James Stewart, Head of ICT at Barker College, Talks Changing SIS

When Barker College implemented a new Student Information System (SIS) just before COVID, it soon became clear the solution wasn’t meeting the school’s needs. What began as a step towards digital improvement quickly turned into a daily frustration. Processes were slow, visibility was limited, and staff were spending more time managing systems than supporting students. Recognising the growing strain, Barker made the courageous decision to pivot, regroup, and find a long-term solution that would deliver real success.

That search led them to Veracross.

Helping to guide the journey was James Stewart, Head of ICT at Barker College for more than nine years. His role spans the full breadth of technology across the school — from infrastructure and devices to the digital platforms that support teaching, learning, and community connection.

In this conversation, James shares how Barker recognised the need for change, what it took to rebuild confidence in technology, and how Veracross has helped the school create a more connected, people-centred digital ecosystem.

Veracross were very hungry to understand Barker…there’s a huge investment of people to understand our culture and what we will try to achieve. From that came really rich dialogue about the right process and the outcome.

What were some of the biggest frustrations Barker College was having that drove the search for a new SIS?

We had a SIS that had numerous challenges. One of those was that it had very linear processes. So to get anything done, you had to go step by step by step. You couldn’t multitask. It was exceptionally slow as well and it didn’t give very good visibility. For our staff, it meant that it took a long time to get a task done, far longer than we would otherwise like. It also meant that we couldn’t get to the high-level things that we wanted. We had to do the low-level things and couldn’t get to what was really important to advance the wellbeing of our students and parent care.

That caused great staff angst and wasn’t sustainable over time. The effort that went in behind the scenes was huge, and it took a toll. You can do that for a short period, but over time, it will start to impact the experience of the broader parent community. We never got to that, but we could see it was coming, hence the need to change.

Was there a point when you decided you just couldn’t keep doing this anymore, when you decided enough is enough?

The point came quickly after the former SIS went in. We were kind of fortunate that it went in during COVID because the school had slowed down. But as the school got back up to speed, the inefficiencies became more and more apparent. We knew within months that we had a significant problem on our hands. We spent a good year trying to remediate that. We brought in external consultants to do everything we could possibly do, but we knew at the end of that remediation attempt that the product could not be sustained. We had significant staff morale issues, which was understandable considering the effort they had to put into their day-to-day job. That was the tipping point.

Then it was about bringing all the key stakeholders into the conversation. It was really important that they had a say; we had to learn what went wrong previously and how we could address that.

What operational or administrative improvements were you hoping to achieve with your new SIS solution?

The list is long and varied. But for operational efficiencies and outcomes, we really wanted staff to be able to focus on what was key to their task. It got to a point where to do some tasks, they’d go get a cup of coffee, come back, have to go do it again. A lot of time wasted. We wanted staff to be able to focus their time effectively and have more creativity and agency in what they were doing. Into that comes staff wellbeing, and staff joy.

It was also very difficult to see a holistic picture. You had to go into different areas of the SIS to try to put it together. We were relying on a lot of manual processes and a lot of things outside of the system to supplement it, which is not effective. We pride ourselves here at Barker on knowing our students, and we were spending a lot of time going around limitations to know our students.

It’s very easy to hide behind technology. We really want to change that paradigm and go back so the focus is on the people. We are here for our community: our students, our parents, our staff, our alumni, those who come and visit. Technology is there to enable us to do that.

How did Barker approach getting a new SIS? Did you use an RFP? Was there a specific process?

We have a very strong community in edtech and in independent schools, so we leveraged that to get an understanding of who was out in the market. It was actually from there that we heard about Veracross.

We went out with an RFP to all the known players within the Australian market. We put our requirements out, which enabled us to find the top 2 or 3 to focus upon. We then used what was called a co-design process. We had around six scenarios that went across different functional areas of the school, and we gave them to each of the finalists and said, “Here’s a scenario. We want you to come and present to all the key stakeholders how your product would address this scenario.” And so they came and they did that. It was fantastic because it didn’t look at one little area; it was this whole lifecycle across different areas of the school.

When you were doing your evaluation, what stood out about Veracross, and at what point did you know they were going to be the right fit?

Veracross were very hungry to understand Barker. I think it was partly in line with them entering the Australian market and trying to understand that well, too. But there’s a huge investment of people to understand our culture and what we will try to achieve. From that came really rich dialogue about the right process and the outcome.

