarding concern from eight months ago, the system produces it without anyone assembling anything. The trail already exists because the architecture made it unavoidable.
We are now taking this further, where we are currently implementing that every event is cryptographically signed by its author and hash-chained, so neither the school, the system host, nor any third party can alter or delete what was recorded without the chain breaking. That is not a feature you configure. It is a property of how the underlying graph works.
Every state school in England submits three census returns per year (autumn, spring and summer), covering pupil numbers, characteristics, attendance, SEN, exclusions, and a range of further data items. The data must be validated against the DfE's technical specification before submission. Errors and omissions affect published statistics and, for schools in particular funding bands, can affect the funding allocation itself. The MIS must generate a census return in the correct format, validate it, and export it for submission.
The Academy Trust Handbook sets the financial governance framework for every academy trust in England. It requires audited annual accounts, an internal scrutiny function, and documented financial controls. Trust boards and accounting officers are personally accountable for compliance. Finance software for academies must produce the reporting the handbook requires; a general-purpose accounting tool not designed for the education sector creates gaps.
Ofsted inspections arrive with short or no notice. Inspectors ask for attendance data, behaviour records, safeguarding evidence, pupil progress data, curriculum intent documents, and staff records in rapid succession. A school where those data sets live across four different systems and require manual reconciliation wastes time it cannot afford during an inspection. The quality of the software infrastructure is not incidental to Ofsted readiness.
The UK school software market is large, fragmented, and in active disruption. The table below covers the main categories, not a comprehensive survey of every product.
| Provider | What They Cover | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| SIMS (ParentPay Group) | The UK's dominant school MIS for four decades, overtaken by Arbor in July 2025. Student records, attendance, SEN, behaviour, assessment, census output. Sold by Capita to private equity firm Montagu in 2021 and now part of ParentPay Group. SIMS Next Gen (cloud) is the migration target for existing users. | Schools on long-term SIMS contracts weighing the migration to Next Gen against alternatives. |
| Arbor | Cloud MIS for primary, secondary, MATs and local authorities. Serves 12,500+ schools. Acquired ScholarPack. Has subsidiary products: SAMpeople (HR), TimeTabler (timetabling), Arbor Finance (maintained schools). | Schools moving to a cloud-first MIS. Strong in primary and growing in secondary and MATs. |
| Bromcom | Full school MIS with strong attendance management. 30+ years in the sector. Primary and secondary MIS, MAT platform, and virtual school tools. | Schools prioritising attendance management and DfE compliance reporting. |
| iSAMS | Comprehensive school management for independent schools: admissions, timetabling, finance, boarding, parent portal, document management. Multi-school and international capability. | Independent and international schools needing full-function MIS outside the state sector framework. |
| CPOMS | Dedicated safeguarding platform. Pupil welfare records (StudentSafe), staff concerns (StaffSafe), visitor management (VisitorSafe). Used across primary, secondary and MATs. | Schools needing KCSIE-compliant DSL records, kept separately from the MIS. |
| IRIS ParentMail | Parent communication: messaging, payments, consent forms, parents' evening booking. 3,000+ schools, approximately 1 million parents. Integrates with major MIS products. | Schools wanting a dedicated parent engagement tool alongside their existing MIS. |
| ClassDojo | Free US-based platform used widely in primary schools. Parent communication, classroom behaviour management, photo and video sharing. Open consumer platform, not purpose-built for UK compliance or under-16 regulatory requirements. | Primary schools wanting free parent communication before the under-16 platform restrictions tighten. |
| PS Financials | Academy trust financial management. Budget planning, purchase orders, bank reconciliation, ESFA financial reporting. Dominant in MAT finance. | Multi-Academy Trusts needing finance software designed around the Academy Trust Handbook. |
Schools commonly run products from three or four of these rows simultaneously, without native integration between them.
The platforms above are functional products. The problem is not the individual tools. It is what happens in the gaps between them.
Attendance data lives in the MIS. Safeguarding concerns live in CPOMS. Staff absence is in the HR system. Parental payments are in ParentMail. Timetabling is in TimeTabler. Assessment tracking is in Target Tracker. Each system holds a piece of the picture of each child, each teacher, and each school day. None of the pieces connect to the others without custom integration work that most schools cannot afford, and most vendors do not fully support.
