Part 1: Taking the plunge

Corinium Education Trust moves to Cloud MIS with Bromcom

Corinium Education Trust is a growing and forward-looking multi-academy trust based in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. It is currently comprised of a large mixed secondary school and three primary schools.

Corinium decided to move away from their legacy on-premises Management Information System during 2022 and knew that they wanted the flexibility and cost savings associated with a cloud-based MIS.

However, the first cloud MIS that the Trust selected – Arbor – did not meet the school’s needs, and lacked the functionality and flexibility that they needed to meet the aims of their schools and the Trust overall.

A second change in the space of 12 to 18 months

Having taken the very difficult decision to make yet another move, the Trust approached Bromcom in June 2023 to procure the One Stop Shop package for all four schools and the MAT Vision package to deliver the data that the central Trust team needs. The comments ‘With Arbor we are on our knees’ and ‘It is like death by a thousand cuts’ were being used during this process, articulating the frustration and difficulties being experienced with Arbor and hence the desire and justification for changing providers a second time, albeit within the space of 12 to 18 months. After having a number of ‘deep dive’ demonstrations, a move to Bromcom proved too compelling to resist.

The timeframe to move all four schools before the 31^st August deadline was ambitious, but the Bromcom onboarding and migration team swung into action and made sure that the schools were up and running with the core system for the start of the new term. Key to this was the project management from the onboarding team and the close involvement of the Bromcom Customer Success manager in ensuring that training was organised and any last-minute hitches with data or configuration were resolved in the first few days on the new system.

Trust Lead (CEO), Chiquita Henson, worked with the Bromcom team and the school leadership teams to develop a rollout plan across the Trust. Now that the core system is embedded, the next steps on the plan include configuration of assessment and primary/secondary dashboards and the rollout of the My Child At School apps to parents, staff and students.

A key benefit of Bromcom for the Trust will be the use of MAT Vision to give visibility of key metrics and benchmarks to the leadership group, governors and trustees. This includes the ability to see metrics such as student absence, behaviour and attainment and staffing data in real time. The trust is considering how governors might benefit from permission-controlled access to Vision to be able to monitor KPIs dynamically rather than static reports generated at a moment in time. The ability to drill down to see underlying data and causes is a capability that will add significant value to Trust governance.

Chiquita Henson said ‘I am very grateful to the Bromcom team. I really appreciate the high level of support they have provided for our schools, particularly given the ambitious migration timeline. Our schools are happy that Bromcom has met their needs and they are excited by the positive impact that the rollout of further features will have upon learning, teacher workload and parental engagement.’

Headteacher of Cirencester Deer Park School, Richard Clutterbuck said ‘Moving to Bromcom has been a breath of fresh air’ and praised the migration process and speedy resolution of early issues in the first few weeks of term.

We look forward to continuing the successful partnership with the Corinium Education Trust and hope that their positive experience will encourage others to ‘take the plunge’ and move to Bromcom, the first cloud-based MIS.

This is the first part in a series of updates on Corinium, stay tuned as we continue to follow their journey.