marshharrier

Glennda - many thanks for the correction - that must have been very recent indeed as I only checked about 6 months ago. My understanding is that their employees are spread about all over the place and so I'd imagine that perhaps only some operate from Coventry? I don't know this for a fact but with a bit of luck they will confirm it for us

Don't be too hard on yourself irsprint84 - appearances really can be deceiving! ParentPay are not a very big company, with only about 20 or so employees and they don't even have a main office (most of their staff still operate from their own homes). In fact most of the time you actually speak to someone at ParentPay you are speaking to someone in their own home. I should point out that using a small company is not always a problem and in fact can be quite the opposite in a lot of situations (personal service, rapid response, local company etc). In my experience it's usually the transition between being a small company and then becoming a bigger company which causes quite a lot of pain and often requires financial investment, commitment and often different people in the business with big company skills! Anyway I hope I've been able to provide some useful information for the members of this thread.

I think before anyone jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire it's really worth doing your research on companies dealing with payments from parents! Here's my checklist FWIW; 1. Are they investing in their product (do they continually develop/improve it? This shows they have vision, commitment and a plan going forward, and it also shows they are making money i.e. are sustainable for the long term)! 2. Are they easily available on the telephone? 3. Do I know where their office is based and could I go and visit them if I wanted/needed to? 4. How many staff do they have? (Are they a garden shed company with only 3 or 4 employees?) 5. Have I seen their accounts for the last year or two? (Are they always late filing their accounts - trying to hide something?) Apologies if this seems like teaching you to suck eggs, but the reality is that it's easy for a company to create a big impression and very few schools carry out the proper due diligence before engaging suppliers (especially in such an important area as this one). I've even complained to our LA that they don't ask proper questions such as 'are they profitable' and 'have their accounts been examined i.e. do they have the capacity to handle 300 schools for example!) The company we use are superb & I looked into every one of the points above before engaging them. It turns out to have been a very good move! HM.

Not in my opinion. OK for occasional or low volume data entry task but that's it. There isn't enough performance (processing capability) for any serious applications plus the work involved in getting data on and off the things makes them unsuitable.

Totally agree Vikpaw ... lots of schools are persuaded into buying something because of fancy functionality which they then never end up using. 'Absence' is a key one i.e. if you're a Primary school with no real absence problem then don't buy something which majors on absence. One other area of caution ... DATA PROTECTION! Make sure that you have the right permission from parents before extracting their data from SIMS/MIS. Some of these systems run a daily/nightly sync with MIS and extract data (contact details). If parents have said 'no' then you need to ensure their data doesn't get pulled out. Similarly if you have new parents joining mid-term and you haven't yet got their permission they too need to be excluded from any auto extract. Some of the apparently less sophisticated systems are that way 'for a reason' so don't be hoodwinked by technology for it's own sake :-)

Saw ParentMail earlier this week to discuss 'ParentMail 2' which is out soon. Includes two-way texting, two-way email, and payments from parents. They're also adding an APP which lets parents do all the above from their mobile phones. (Yup you read it correctly ... parents will be able to build their own private groups and send their own messages too - independently from the school). Mobile Phone App To Help Parents Supervise With Their Children Announced « Gadgets and Technology News Looks very cool indeed, and as for pricing ... they're about the same as everyone else!

SIMS InTouch is expensive. There are other better and cheaper systems out there.

Complete rip off - trying to charges parents either £1 or 50p per alert message depending on how they pay! Outrageous and not endorsed by Kent CC as far as I can see.

You need to look on the BECTA website to find the recommendations.

Like it or not the Government (most Governments) already hold more information about each of us than anyone else! I don't like it particularly but it is a fact nonetheless. I'd rather this than massive private 'corporates' with other agendas gathering our data! @GeeHubb ... you clearly don't mind how many organisations gather data on you? I don't have a problem with the Government hiring out external companies to build the backbone (a la Capita/Serco) but I DO have a problem with those private companies then owning the backbone as is the case now! The Government could easily (right now) contract the building of an MIS backbone from any number of companies who could build it and transfer the ownership to the Gov't for substantially less than £10 million GBP! Sounds like good value to me ....

iThoughts gets my vote - I use it almost every day! Close second is Notebooks which has great personal wiki capability and also links nicely with dropbox

My idea ... that the government builds the backbone (after all it's them that want endless census data out of MIS) and then the private sector innovates and builds the components! It's then very much down to individual schools to choose the components they want to use and also NOT to be burdened with loads of things they never use (How much of SIMS does the average Primary school actually use .... 10%!) This way education can be flexible to suit individual schools, needs, environments etc. Difficult to disagree with this. The forum posts speak for themselves. I have had the presumption to criticise Capita on a few occasions and EVERY time I do, there is one person who can be guaranteed to jump down my throat. Seems a bit of a personal mission to me. On topic - Interoperability absolutely HAS to happen with MIS and the players should be forced (by law if necessary) to co-operate (although they might appear to be on-side with SIF, it is IMHO a bit of smoke and mirrors and not proper engagement on the part of some!)