We also really appreciate it from a product side. It’s a highly configurable product and also a CRM at its core. But it was really the approach, the company, the people and the willingness to partner and really invest to understand deeply. We love that. There was a point when all the key stakeholders got together and we all said yes, we believe that Veracross is the best way forward for us, and we’re all ready to commit to that partnership.

How have you and the team found working with Veracross and implementing the solution?

There’s a line from The Lion King where Simba needs a new diet. There’s a slug, and he has that, and it’s “slimy, yet satisfying”. The short answer is: it’s been challenging, but highly rewarding. You don’t go into it and think it’s going to be seamless. It exposes every part of the operation of your school, and you have to go in and assess the outcome. Do we have the best process? Does that process work with this particular application? If it doesn’t, how can we rework and do this? What’s the impact of doing that on all the elements of the community and other parts of the school? It’s highly complex, but we’ve loved every minute of it.

We’ve gotten to a point that we look back and we go, yes, we made the right call. The effort is worth the outcome.

Yes, we’ve made a few mistakes along the way, but it has gone better than we could have possibly expected. We took the time and went through the previous mistakes, and we’ve actually been able to leverage them to our advantage. We’ve gotten to a point that we look back and we go, yes, we made the right call. The effort is worth the outcome. That learning, that thinking, that engaging with key stakeholders, building the governance structures, understanding what was important to us. It took a long time, but it’s essential. That was our foundation for everything to be built across.

How did you and the business prepare the staff and community for the change?

We were lucky. The staff were deeply dissatisfied with what we had and they were advocating for change. Generally, when you do a change announcement, people groan. In this case, it was “Great, fantastic. How soon?”

First and foremost, our Head of Barker College, Phillip Heath, owned it. He got up in front of the staff at least every term and gave them an update. So the staff knew that the school was taking that very seriously. From there, we had champions out in every department who we were making sure that the department was aligned and knew what was going on. It was a lot of planning. We really tried across all levels to make sure staff were aware of what was happening and when it was happening.

How long has Barker College been live with Veracross?

Barker has been live with the academic part of Veracross since April 2025, about four months now. Academics is the whole teaching and learning element of the school, and it was our key metric for success. This is what the previous SIS didn’t deliver as well, and what Veracross had to deliver well.

All our focus was on that release, but we also did soft releases before that, bringing in some wellbeing elements, and some attendance elements and other things to make sure we had it right before the full academics release.

How have the teachers and staff found using Veracross?

I’m confident you could talk to any teacher here at Barker College, and they’ll tell you what a breath of fresh air it is, how they can find the information quickly, effectively. They’ve now got much more time to do other elements of their job, and they’ve really enjoyed the change.

At the end of the term that it was implemented, we got all the key stakeholders together from all the functional areas in the academics module — wellbeing, calendar, attendance reporting, you name it — to go through all the individual areas to understand how it landed, what was going well and what we needed to do more work in. We, the project team, were blown away by the positivity that we had. In a SIS project, you generally don’t hear that.

Now, their expectations will increase. And our challenge now in our partnership with Veracross is to continue to rise and meet those expectations. And what a great problem to have.

What are your expectations for how Veracross will improve communication and transparency with parents and the broader community?

One of the great things about Veracross is that you can make so much information transparently available to all of our parents. We’re part of the way forward on the journey with our parents, but our next focus is making some of the accounting elements more transparent, improving our communications to parents.

Communication is not just a tool, it’s also organisational discipline behind the scenes to make sure we’re using it effectively. It takes time to put that change in so that we’re using the tool effectively to give the parents the best outcome possible. We’re really looking forward to bringing this through, and we expect to see really significant improvements by the end of this year, even further to what the parents have already seen.

What’s the one piece of advice you would give to a school before they start their journey towards a new SIS?

Know your school. Whoever is leading the project, make sure you fully understand your school. We often think that we understand what every functional area in the school is doing, but it’s our lens and our perspective that we put on that. I think a lot of these projects don’t work because people have made the wrong assumptions about how areas of the school work.

How do you know your school? You need your leadership from the highest level to own that and to make sure the key stakeholders are invested in this. Being invested is not turning up at meetings. It’s being actively involved in how the SIS works in their area. And they’ve got to be involved from the very beginning. When you’ve got everybody in key positions working together, then you can know your school.

 

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