Your school software will always be the backbone of your daily operations. But the right software is more than just a database to house information. It should support you in all areas of school life, from admissions, teaching, and academics to full financial management.
Each piece of software will support different activities in your school, but this doesn’t mean that you need to invest with multiple suppliers in order to reap the benefits of effective school solutions.
There are two key pieces of software that your school should consider. Research suggests that around 90% of students prefer online learning to traditional learning environments. The combination of an integrated, comprehensive, and flexible SIS and LMS for schools should be the primary solutions that your school implements to boost overall performance – and meet student’s evolving expectations.
But how do they really improve school outcomes and how can you ensure you’re making the most out of your chosen school software?
- Accessibility
- Communication
- Reporting
- Efficiency and cost-saving
- Security
- iSAMS SIS for Independent and International schools
Accessibility
The best learning experiences for students will maximise accessibility. This means empowering students to access learning materials and resources, homework tasks, and lesson or revision plans – anywhere they need them.
While lesson time largely contributes to a student’s progress – it's important to remember that removing the ‘barriers to entry’ can really drive your school’s overall performance and student outcomes.
Today’s students are more tech literate than ever before. Many will expect a certain level of self-learning and online resources to be available, both within and outside of the classroom. That’s why LMS’ are continuing to grow in popularity in the education sector, extending the EdTech boom caused by the pandemic.
Find an LMS that works effectively with your SIS to ensure your students have flexible access to the resources they need. A powerful LMS should drive your students to go the extra mile and achieve their academic goals, ultimately boosting performance for your school.
Communication
Your SIS and LMS are hubs of communication. Not just with your students, as you’d expect, but potentially with your wider school community too.
Depending on your software’s functionality, your LMS or SIS data may be accessible to both parents and teachers. Empowering these groups with the right data could really make sure that all those involved in a student's care and academic performance are truly driving towards the same goal.
However, it’s important to remember that a lack of communication with parents, teachers, and students, can have a negative impact on overall performance too. It becomes more difficult to stay on track and ensure everyone is up to date on the most recent updates, whether those are updates about the school and events, or individual performance alerts.
By adopting an SIS and LMS that integrate well and share the right data, you can more efficiently harness the communication tools provided by both pieces of software and ensure that all parties are up to date on the information most relevant to them.
By involving key stakeholders in a child’s learning, you can drive a concerted effort to enhance student performance, from all angles.
Reporting
The more data you have access to, the more insight you can have. This is true for all areas or types of business. Data visualisation and forecasting is a powerful tool for planning and development. This is particularly true for schools, when they are supported by the right software that provides and enables them to harness their extensive data stores.
Working in tandem, your SIS and LMS should hold a large amount of data relating to your school, including students, admissions, wellbeing, behaviour, attendance, academic performance, and more.
The key to making smarter decisions lies in accessing this data and understanding what it means for your school or group. This is easier said than done when you’re handling big data. But it’s important for building a truly targeted growth trajectory.
Consider working with a supplier with an extensive range of solutions that suit the needs of your school, including your reporting and data analytics requirements. For instance, the iSAMS SIS works seamlessly with its Power BI reporting solution – Central. The latest BI technology enables Central to harness all available data within the SIS and provides intuitive visualisations for your key information.
Effective representation of important data points is not only important for guiding decision-making for your school, but also for improving communication between IT teams and school leadership. The better users and leaders can understand data points and the decision-making process, the more they can get behind it to help drive your school forward.
Efficiency and cost-saving
Comprehensive school software should support more than just your IT or teaching teams. A whole school approach to efficiency and maximising potential is important for school growth. That’s why it’s important to work with software providers that understand the variety of roles within a school and offer tailored solutions.
You may not find one provider that truly meets your needs for every single area of school life, but the best systems are flexible – offering integrations using API technology.
The end result of the right SIS and LMS software choice? Boosting efficiency across all school teams, including admissions, finance, HR, academics, and more. When teams can work effortlessly together, they can reach end goals as a united force.
It’s also important to consider the cost and time benefits of paperless and cloud storage as you work to improve efficiency throughout your school, too.
Security
When we think of school performance, overall academic performance is likely one of the first impacting factors we think about. However, there are other components of school operations that are critical to your school’s outcomes. Each department will have different goals, and they all push towards the wider school target of being the very best in your space.
For your IT teams, academic performance may be a happy side effect of a job well done by all – but is unlikely to be their specific target. However, overall data and IT security is critical to keeping your school operating at its best.
Security is also a priority for protecting your students first and foremost, as well as parent, teacher, and staff data. Your teams need to work with software that they can trust and that puts data security and protection at its heart.
Supporting systems that work well together are fundamentally more secure. Seamless integration isn’t only time efficient, but ensures data integrity and security across your databases. Systems that work together benefit from security technology such as Single Sign-On (SSO) and cloud operation and storage.
Focus on providing your students with the best learning experience, safe in the knowledge that your sensitive school data is secure with the latest cybersecurity technology.
iSAMS SIS for Independent and International schools
The iSAMS SIS was created with the specific needs of schools in mind. Offering a comprehensive range of modules and supporting systems, schools can build a software solution that drives performance for the entire school.
However, we also know that we can’t build every piece of software for every school. That’s why we offer system flexibility with our APIs. Whether you’d like to choose from our extensive range of marketplace partners, or work to build your own custom integrations, iSAMS is your one source of the truth.
Interested in learning more about the iSAMS SIS and range of modules or integrated solutions? You can watch a demo below: