Successful trusts of tomorrow need full and fast access to data today

The ability to manage financial, performance, and well-being data across many schools is now a must. What’s more, every efficiency schools make counts more than ever.

For Kernow Learning, a trust which brings together 21 schools, the need to collate data trust wide and manage it centrally became critical last year, and so they made the decision to move from their current MIS provider to a solution that offered more – IRIS Education.

Now using IRIS Ed:gen, IRIS Central, IRIS Reach, IRIS Financials, and Every HR by IRIS, the trust has just one supplier for all their needs and in just a year has transformed the way they work.

IRIS Central – Transforming every school’s tomorrow

Data holds the key to understanding performance, targeting meaningful intervention, driving effective trust management, and improving outcomes.

David Houghton, COO at Kernow Learning told us IRIS Central was actually a key factor when they began discussing moving to a new MIS. He said, "Last year, we were in a position where our data software wasn’t working for us. It didn’t consolidate trust-wide information from across our schools into a single platform which meant that colleagues were feeling the administrative burden of collating data and reporting on it in a way that was helpful and usable for our schools and our Shared Services teams. We needed to find a solution that was more effective and more efficient.”

Capturing data is typically siloed, manual, and costly. By the time you’ve collated the data you need, it’s often already out of date.

David tells us, “Due to the lack of centralised functionality with our previous systems, the opportunity to collect data across our trust at a single point in time was difficult. Now we have IRIS Central in place, we click a button to pull trust-wide data together and there you have it.

It’s completely transformed the way we work.

IRIS Central is an exciting, robust solution that is revolutionising our central trust databases. It ensures our leaders are empowered to spend more time on creating a better experience for our pupils. Critically, this cuts the time spent on administrative work and reduces the margin of error – maximising output and minimising the energy put in.”

The beauty of IRIS Central is that it allows schools and trusts to wave goodbye to painful, lengthy reporting. With instant access to smart dashboards and reporting at group, school, class, or individual pupil level, it is now easier than ever to identify trends and save valuable staff time.

A one-stop solution for your education management

With so many software providers available in the ed-tech space, it can become a minefield for schools and trusts to know where to go and whom to trust. For Kernow Learning, having one supplier for all their education management needs was quite important, and they narrowed their selection process down to two – IRIS Education, and one other.

David tells us, “IRIS Education offered the products that felt like the best fit for our trust.The integration of the solutions means we are working smarter with our data, our processes are smoother, and we’re making efficiencies. What’s more, we have one team to support us, and one supplier to build a great relationship with.

We’ve been working with IRIS Education for a year now and we’ve got a fantastic relationship with the team. They aren’t afraid to go back and ask certain questions or make enhancements on our behalf, it feels like a partnership and we’re all on the same team.”

IRIS Ed:gen – smarter than your average MIS

With their previous MIS not providing the level of information the trust needed, Kernow Learning made the decision to begin looking for a new MIS provider.

IRIS Ed:gen is a cloud-based management information system that delivers a collective view of pupils, in real-time, streamlining the management of the whole school day, helping staff excel in their roles, and supporting pupils to reach their full potential.

Designed with users in mind, Ed:gen empowers school office teams to multitask easily and save valuable time. Users can work in different parts of the system simultaneously, input data just once, and complete many everyday tasks in a single click.

Ed:gen has now been Kernow Learning’s MIS for the last year, and though making that move isn’t a decision any school can make lightly, for Kernow, it’s been a rewarding transition.

David tells us, “Moving MIS is a daunting task whether you’re a trust of 3, 10 or 20 schools and of course there have been hiccups along the way, but we are now in a position where Ed:gen is working fantastically for us; we’ve got better analytics than ever before, our view on pupil and staff data has immensely improved, we’ve streamlined many of our workflows and processes and we’re excited for further enhancements of the system to come. It has absolutely been the right move for us to switch to Ed:gen and I regularly recommend it and in fact the full IRIS Education suite, to other trusts.”

In IRIS Education, Trusts trust

With only 1-2 months between tender and going live, Kernow had a challenge on their hands moving from their legacy MIS to Ed:gen, but with the support of the IRIS Education team and the dedication of the staff at all the schools within the trust, the last year has been a success, proving that the decision to move was the right one.

David tells us, “Ed:gen and Central have revolutionised the way data and insights are used within our trust, and we’re really excited about what else we’re going to be able to do over the next few years. We have built a fantastic relationship with the IRIS Education team and we’re in a very strong place with the software we’ve put in place. Our schools have fully embraced the new platforms and we’re really seeing the benefit of the technology, we wouldn’t be without it now.”