iSkool intelligent schooling: a business case for school management system; to understand, estimate the size of opportunity and build a business case for a school management system

Abstract

For long, private sector?s participation in India?s education market has been limited to a few chains and trusts. However, times are changing now with private sector waking up to the full potential of this sector. This is complemented by growing shift towards private schooling. As the private players become more active, the already fragmented education sector may see even more fragmentation followed by a consolidation wave as national chains begin to emerge. The underlined pressing need of quality education supported by state of the art management systems is quite clear at this stage. Some players like Educomp and Aptech have had some success in providing content as well as teaching solutions. However, that promises to be just the tip of iceberg. Schools continue to manage with make-shift software with a typical school in a metro using three to four different applications. With the growing need as well as the awareness about comprehensive school management system, schools are now demanding better integrated solutions. A handful of companies have sprung up in India in different parts aiming to serve this need but none of them seem to have found the right combination of technology as well as complete set of functionalities. On looking closely at the education sector, several revelations emerge. Not only has the sector been underserved by technology, but parents as an important stakeholder in the entire education system have been given only marginal importance. Today, their interaction with the schools is limited to a parent teacher meeting which typically happens once in two months. Therefore, it is obvious that a new system needs to be a lot more inclusive as well serving the needs of teachers, students, parents and the management. The SMS youth of today requires new paradigms in education support systems. Collaborative learning, discussing and debating has to be implemented at a structural level. Today, the students blog, network over social networking sites with other friends and use high end cell phones to surf over the internet. Therefore, to ensure that the ultimate customer of the education system i.e. the students are served in a manner that fits their changing lifestyle, the new system has to be a lot more forward looking and should allow anytime, anywhere access to educational resources while allowing students to discuss various topics on a platform. From a business perspective, a school management system will also open a plethora of services which can be rendered using the underlying system. These services include procurement of stationary and uniforms, GPS-enabled tracking of school buses over the proposed system and helping the government with data collection pertaining to different schools for the formulation of policies. Lack of a common standard for school management systems is an important gap in the current scenario which limits the ability to aggregate school level data. Globally, there have been efforts in this direction but we are yet to see anything significant in India.