What happens if a school loses all its MIS data?

[elsiegee40]

Any education is better than none. However an education is provided by teachers NOT servers. If the teachers are given a classroom and kids then they can teach and the good ones will do it well. Data is nice for tracking progress and satisying politicians and Ofsted, but if it all vanished the good teachers would not suddenly become rubbish ones.

[GREED]

I'm not suggesting they would not at all. But I'm sorry I disagree that data and systems are there to satisfy government and ofsted it is a valuable resource to help guide staff on how to give an individual education to each child, and particularly important THESE DAYS when it comes to monitoring vulnerable children in any area. Would we say the same if the NHS database (no laughing!) Went pop? Suddenly your entire medical history gone. Or your financial records. Bank accounts. It is the way the world has grown that we are dependent to a degree on technology.

 

Anyway this is just how I see it and have witnessed in many a school.

 

Perhaps in an ideal world I'd challenge a school to ditch their MIS for a term (or more) suddenly and without warning, see how things pan out.

 

BTW: the positives I'm getting across is to have robust DR procedures in place so that it is (near) impossible for such a situation to occur. My gripe is some of the blasé comments about the importance of the data.

[tmcd35]

@GREED, I think you underestimate the amount of data already being kept either on paper or otherwise outside of the MIS, and overestimate how long it would be down for. If the worst happened a school could survive on non MIS data and records for a few weeks, in which time large parts of the MIS would be rebuilt. Ultimately it's the depth and accuracy of data that will take time. I'm yet to meet a department head who doesn't in some way keep there own bespoke tracking spreadsheets in addition to the requirements of the MIS, or a teacher who doesn't keep their own markbook of some kind.

 

We are heavily dependent on technology, but we are not totally dependent on it. If I lost my home Internet for a month I can still visit my bank or pick up the phone, tesco's will still take my money. All inconvenient but doable in the short term.

 

I don't think many of us are underestimating the importance of the data, I'm certainly not, but the question is what would happen if it all suddenly went. The answer, the school will survive but the short to mid term will be a miserable experience for all involved.

[GREED]

Fair enough. I take and accept your points there. I guess where my career centres around such systems I have a holistic, yet sometimes tainted view!

[Ephelyon]

I think there's still the question of how long the school would last. Yes, good teachers can always teach, but we do now rely on data analysis and tracking, both of academic and pastoral factors, to inform the education we provide and there are requirements now incumbent upon schools to do so that didn't exist a couple of decades ago. Can you compete locally if everyone else has an edge over you there? I think it's the educational equivalent of the oft-quoted statistic (wildly twisted though it often is) that many businesses that have suffered a major data breach/loss never fully recover. Those of you who have personally supervised situations where schools have had to rebuild their MIS... for how long have they been monitored in this respect afterwards?

 

The school may well rebuild a good proportion of its data, but there will always be gaps and they could be critical. CTFs don't contain everything, and we're transitioning away from paper/Excel markbooks here in a drive towards the MIS, because it's supposed to be the one place where this stuff is. That's why it's also backed up offsite every evening - in fact, the entire system is - to another school over the interconnecting County broadband network. Paper and other copies are wasteful (the obvious exception being a stock of blank paper registers to deal with temporary issues) and we can't afford that at the moment.

 

There's no point in investing in a MIS and shifting towards technology if you're going to lose a number of the economies it provides by duplicating its functions elsewhere. It's like buying a backup abacus for every computer. Do invest your processes in the MIS... and then make damn sure you take adequate measures to protect it and hire staff who know how to manage it. That's the gamble we're all supposed to be taking these days... and then making damn sure we hire decent technical staff and pay and train them well!

[GREED]

Very chicken and egg isn't it. We push everything into the one system but if it goes we are more stuck than if not, however is makes much more sense and more powerful to have it all in one place.

 

I would dangerously argue that if one is not doing the sort of in depth analysis and alerting currently available in some of the bigger MIS' whether in the MIS or by hand or both, then your students are not getting the very best education available. We should be using systems to help inform teachers. And of course when that goes, there is a big hole to fill.

 

Interesting...

[CAM]

Paper records exist but they are patchy at best and completely missing at worst. Primary schools and parents are notorious for supplying data late or incomplete. It's been improving but I still have to manually check students for the census. Now imagine that for your entire school each year!

[GREED]

Paper records exist but they are patchy at best and completely missing at worst. Primary schools and parents are notorious for supplying data late or incomplete. It's been improving but I still have to manually check students for the census. Now imagine that for your entire school each year!

 

Some do still. No many but some