The most common thing a school says to us is not about price, and it is not about features. It is “we already have SIMS, and we are not changing it.” That is a reasonable position, and it does not have to end the conversation. GroupEd is built to work alongside the system you already run.
The short answer
No, you do not have to leave your MIS.
GroupEd Classroom and GroupEd OnSite are sold on their own, and both work with the management information system your school already has. Your registers stay where they are. Your statutory returns stay where they are. Your supplier, your contract and your support route are all untouched.
You are adding the parts you are missing, not replacing the parts that work.
Which systems does it work with?
Arbor, Bromcom, SIMS and GroupEd One, as standard.
A connection is not a migration. Pupils, staff, classes and registration groups flow across from your MIS, and they keep flowing. When a pupil joins in October, or a class is reshuffled at half term, the change reaches GroupEd without anyone typing it twice. Schools are right to be wary of bolting on another system. The usual result is two lists that have drifted apart by December.
Your MIS stays the record of truth. GroupEd reads from it.
What moves across, and what stays put
Worth being precise about this, because “works alongside” is the sort of phrase that can mean very little.
Stays in your MIS: the registers themselves, your census or PLASC return, admissions, and the pupil record as the legal source. Nothing about your statutory obligations changes, and nothing about who you call when something breaks.
Can move to GroupEd: behaviour and achievement, rewards, seating plans, parents’ evening bookings, and parent communication: through the Parent & Carer app, which is free for every family whichever route you take. On the OnSite side: reception sign-in, visitor management, evacuation roll call and lockdown.
These are the parts schools tend to describe as clunky, or as a separate system they are already paying for on top of the MIS. They are also the parts that touch the most people every day: every teacher, every parent, everyone who walks through reception.
What running two systems does cost you
Two systems means two suppliers, two support routes, and two places a change has to be made when your school changes. And while your MIS holds the registers, GroupEd cannot produce your census for you. That stays with the system that holds the data. Adding GroupEd alongside is genuinely the smaller decision. It is not a free one, and any supplier who tells you otherwise is selling.
What it costs
Our prices are on the website, which in this market is unusual enough to be worth saying out loud.
Classroom on its own is £290 a year plus £4.50 per pupil for a primary, or £1,490 plus £5 per pupil for a secondary. OnSite on its own is a flat £379 for a primary and £579 for a secondary, with no per-pupil fee at all. Everything is plus VAT, frozen for three years, on a twelve-month minimum term.
If you are comparing suppliers, it is worth checking each one line by line for a separate central or trust fee. They are not always in the headline figure.
When moving your MIS does make sense
Honestly? At some point, running two systems costs more than running one.
If you are already paying for a sign-in system, a parent app, a behaviour tool and an MIS, the arithmetic starts to favour consolidating. That is what GroupEd One is: the MIS itself, with Classroom, OnSite and the parent app included at one price rather than added on. Data migration is free, most schools are live within two to four weeks, and you can switch at any point in the year rather than waiting for the summer.
But that is a different decision, on a different timescale, and it is not the one this article is about. If you think you might be closer to it than you were a year ago, we have written separately about the signs a school has outgrown its MIS.
Where to start
Start with the thing that annoys you most. For most schools that is either parent communication or the front desk, because those are the two that generate the most complaints from the most people.
If you would like to see how it sits next to what you already run, book a 30-minute demo and we will use a school like yours rather than a sales script. If the answer is that you should keep what you have for now, we will say so.
