The Competition and Markets Authority has closed its investigation into school information management provider Education Software Solutions after finding that schools have been able to switch to alternative providers.
The watchdog today concluded that “intervention is no longer needed”, and that continuing to investigate the company, which is the largest provider of school information management systems (SIMS) in the UK, would be “unlikely to have further positive impact on the sector”.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened its investigation into the SIMS provider in May this year in response to concerns that the firm may have been trying to retain customers by making it difficult for them to switch providers ahead of contract renewal dates.
Schools had previously reported to the CMA that Education Software Solutions (ESS) had warned them not to share a copy of their database when switching to a new provider, as doing so would breach the company’s intellectual property rights.
The CMA has now confirmed that “a considerable number of schools have managed to switch from ESS to new providers”.
Schools had told the CMA that sharing database copies was a longstanding, widespread practice in the sector for data transfer of this kind - a practice that ESS stated it was unaware of.
Investigation into SIMS provider closed
The watchdog also found that competitors and third parties have been developing ways to migrate schools’ data using tools that do not raise intellectual property concerns with ESS.
In today’s announcement, the CMA said that these methods of data sharing are “less burdensome on schools”, “less error-prone than previous options” and “remove the need for sharing copies”.
It added that ESS’ share of the MIS market in England is declining, falling from approximately 50 per cent to 46 per cent in just a few months.
This is in comparison to the share of its main competitor, The Key Group, which has increased to a similar level at around 41 per cent.
Lewis Alcraft, group chief executive of ESS, said complaints had been made to the CMA that the firm’s SIMS application programming interface (API) was too “complex, time-consuming and error-prone to be usable”.
However, Mr Alcraft added that these APIs were now being used to undertake migrations to other providers.
In 2022 ESS offered the CMA commitments following a review to determine whether the company was using its dominant position in the market to push schools into accepting new three-year contracts, where previously they had run for just one year.
The CMA said this move allowed eligible schools to exit early from their three-year contract.
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