It was our first time at BETT, not surprising really since we launched Schools BI a year ago! We were right by the Futures stage and it was really buzzing. Visitors were so keen to find out more about emerging, and new, ways to use technology to improve education; because let’s face it – that is what is really important here, ensuring that everything drives better educational outcomes.
International Flavour
The first day was full of international visitors, and whilst we had visitors from all over the world throughout the 3 days, on Wednesday there were definitely more. We were excited to talk to people from Sweden, Copenhagen, UAE, Bahrain, Spain, France and Kazakstan. Although, the French visitors kept asking us to move out of the way so that they could take pictures of the product …. what can you do 🤔😂!
Visitors were searching for us!
The Thursday was definitely the busiest and we were thrilled when visitors actively sought us out (we were on a pretty small stand), and we found out that we’d unfortunately been missed off the signboards – so a serious level of effort had to be made to find us!
It seems that there is a real shortage of solutions like Schools BI that give you access to your data, that are MIS-agnostic, and don’t require you becoming a BI specialist or developer! Which is exactly why we developed this solution in the first place! As we’ve worked with our Schools to develop Schools BI, it means that it has been designed by Educators, rather than by developers.
Always Evolving
So, the resulting product is one that will actually be genuinely useful. What we found at BETT is that Schools, Academies and MAT’s all had a variety of pain points when dealing with the data they hold. Many of these coincided, but many were also unique. This is something that we are finding more and more; whilst it is reasonable to think that all Schools or MAT’s would have the same set of issues, this simply isn’t the case. Each one uses different systems and processes, so a ‘one size fits all’ approach simply isn’t practical.
We have developed a standard set of dashboards that our customer’s requested, however we don’t stop there. We make them bespoke to your working practices, so it doesn’t matter what (or how many) Management Information Systems you have, or where you hold your data. We can work with you so that you have the analytics you want, displayed on clear and interactive dashboards – simple as that!
On the final day of the show, it was a bit quieter than the Thursday but still a very exciting day for us as our very own Rhys Gwillym was speaking on the Futures stage. There was a great turn out for him and we got loads of fantastic feedback afterwards.
We got ourselves noticed!
We’re thrilled with the way the event went, so much so that we’ve now booked in to the Schools & Academies Show, again at Excel, on 27th April. Although, I think we, at Schools BI, are now immortalised as the ‘t-shirt’ or ‘bikini’ people due to our show wear 😁 (designed by a girl, not a boy!) …. you’ve got to have a bit of fun!