The practical consequences are daily. When a pastoral leader needs to see whether a pupil's deteriorating behaviour correlates with recent attendance and a known safeguarding concern, they open three different systems, pull data from each, and assemble the picture manually. When Ofsted arrives and asks for the evidence base for the school's response to a safeguarding concern from last term, the school pulls data from the MIS, the safeguarding platform, and possibly a separate email archive, and tries to present it as coherent. When the finance team prepares the year-end accounts, they reconcile payroll data from the HR system with invoices from the finance system and grant records from a spreadsheet.
The SIMS situation makes the deeper risk concrete. Schools that ran SIMS for 20 years built their entire operation around it: their workflows, their staff training, their third-party integrations, their report formats. Capita sold the business to the private equity firm Montagu in 2021, and SIMS now sits inside ParentPay Group. Existing users are being moved from on-premise SIMS 7 to the cloud-based SIMS Next Gen on the owner's timeline, and in July 2025 SIMS lost its 40-year position as the most used MIS in England to Arbor. Their data and their processes are tied to a private equity-backed company's product decisions. This is not specific to SIMS. Every subscription platform carries the same risk. When the vendor changes direction, raises prices, or gets acquired, you wait.
We start with your school, not a product template. How your attendance team actually runs registers. How your DSL records and escalates concerns. How your finance office tracks the pupil premium spend. How your admin team manages wraparound care bookings. We map the whole operation and build a system that fits it precisely.
Because everything runs on one data architecture, data entered once appears everywhere it is needed. A pupil's record, attendance pattern, behaviour notes, SEN plan, parent's contact preferences, and place on the after-school club register all exist in the same system and connect without manual export.
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Most school management systems handle communication between teachers and parents. Fewer think carefully about communication between schools and children directly. The distinction matters more than it used to.
Australia banned under-16s from social media in December 2025. The UK government confirmed on 15 June 2026 that it will legislate the same restriction, with the ban expected in force by Spring 2027. The UK will go further still, adding restrictions on stranger contact with children, AI chatbots and livestreaming across a wider range of services. Both regimes contain an explicit carve-out: communication between an educational institution and its own pupils and families is protected. A school's closed app talking to its own children and parents sits inside that boundary, not outside it.
ClassDojo and similar platforms, by contrast, are open consumer social platforms. They are US companies operating under COPPA and FERPA, not the UK GDPR and the incoming legislation. As the regulatory environment tightens, the question of whether a given tool is an open social network or a closed institutional system will carry legal weight.
The communication layer we build on the engage.re graph is designed so that the lawful child experience is the default, not a bolt-on:
The full case for this architecture is in the founder's essay: What Law Cannot Do for Children Online. The parent-facing guide is here: What social media can my child actually use?
ESRE builds school management systems for a one-off cost. No annual MIS licence, no per-pupil subscription, no price increase when you add a new function or grow your roll.
The MIS itself is usually cheap: Arbor publishes a flat £1,500 a year for a primary and £2,000 for a secondary, and Bromcom charges a base plus roughly £7 to £11 per pupil. The cost that bites is the accumulation: a separate paid subscription for safeguarding, finance, parent communication, catering, timetabling, assessment and HR on top of the MIS. For a secondary of around 1,000 pupils running a paid product in every category, the stack runs roughly as follows. A primary, with a flat-rate MIS and fewer specialist tools, typically runs £4,000 to £12,000 a year instead. Not every school buys all of these separately, since some functions come bundled with the MIS.
| System | Typical Annual Licence | Common Products |
|---|---|---|
| MIS | £2,000 to £12,000 | SIMS, Arbor, Bromcom |
| Safeguarding | £1,000 to £3,000 | CPOMS, My Concern |
| Finance | £2,000 to £6,000 | PS Financials, IRIS Financials, iplicit |
| HR and staff management | £1,000 to £3,000 | SAMpeople, various |
| Parent communication | £1,000 to £4,000 | IRIS ParentMail, School Gateway, Weduc |
| Timetabling | £1,000 to £4,000 | TimeTabler, Edval |
| Assessment tracking | £1,000 to £3,000 | FFT Aspire, others |
| Cashless catering & payments | £1,500 to £4,000 | ParentPay, SchoolGrid |
| Annual total (loaded secondary stack) | £10,500 to £39,000 | |
| Five-year total | £52,500 to £195,000 |
None of these systems share data natively. Integration requires custom API work at additional cost, or manual data transfer between platforms. The staff time spent managing the gaps is a further cost that does not appear on any of these lines.
