news Tes acquires an MIS or two...!

[vikpaw]

Some spring time news.

Tes has acquired Education Horizons Group, adding not one but three MIS to their portfolio along with some other products and a heap of customers.

https://www.tes.com/for-schools/now-tes/education-horizons

 

EHG who took over DoubleFirst some time ago, adding Engage MIS to their suite, also started work on their new MIS offering Zunia. I was involved in early stages of it and it was pretty amazing, built from the ground up, with a huge team of developers.

 

Now Tes has taken a big step into the MIS market through this acquisition along with Synergetic, EHG's standing school management system, and the other complimentary tools such as Seqta a learning management tool.

 

Engage was pretty all encompassing anyway, but now it has a whole suite of products at its doorstep which adds more choice for schools wanting best in breed add-ons with close integration.

 

Engage || Zunia  || Synergetic

 

Exciting times for private and international schools.

[Dos_Box]

Interesting times, TES seems to be building up quite a portfolio of essential backend educational software.

[PotNoodleTech]

Ah the company that buries it's head in the sand and pretends it's own data breeches don't happen looking after even more MIS data.

 

Great.

[MrEprise]

I wouldn't mind but the products offered by TES aren't particularly cheap compared to the competition, and the costs of these rise exponentially with each passing year.

 

We use about 3 products from them and if I could fund alternatives, that's a £11k saving right there.

[psydii]

10 minutes ago, MrEprise said:

We use about 3 products from them and if I could fund alternatives, that's a £11k saving right there.

Counter point, how much would it cost to hire people to do the back-end admin work that these tools eliminate.  

 

Counter counter point, as long as we have at least three/four big players in what we're loosely referring to as the MIS market we're in the sweet spot (for us customers) of both supplier scale and competition when it comes to pricing..... as long as we (the customers/market) keep choosing the best value combination services and don't accidentally recreate the (effective) single supplier dominance of the 2000/2010's.

[Jamman960]

Oooh interesting! moved my previous school to Engage and loved it (the MIS, not the migration process!)

 

I would have thought education horizons was far more internationally focused than Tes with most of their workforce based in Austrailia, with Tes behind them they may become a serious contender

[MrEprise]

1 hour ago, psydii said:

Counter point, how much would it cost to hire people to do the back-end admin work that these tools eliminate.  

 

 

Technically, we're already paying for those people to be here (one of those is me) and they were doing said back-end admin work 4 years ago before we moved to the TES products.

[TechMonkey]

On 23/04/2025 at 10:57, Dos_Box said:

Interesting times, TES seems to be building up quite a portfolio of essential backend educational software.

& then making it worse....

[Bromcom_John]

Be interesting to see if this actually shrinks choice in the long term. It is unusual for any acquisition of this type to maintain multiple competing products under the same banner.
Exciting times, as you say.

[vikpaw]

Well, EHG kept 2/3 going under their banner for quite some time.

 

I would imagine the best case scenario is they take the best of each and build a central, internationally suitable, core system which can then tap into any other add-on.

 

Faria were/are looking to do similar, but haven't heard much on that front for a while.

[DrCheese]

With all the various bits of software TES own now (SchoolCloud, Classcharts & now this) it's fairly clear to anyone externally that they will be looking to merge all these together & create an MIS - I'm all for more competition so this is good!

[Ironside]

Sorry but I have to agree with someone up the thread - TES, the people responsible for making (not letting, making) parents see classcharts info for kids who A: aren't theirs and B: not even at the same kid, shouldn't be trusted with school data to the extent of an MIS. While I will back down on this if a more-informed or more GDPR savvy person comes in, I don't believe TES ever faced consequences for that breach that should've seen more serious consequences than it actually did if my mmeory serves.

Thread link for those unfamiliar: ClassCharts GDPR security issue - MIS Systems - EduGeek.net

 

Edited April 29, 2025 by Ironside