🤯 14x Growth Story: 350 to 5,000 Schools in 5 Years.

In early 2017 I began working with Arbor Education to help build and scale their MAT offering.

I'd been working with large MATs since 2010 and spent 2 years advising the DfE's Academies Programme.

Back then Arbor had around 350 MIS customers and 4 MATs, with their MAT product still far away on the horizon.

Fast forward to today and Arbor has over 5,000 schools and works with 350 Trusts. That's 14x growth.

• 🎟 Join the 90-minute webinar “Selling to Multi-Academy Trusts” on 10th October. I’ll be discussing many of the topics covered in this blog. Last few tickets remaining here

📝 Background to the MIS Market

• 👉 If you’re not familiar with the MIS market here’s a quick primer.

• 👉 If you know this story, skip ahead

SIMS (formerly owned by Capita), enjoyed a 25 year run where it counted around 85% of all English schools as customers. Enjoying a first-mover advantage in the early 90s and quickly selling through Local Authorities, it essentially became a monopoly with schools unable to move or choose an alternative due to LA mandates.

The introduction of the Academies programme enabled schools to breakaway from LA control and gave them greater freedom in their procurement. Around the same time, the advent of cloud technology meant it became easy, cheaper and faster to build a competitor to SIMS.

Competitors entered and a new market was born.

♟ Playing the Long-Term Game

As MIS competitors fought to switch schools from SIMS, 4 main competitors emerged from the fray; RM, Bromcom, ScholarPack, and Arbor.

In this chasing pack, Arbor were in 4th place. Small in size but not in ambition, at Arbor I saw a marked difference to what I’d experienced at other EdTech companies. There was a strategy beyond next year’s growth and regular long range planning, akin to what I’d been used to at Apple Education.

A little later, The Key Group acquired ScholarPack, and the Big 4 became 3.

Building a comprehensive long-term MAT strategy was no easy feat and a lot of people were involved with a lot of time given to it.

My first task was that I went and met as many of our schools in person, not to sell to them, but simply to understand how they used the platform, what they liked, and what they needed next.

Mixed in, I spent a lot of time with Arbor’s unhappiest customers. Most schools had never changed MIS, and many found it difficult or slow work which lead to a whole raft of negative emotions. When I joined, churn was around 10%, reducing to 1.8% by the time I left.

The interesting thing about churn is that it’s often more of an implementation and perception problem that it is a feature problem but more on that another time.

All these learnings, as well as reading the signs coming out of the Department for Education, enabled us to build out a long-term MAT strategy. This included:

• A clear roadmap for the MAT product. It wasn’t an extension or bolt on to our existing platform but a specifically designed platform for Trust needs

• Marketing. We treated Trusts as a complete different segment (as they are), and had unique content, assets, and eventually events that we could engage them with.

• Sales. We evolved the sales process to account for the extra stakeholders involved and additional steps that are required to proceed.

• Onboarding. This was differentiated, and eventually tiered, giving Trust’s different options to choose from based on how much internal capacity they had and how fast they wanted to implement.

• Support. Our whole support provision had to evolve, going from an ‘all you need, any time you need us’ offer, to a tiered triage system enabling us to quickly respond to and resolve school issues.

• Internal Processes. We developed new ways to communicate with Trusts and schools, who often times may not be fully aligned. Walking the line between internal power struggles was not always straight-forward and something we had to be mindful of.

• Software Systems. With all this extra complexity we upgraded our systems so that we understood how individual schools were getting on, how quickly implementations were going, and received early warning signs when key members of staff left.

• People. We built out of key teams, hiring people both experienced in the sector but also bringing in more commercial people with experience in training, support, project management and many other complimentary skills.

After 2 years at Arbor, I believed we were positioned to win the MIS market. I moved on to fulfil a long-term goal of studying a full-time MBA and began thinking about my next business.

👹 Competitors Circling

After half a year out, I start to miss the sector and began taking on consulting work and was approached by both RM and Bromcom.

I won't say which company, but a series of meetings were organised which were interesting to say the least. The company was increasingly unhappy as it was beginning to lose ground to Arbor with more schools choosing to switch them them.

Proud of the work at Arbor, I wasn’t interested in divulging the specifics, but was interested to explore building another MAT strategy with a different team and a different product.

As I met with the senior managers at this company, the idea of 'MAT Strategy' was at first seen as a ‘nice to have’ and by the end as an indulgent fantasy.

