Bromcom School MIS demo | An insiders view

Each and every day, people make the choice to leave their current MIS and join Bromcom.

Before that happens, they need a demo of our product to make sure it can meet their needs. It is crucially important to us as a company that we received feedback on how the demo went, not just from the customer, but also from our sales team.

Below are some thoughts from our sales team, regarding a recent demo he conducted and how we can use that feedback to optimise future demos. The Bromcom demo in question was planned as a deep dive carousel, with it’s content distributed in advance to attendees. As usual, we always invite participants to ask questions as we go along.

Administration (Primary)

We started the morning with a session on Primary Admin and were joined by head teachers and admin/HR staff. The main feature that we wanted to showcase was the Teacher Dashboard, which offers a ‘one click’ screen with all of the essential functions available in one place. After this, we had a discussion about browser compatibility and Single Sign On, before demonsrating our Parent, Teacher and Student Apps. The items covered were;

• Registration entries, late children, medical appt & illnesses etc.
• Distilling down from the whole cohort to a subgroup, Y6 pupil premium females.
• Enter a behaviour incident on behalf of a colleague.
• Processing Y6 leavers & CTF import.
• Messaging individuals or groups.
• Power of push notifications.
• Adding a new Student on the fly.
• Exploration of the staff area in a similar style.
• Groups.
• Create pre admission group and engaging via MCAS.
• Wraparound care.
• Run though of Trips and Groups.
  • Create a group in MIS, Parents subscribe via MCAS, payments, notifications to the group of late arrive etc. Plus explanation of how this is all done in one place rather than multiple applications.

The session was very well received and overran, all liked the simplicity on the admin screen where all tasks can be accomplished, whereas with their current MIS they felt they were jumping around. Nursery/Wraparound care was also mentioned as being complicated to set up in their current MIS. Another great feature we showcased was Walk Me, the interactive automation tool available in our MIS. Lastly, they were blown away with our primary report designer and how much quicker it is than their current MIS.

Assessment (Primary)

After we demonstrated Primary Admin, we moved on to a short Primary Assessment session. For this, we started by talking about using the Formative and Summative trackers and went on to explain how the system could be configured with features like Comment Banks and Grade sets to demonstrate progress. Importing/Exporting data using Excel and Standardised scores were covered before we looked at the built in Analysis tools, the KS2 Dashboard and explained Benchmarking. The demonstration was well received and the flexibility of our system was the main aspect that impressed everyone throughout.

Attendance (Primary)

By this point, we were running behind a fair bit because the previous two sessions were so enthusiastically received. Initially, attention was drawn to the fact that we have different a UI/UX for Primary and Secondary schools, catering for both rather than one size fits all. We explained that, for Primaries, this streamlines general navigation and is beneficial because Primary staff tend to have multiple responsibilities or roles, whereas Secondaries have more specialised roles or staff things like Exams, Behaviour and Data management. The demo then followed our traditional route and covered;

• Take Register
  • Autosave
  • Ability to use keystrokes not mouse clicks
• Dinner & Meal Patterns
  • The ability to change choice on the day or by parents in advance.
  • Forgotten Lunches
• Key contextual data that can be bought in.
• Projector mode
• Seating plans
• Attendance Dashboard

All areas of Attendance passed with flying colours, however our Dinner selection particularly impressed. Be it on the day through a register or via MCAS,  this was something that their current MIS didn’t offer.

Census, Communication and Diary (Primary/Secondary)

This section of the agenda proceeded smoothly, our relationship with the DfE was discussed along with the nuts and bolts of how we operated Census and what’s collected. We went through a census scenario and all were satisfied, including our mentions of the Bromcom Help Centre where the latest Census guidance is published prior to each return.

Cover (Secondary)

In their current MIS, staff had to split all of their double periods into singles so that they could accommodate teachers covering single periods of a double lesson. This meant that registers had to be completed for the two single periods of the double lesson and caused confusion. We demonstrated that this was not an issue with ourselves and on the fly, we could split the cover period of a single lesson into two, or a double into 4. This is because Bromcom use a period-based approach and other MIS’ use a time based one. Each may have its own advantages and could be seen as a “double edged sword” but ultimately it depends what each School prefers/needs.

Assessment (Secondary)

Here, we explained and demonstrated how we have developed our Secondary Assessment system to to provide a system where it is easy and slick to manage multiple sheets. One pain point that did surface was that Subjects had to be duplicated in their current MIS, such as English, to record separate grades for English Literature or Science etc. This was their man gripe against their current MIS’ assessment system.

Behaviour (Secondary)

This was a secondary session where we focused on how implement personalised behaviour policies, or how to create a new one with our Behaviour Pathways tool. We then moved on to the dashboards for a detailed look at the analysis here. Again, the lack of confidence in their current MIS has given them no alternative but to continue using third parties and workarounds to record Positive and Negative events. Bromcom is seen as a definite way forward here to get everything in one place and potentially tie it all in with MCAS.

MCAS (Primary/Secondary)

Finally, we concluded our demo with an MCAS session. Due to lack of confidence with Communication aspects of their current MIS, third party programs like Parent Pay were still in use. Our demo covered all of the standard functionality such as User Accounts, Push Notifications and Publishing Documents. We also highlighted our MyChildAtSchool (MCAS app) which is scored very highly on the App/Play store respectively. The functionality MCAS offers along with how well put together everything is, was extremely well received by all and ended a fantastic demo on a high note.