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Changing management software without breaking the school year

19 July 2026

November. The school office juggles a spreadsheet for payments, a notebook for absences and an ageing piece of software that nobody dares touch any more. At the end of every month, the same day lost to reconciling the figures. Everyone knows it: the tools need to change. And everyone gives the same answer: “not mid-year”.

This caution is legitimate. A school never stops: the register must be taken at eight o'clock, receipts must go out the same day, the class council will not wait. Switching the whole school over in one go, in the middle of the year, would indeed be a mistake. But waiting for the following summer has a cost too: additional months of re-keying, payments desk errors and manual reminders. Between these two extremes lies a workable path: changing step by step, without ever interrupting the service.

Start with a narrow scope

The first decision is not technical; it is a matter of scope. You do not replace the school's entire administration in one go. You choose a single process, bounded and daily: the payments desk, or absence tracking. Not both.

This choice has two virtues. First, it limits the risk: if something sticks, it sticks within a scope you control, while the rest of the school carries on working as before. Second, it makes progress visible within days: a payments desk that issues its receipts without re-keying, or a morning register whose results reach the school office in real time — these things are observed, not promised.

The rest of what is already in place — report cards, timetables, communication with families — stays as it is. You only touch what you have decided to touch.

The method, step by step

Once the scope is chosen, the process follows a precise order:

• Bring in the existing data through imports. Pupil lists, classes, families: all of this already exists in your files. It is imported, not re-keyed. Manual re-keying is slow, demoralising and error-prone; it condemns projects before the first day of use.
• Run the old and the new in parallel for two weeks. Within the chosen scope, both tools record the same operations. Every evening, you compare. When the figures match for a fortnight running, the switchover is no longer a leap into the void.
• Train by role, not in a general meeting. The school office needs an hour on payments and receipts. Supervisors, twenty minutes on recording absences. Teachers, even less. Each person learns what concerns them, on their own data, not on a textbook example.
• Appoint an internal point of contact. Someone from the school who gathers the questions of the first few days. They stop every hesitation from turning into a blockage.

What Scoliom takes over, and how

What the school sends: the Excel or CSV files of its current tool. The import recognises the usual column headings, in French as in Arabic; failing that, a downloadable template serves as a model. The timetable can be imported too, from an .ics file or an Excel list, with a preview of what will be written. Setup and data migration are included from Scoliom Essentiel; with Scoliom Logiciel they are options, costed in the same quote. The import goes one way, into Scoliom; at the end of the contract, your data is returned to you in standard formats. For a switch during the year, the school chooses the first billed month: nothing is billed before it.

Choosing the right window in the year

The school calendar matters as much as the method. One rule admits no exception: never migrate during examinations. Not during end-of-term tests, not during class councils, not in the week report cards go out. These periods concentrate workload and tension; you do not add a change of tools on top.

Conversely, the year offers quiet windows: the return from half-term holidays, the start of a term, the weeks after report cards have been issued. Two weeks of parallel running fit there without inconveniencing anyone. This is also why waiting for the summer is not compulsory: summer is one window among others, not the only one.

This staging changes the nature of the project. It is no longer about “changing software”, with all the worry the phrase carries, but about moving one process at a time, keeping a fallback available at every moment. The old tool only disappears once it no longer serves any purpose.

Before choosing the scope, you first need to know where you stand: which tools are actually used, what data exists and in what format, which periods of the year are busy. That is precisely the purpose of a remote assessment: establishing this picture with you, before any decision. A successful change rarely starts with the software. It starts with a sound reading of what is already there. To compare suppliers afterwards, our guide to choosing school management software sets out the questions to ask each one, from taking over your current files to training your staff.