Education

The suppliers, products and customers in this chapter are in the landscape database, filtered to education, with known spend and sources. The graph shows how they connect.

Sector overview

Education digital splits across three populations with very different procurement dynamics: schools (~32,000 in the UK), further-education and sixth-form colleges (~250), and higher-education institutions (~170 universities). Schools mostly procure independently or through MAT-level (multi-academy trust) frameworks. FE/HE procures institutionally. The Department for Education runs a set of national systems that schools and colleges interact with statutorily.

Major systems

Lock-in observations

The school MIS market has fragmented in the last five years. SIMS (long the near-monopoly under Capita) has lost meaningful market share to Bromcom and Arbor, both of which have benefited from MAT-level decisions to standardise. The DfE’s active interest in MIS competition has accelerated this. The market is now competitive between proprietary products, but no open MIS exists at scale for UK use.

The much larger sovereignty exposure in education is in classroom productivity. Microsoft 365 for Education and Google Workspace for Education are used in nearly every UK school, with pupil and teacher data flowing through US-vendor cloud at scale. This is the largest unresolved data-sovereignty question in compulsory education.

Higher education has a more diverse student-record-system market (Tribal SITS, Ellucian, Unit4) but each university is heavily locked-in once a system is chosen. Open VLEs are a long-standing exception: Moodle has substantial UK HE adoption.

Replaceability

School MIS A

The functions are well understood, the market is increasingly competitive, and there is no regime equivalent to clinical safety. In principle an open school MIS is one of the strongest candidates in the survey, but in practice schools need a stable, accredited product from the first day, and competitors already have the user base and integrations. The realistic CIC work is components and data-portability tools; a complete open MIS is beyond CIC scale.

Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace in schools C

As in other sectors, replacement is not realistic. Mitigation is through open alternatives for specific uses (assignments, communications).

HE student records B

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data return is well-documented; admissions integrate via UCAS APIs. Open alternatives do not exist as turnkey UK-fit products. It is beyond the CIC’s scale on its own but is a credible project for a group of universities.

Virtual learning environments A

Mature open options already exist (Moodle, Open edX). Sovereignty work here concerns adoption, hosting and contributions to those projects.

UCAS D

UCAS is an independent charity company and does not raise a sovereignty concern.

The human dimension

Teacher-facing digital tools are a significant source of frustration in schools, particularly the time-cost of MIS data entry and the workflow gap between MIS, planning tools, and classroom platforms. Teacher and school-leader surveys consistently identify administrative load as a contributor to recruitment and retention problems. HE staff report similar friction with student records and module-administration systems.

Hands-off

Sector summary