| Scope | Typical One-Off Cost | What It Replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Core: student records, attendance, DfE census output, SEN and behaviour | £15,000 to £28,000 | MIS subscription |
| Full: above plus safeguarding, finance, HR and parent communication | £35,000 to £65,000 | MIS, safeguarding, finance, HR and parent comms subscriptions |
| MAT: full system plus multi-school dashboards, trust finance and cross-site HR | £65,000 to £100,000 | All subscription categories across all schools in the trust |
A secondary paying £20,000 a year across its software stack spends £100,000 over five years and owns nothing at the end of it. A full bespoke system pays for itself within three to four years at that spend, sooner for a multi-academy trust whose stack is multiplied across schools, and then keeps running and evolving while the subscriptions would have carried on being paid. For a small primary, where cloud software is genuinely cheap, the case for building is not a lower bill but ownership and capability: one system you control, connecting every function on one data architecture and belonging to the school permanently. When the DfE changes census requirements, KCSIE is updated, or new legislation arrives affecting how you communicate with children, the response is a configuration update or a short build, not a platform switch.
Put against a five-year budget, the difference is not the sticker price, it is the slope. Take a secondary running a £20,000-a-year stack and a Full bespoke build at £45,000, plus UK hosting the school controls at roughly £1,500 a year. The rented stack is a line that climbs every year and never stops. The owned system is paid once, then runs close to flat.
| Cumulative spend by | Keep renting (£20,000/yr) | Build and own (£45,000 once + hosting) |
|---|---|---|
| End of year 1 | £20,000 | £46,500 |
| End of year 2 | £40,000 | £48,000 |
| End of year 3 | £60,000 | £49,500 |
| End of year 4 | £80,000 | £51,000 |
| End of year 5 | £100,000 | £52,500 |
| End of year 10 | £200,000 | £60,000 |
The two lines cross in year three. After that the rented stack keeps taking £20,000 or more out of the budget every year for the same software, while the owned system runs on for the cost of hosting. By year five the school has kept around £47,000 it would otherwise have paid out; by year ten, around £140,000. And this holds the rented figure flat, when the per-pupil and per-transaction lines actually rise as the roll grows, so the real gap is wider. From year four that is close to £20,000 a year back in the budget, about the cost of a full-time teaching assistant, on a line that was buying software the school never owned.
For a multi-academy trust the arithmetic compounds. A five-school trust spending £15,000 to £20,000 a year on each school's stack carries an £80,000 to £100,000 annual software bill. An owned trust system at £65,000 to £100,000 costs about one year of that, and then ends the per-pupil renewal that would otherwise scale every time the trust takes on another school.
Every system we build, the client owns all the code. No vendor lock-in, no acquisition that forces you onto a new platform you did not choose, no service terms that change without your agreement. Your system is cloud-hosted on secure UK-based servers. Your data belongs to you.
What we build is not one screen. It is a connected data architecture from which multiple applications emerge. Pupil, staff, financial and safeguarding data is entered once and appears wherever it is needed.
All of these surfaces draw from the same data. An absence recorded in the register appears in the attendance report, the parent's notification, the cover manager's list, and the pupil's longitudinal record simultaneously.
Every system we build is handed over with documentation that describes it precisely: the concepts it holds, how to read and write them, and how to add a new field, workflow or view. That documentation is written for an AI to follow, so a school using a capable frontier model can extend the system itself, with little or no input from us, working inside failsafe environments with version control and automated backups. Adding a census field for a DfE change, extending the safeguarding module after a KCSIE update, or building a reporting view for a trust board meeting becomes a job the school can do in-house. And we are always here for the times you would rather we did it.
This is where engage.re stands alone, and it is true today, not someday. On every other school system, the vendor holds your data and its terms of service decide what may be done with it. On engage.re the school does not merely own its data; it controls the visibility of every part of it. Every record carries its own visibility, set by the school, and that control is enforced by how the system is built, not by a privacy policy you are asked to trust. No other school platform puts that control in the school's hands rather than the supplier's.