If I can add to my last post, VLE's are already being rolled out on the whim of may Local Authorities! It has been decided that this should be done and it is being done! Schools are now in the situation of having to persuade parents of the benefits i.e. it's a done deal! Take a look at the link below and the first post which rather makes my point. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/65049-do-primary-school-pupils-need-online-storage-area-vle.html#post584377

Graham - I agree with you but I think you missed my point. My point being that the whole concept of VLE's being discussed with parents before the last Government set the whole ball rolling and before schools were instructed that having a VLE was mandatory'ish within defined timescales!! I'm not sure the guidance given to schools was "If you don't get a good reaction from parents, then you don't need to do it" or at least I've never seen such guidance. In the meantime a whole industry has been born (which taxpayers are paying for) and from my own experience, provides ZERO value! I realise some VLE's may be better than that used by my child's school, or that VLE's will be better used by some schools .... but there will be many (perhaps the majority) that will not!

IMHO I don't agree with the current drive to centralise everything. Of course there are benefits but those benefits are the only one's that are being pushed at the moment. Centralisation (because) of scale always leads to one thing - MASSIVE companies/organisations (because they are the only ones able to afford to build the infrastructure). So if you want EVERYTHING to be done/controlled by the world's biggest companies, centralisation is for you. It really is that simple (unless in my point above it is the government that provides the central piece!) To give a contra view, colleagues of mine up in Hull a few years back, had their school flooded (under 4ft of water). Their entire IT infrastructure was ruined including all the DATA on SIMS (I realise this would seem to support off-site centralisation ... but hear me out)! They were using one or two niche service providers that were hosted in the cloud whose services were unaffected by the chaos and which the school were able to continue to rely on. (In fact those services proved to be a lifeline). The point I'm making is that it is good to have data in more than one place in my opinion. A single point/location/service/provider which could fail (and they all do at some point) is NOT a good idea. Having your systems spread about builds resilience as long as it's easy to integrate those systems when necessary, and means none of those providers get too big for their boots and that they concentrate on making their products as good as they can be in the market. At the moment, all we're hearing is that "Everything in one place, or in one system, is a good thing" because it's an easy argument to present and it's easy for the school! I'd like to see more emphasis put on the benefits of multiple products, locations, services and providers. Where the school doesn't come to a grinding halt because one system is having problems, and NOT being held to ransom because the ONE system has become so big you cannot do without it.

@Ed - Sounds good as long as the new wonder-MIS producer doesn't get grandiose ideas of power and ruling the world (like someone else we know). Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely! My idea FWIW is that the Government build the product you suggest i.e. the framework/backbone and then let everyone else build the components. That way you'd have a guarantee that the framework manufacturer wouldn't walk over the component manufacturers when the temptation became too strong.

IMHO ... NO it isn't worth the money. I was sent a login yesterday by my daughter's secodnary school to their new VLE (won't mention it's name but it's mentioned in this thread). Virtually no information of any value, virtually no interaction for me, most of the options locked down (no permitted access), my contact details incorrect, achievement information just static sentences with no ability to see more. Utterly hopeless and I won't be going back to have another look anytime soon. I wonder how many other 'parents' like me in this scenario will reach the same conclusion. I wonder also what the stats are as to what % of parents EVER login to these (working in a Primary school I don't have numbers but I'm sure some of our secondary school friends here might know?) For me the idea of a VLE was a good one, but like so many things it was decided without talking to parents first .... build the mountain and the people will come!!

