With our 40th anniversary rapidly approaching in July, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how much education has changed in that time.
When I founded the company in 1986, first selling multi-user multi-processors to businesses, there were no GCSEs, SATs, or National Curriculum. That all changed two years later with the Education Reform Act 1988, arguably one of the biggest changes in modern education, enabling schools to control their own budgets and choose their own administration. So, a year later, we pivoted to providing our multi-user systems to local authority schools, starting our long journey partnering with schools.
An advert for Bromcom’s ‘shoebox’ from 1986.
In 1993, the same year Ofsted began inspecting schools, we released our first Electronic Attendance Registration System (EARS) – something people still associate with Bromcom today! By using handheld devices and short-range radio signals, teachers could take the register wirelessly and send the data directly to the school’s administration computer, speeding up the process of taking registration, streamlining attendance monitoring, and effectively tackling truancy in hundreds of schools across the UK. It was so groundbreaking, the following year we won a BETT Gold Award for it and even appeared on the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World to showcase the product.
The first EARS released in 1993.
In the millennium, we spotted the need for a simplified parent communication process and introduced our next innovation: mychildatschool.com. The first online parent portal, it allowed parents and guardians to look at their child’s performance and attendance securely online and went on to win us the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation in 2001.
The team being awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for MyChildAtSchool.com in 2001.
A few years later, we entered the MIS market. In 2004 we started the development of a complete web-based MIS and in 2010 – the same year it became possible for all publicly funded schools in England to become academies and just before Pupil Premium was introduced – we launched the first cloud-based MIS in the UK. Teachers and school staff could now use the MIS anywhere they had internet, unlocking a range of benefits including enabling schools to overcome their reliance on costly servers, offering them greater data security with the cloud, and giving them greater freedom and flexibility when using an MIS.
16 years later, we are now one of the UK’s biggest cloud MIS providers, helping almost 6,000 schools deliver better student outcomes and reduce the admin burden with our cloud-based solutions including Bromcom MIS, Finance, and Vision. We have continued to innovate our MIS since then, including launching the first AI-powered MIS in 2020 when many schools closed temporarily for the COVID-19 pandemic, and this year we are delighted to confirm the rollout of the first cloud-based MIS on a national scale in Northern Ireland.
Over the past 40 years we have listened closely to schools’ changing needs and challenges, finding innovative ways to help schools overcome them. We pride ourselves on always moving forward, and now we’re looking forward to supporting schools with the next challenge, whatever it may be.