Losing ground in the market to Arbor, it felt like the management team was driven to meet me more by panic than any vision. Their strategic vision amounted to replicating the SIMS model of the 1990s by signing LAs up and enforcing usage. Individual Academies would be targeted by cold emails.

The year was 2020.

Multi-Academy Trusts didn’t factor into their thinking and there was a fundamental lack of acknowledgement of the direction for the sector. It won’t be a surprise that we didn’t work together.

🚢 The Tip of the Iceberg

This company weren't unique in thinking this way. In fact, many EdTechs I spoke with at this time gave little thought to MATs.

The key in building great strategy is not where the school market now, but where it is going.

In 2020, only 10% of Academies were part of a 10+ school MAT (the data lags by 1 year).

The ‘tip of this iceberg’ was small (as it alwasy seems from the surface), and it was easy to dismiss Trusts as insignificant.

3 years on, 20% or schools are in a 10+ school MAT.

When you looked under the surface, it was easy to see just how deep this iceberg went:

• The rate at which schools were academising was increasing.

• The rate at which schools were joining Trusts was increasing.

• A growing skills gap emerged in Trusts who began recruiting from the private sector.

• Private sector employees brought with them new ideas, processes and expectations to school and Trust procurement.

• The Department for Education was communicating that they saw Trusts as the future for the UK education system.

• The Education Secretary stated the goal was that there would be “No more than 1,000 Trusts” - split equally would mean every Trust would have 26 schools.

• It appeared unlikely that a change of Government would happen, changing this political direction.

Read back, it is inevitable where the market was leading, and it was leading to Trusts having greater control in EdTech procurement.

How Strategy Builds an Unstoppable Advantage

By 2021, Arbor’s strategy, years in the making, was coming to fruition as they overtook both RM and Bromcom to become the #2 in the market. However, 73% of schools still used SIMS, so there was plenty still to play for.

Then it happened! A huge shift that happens in every market. The only question is when will it happen and how big will the opportunity be. This one was a big one, perhaps the biggest UK education has seen.

In mid 2021, SIMS was sold to ESS (the Parent Pay Group) and in late 2021 ESS tried to enforce that all customers switch from 1-year contracts to 3-years, giving some schools as little as a few months notice. Thousands of schools mobilised, hundreds of schools sought legal action and the Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation.

ESS softened their stance, lengthening their break period and the ‘Great Switch’ began. More schools switched MIS provided in 2022 than in the previous 5 years combined.

It’s in these unexpected times, long-term strategy pays dividends. No one could have predicted that this would happen, but for years, Arbor had invested time and resources into building a multi-year MAT strategy, while competitors only focused on the year ahead.

When schools decided to switch MIS, the competing MIS companies had to be ready. There wasn’t time to scale up, refine process, change systems - it was time to execute.

In 2022, Arbor won 1,849 new schools vs Bromcom’s 782. For every 1 school Bromcom signed, Arbor acquired 2.5.

RM fell so far behind they were later sold to The Key Group.

Arbor and Bromcom were the last 2 big companies standing.

As of the most recent data, Arbor’s lead continues to grow, winning 657 vs 181 Bromcom’s in 2023. For every 1 Bromcom sign, Arbor sign 3.6.

With 5,000 schools and reach into 350 Trusts, Arbor are likely to approach a tipping point meaning Bromcom will find it ever more difficult to narrow the gap.

The only question left is how much of SIMS market share will Arbor take.

🤔 What to Expect Next from MATs?

Whether you agree with it or not, by 2030, the DfE has set the target for every school to be part of a MAT.

Within 12 months, the forecast is that more than 50% of schools will be part of a Trust. That’s a major milestone.

The internal guidance going out to Trusts is that they needed to have a minimum of 11 schools to be considered sustainable in the eyes of the DfE and ESFA. Expect Trusts to grow in size and more mergers to take place.

We can also expect Trusts to take a greater control of educational resources across their schools. Many larger Trusts are developing approved curriculum lists, and those not making the cut cannot be purchased. As Trusts for the first time begin to be judged on the educational improvements and value add they provide to their schools, it’s easy to see that they’ll quickly move to better control what classroom resources are in use.

• 👉 On the 10th October I'll be giving a 90-min crash course on how to you can prepare for the changes and build your own MAT strategy for the years ahead. Get your ticket below.

As always, thanks for reading. If you haven’t already, feel free to add me on LinkedIn.

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Best, Jay