Hi Greed, It isn't just about schoolcomms! this decision to enter the comms spaces should sound warning bells to EVERY CAPITA PARTNER! Other Capita partners in this space alone are Truancy Call, ParentMail, Keepkidssafe, Teachers2parents, Groupcall and so on. All of these companies are paying Capita for the right to be 'partners', and they have all been stitched up. This isn't a one off either as Capita have a track record of doing this. (look at parentpay and pass - both of them had the same treatment when SIMS introduced lesson monitor and the dinner money module)! Why - take a guess ... Money, profit and most importantly .... To control the market. Capita don't want any companies getting too big a foothold in the education space so as soon as a company starts to do well and get a good number of schools using their product/s .... You've guessed it .... In come Capita with a 'built into SIMS' option thats easier and cheaper! I had the MD of ParentMail at my school recently, and he told me that he has personally contacted the CEO of Capita (Paul Pindar) to try to persuade Capita to consider producing a 'partner charter' which would grant partners a guaranteed amount of notice if they intend to enter a partners space. Guess what ... He didn't even get a reply! He also told me that he was given only one terms notice that Capita were planning on entering the comms market! To my mind this type of behaviour by Capita is despicable and I've said before schools should act with their feet and refuse to use InTouch.

Anyone seen this -> http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/61463-sims-intouch-port-requirements.html I know for CERTAIN I don't want a permanent VPN connection to my database! Any connections needs to be controlled by me and not by a third party (whomever they may be!)

Amanda, We also recently ordered +Pay having studied the options. It was a strange choice of ..... "whether to choose the established 'comms' player who are moving into the 'payments' space, or the established 'payments' player moving into the 'comms' space? Both of these products (in my opinion) play to their historical strengths at the moment and it will be interesting to see how things develop. For us, the fact that we already had 90% of our parents registered with ParentMail made the decision an easy one in the end, although I too much preferred the user interface in +Pay. I'll be running a full analysis of our use of +Pay as it's a new product and I thought it would be useful for others here. Early days yet of course but I'm happy to answer questions from anyone if I can help. H.

Update on +Pay as promised. We had a demo last week and it looks very interesting indeed. Rates are as follows; Credit card - 1.65% (with no added transaction charge!) Debit Card - 32 pence per transaction These rates are competitive with other systems we've seen. Usefully for parents it also has a PAYPAL option too although it is slightly more expensive than cards at 1.9% + 20 p per transaction. System itself is very intuitive and allows you to create email/text reminders as part of the payment item. This effectively means that you setup the item and the messages go out automatically ... which I like! You can also chase the 'non-payers' with a single button click which again our admin team will find a doddle. We've ordered, and the setup time is 4 weeks. Will report on how it goes if anyone is interested. H.

Russ - I don't want to turn this into an outright Capita bashing thread, but I think there is a very disturbing and not so obvious problem that is not being picked up by schools generally. The more schools rely on SIMS, the more companies are forced to partner with Capita (because it makes life easier for schools), and the more Capita moves into competition with niche providers (partners) the biggers SIMS becomes .... can you see where this is going?! It's a vicious circle which schools will be unable to break out of. Capita know this very well and they don't want niche providers getting any kind of foothold which might allow them to tackle the MIS sector. That is where the true anti-competitivness angle comes from i.e. stymying the market and removing future competitors while they're too small to fight back. THAT is the real hidden secret here and schools are playing straight into Capita's hands because generally speaking, they are only interested in what is easiest to do! Using something which is 'inside' SIMS will ALWAYS BE EASIER than using a 3rd party product, and as long as 'easiness' is at the top of the school IT agenda, it will always triumph. A long view is required right now before it is too late. Schools need to say no to Capita by not buying their bolt-ons! Only if this happens consistently will they concentrate on their MIS tool and make it as good as it could be.

Pete ... I really wouldn't bother. You'll spend tens of thousands of pounds building your product and selling your product to the market, you'll spend thousands paying Capita to partner with SIMS.net and then after a while Capita will move into the market themselves, smashing you and all your hard work to smithereens despite the fact that you've been paying them for years. That's what happens in the education software market ... hadn't you noticed? :-) This thread makes this point precisely. H.

Might want to look at a similar thread --> http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/56923-sims-extra-curricular-2.html Before anyone asks I don't work or have any connection with Schoolcomms! I feel really sorry for these guys and other Capita partners in the same space (probably another 3 or 4 companies!) Capita don't need to occupy this space and IMHO schools should NOT buy into InTouch as a protest! As usual Capita are trying to muscle in on EVERYTHING and expecting schools to pay through the nose. Vote with your feet folks or very soon all you'll be able to buy is Capita products. Sorry for the strong views!

No I'm afraid not! I am just passionate that small providers get a chance, especially as that's where most of the 'original thinking' comes from! I hate to see them being simply trampled underfoot by a company that already has far too much control of the education software market as it is! Total and utter 'greed' is the only word for it. If WE don't stick up for small companies we'll only have ourselves to blame when there is no choice other than Capita, at which point we'll also have no choice but to pay the prices they want. H.