What we are implementing now is the part no one else has even attempted: the keys. Each school's data moves into its own domain, held under the school's own cryptographic keys and written to a signed, hash-chained log. Possession stops being something a contract promises and becomes something the technology enforces. Nothing in the record can be altered behind the school's back without breaking the chain; the school can export the entire system and move it whenever it wants; and no vendor, no acquirer and no change of terms can reach in, lock the school in, or quietly rewrite the rules, because the control is hardwired into the cryptography rather than written into the small print. For pupil and safeguarding data, that is the strongest guarantee any school system has ever been able to make.
The SIMS situation illustrates why this architecture matters: twenty years of pupil records in a format owned by a private equity-backed company's product roadmap is a governance risk that does not need to happen twice. Schools that build on this architecture own their data at the structural level, not just under a contractual clause.
See examples of what we build across different sectors.
School software licences erode budgets every year. A bespoke system is a capital investment. You own it outright, with no annual renewal letter and no per-pupil fee that rises as you grow.
Primary, secondary, MAT, independent. Your workflows, your terminology, your reporting requirements. The system is built around how your school actually operates, not how a vendor decided you should.
KCSIE-compliant DSL records that sit inside the same system as attendance, behaviour and pupil profiles. Every action is logged automatically by the architecture, not by someone opening a separate app. No data silo, no manual reconciliation for Ofsted.
School data, including safeguarding records and pupil personal data, hosted on UK servers you control. Not on infrastructure owned and operated by a US company under US law.
A Management Information System (MIS) is the operational core of a school: it holds pupil records, runs the attendance register, manages admissions, and generates the three DfE School Census returns every state school in England must submit each year. Every school needs something to produce the census return. Whether that is a commercial MIS subscription or a bespoke system is a choice; submitting the census is not.
Capita sold its Education Software Solutions business, which includes SIMS, to the private equity firm Montagu in a deal completed in 2021. SIMS now sits inside ParentPay Group. Existing users are being migrated from the on-premise SIMS 7 to a cloud platform, SIMS Next Gen, with the spring 2026 census the last to run in SIMS 7. In July 2025 Arbor overtook SIMS to become the most widely used MIS in England. Schools that have run SIMS for 20 years are now evaluating whether to accept the migration or move to an alternative. Arbor, Bromcom and bespoke systems are all actively attracting SIMS users at the moment. We can migrate historical SIMS data fully into a new system.
Keeping Children Safe in Education requires every school to maintain timestamped records of every safeguarding concern raised, every action taken, every referral made and every outcome reached. These records must be held securely and be instantly accessible to the DSL. Ofsted will ask for them. Standard MIS products typically do not have adequate DSL record-keeping built in, which is why most schools use a separate safeguarding platform such as CPOMS. A bespoke system integrates safeguarding records into the same architecture as the MIS, removing the data silo entirely. Because the underlying architecture logs every action automatically across every module, the DSL's complete evidence trail exists without anyone assembling it: the attendance entry that prompted concern, the communication with parents, the staff access to the record, the referral, all logged and timestamped in one place.
A MAT needs consolidated views across all its schools: attendance rates, exclusion numbers and safeguarding flags for the whole trust. It also needs trust-level financial reporting to the ESFA, HR management for staff who may work across multiple schools, and benchmarking between schools. Standard single-school MIS products treat each school as a separate installation. A bespoke MAT system holds all school data in one architecture with role-appropriate views for headteachers, trust leadership and the board.
Yes. We import historical data from SIMS, Arbor, Bromcom and most other MIS platforms. Pupil records, attendance history, SEN data and behavioural records can all be migrated so the new system opens with your full operational history intact.
A core system covering student records, attendance, census output and SEN management typically takes six to ten weeks from first conversation to live deployment. A full system including safeguarding, finance and HR takes twelve to twenty weeks. MAT systems with multi-school dashboards and consolidated financial reporting are scoped individually. We work around your school calendar to avoid key exam periods or inspection windows.
Your system is hosted on UK-based servers. Your data belongs to you. No third party can access it without your authorisation. Pupil personal data, including safeguarding records and medical information, stays on infrastructure you control and is not processed by any US-based service. Roles and permissions are granular: the DSL sees safeguarding records, the finance team sees financial data, a teacher sees the pupils they teach and nothing more.