Established in 1925, Tanglin Trust is the only dual-pathway International School in Singapore

Tanglin Trust offers a British curriculum education to students from 3-18, including both IB and A-level qualifications.

Established in 1925
Ages 3-18
Dual-pathway: A-level and IB
2500+ students, 50+ nationalities

Looking to develop a best-in-breed hybrid system

I started at Tanglin Trust back in March 2020, just at the beginning of the pandemic, and I inherited iSAMS as the MIS here. One of my first tasks was to look at the strategy for the application group – what were we doing as a school?  

Previously, we had been focused on writing our own applications and with that comes the issue of – not just functionality – but integration between the various systems that are needed to run a school. The first thing we did with our application platform was we decided that iSAMS would be at the centre, one of our foundation systems and our one version of the truth.

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Watch: Q&A with Tanglin Trust School

In this Q&A you will hear from Christopher Blake, Applications Manager at Tanglin Trust School about their experiences of using iSAMS.

The first thing we did with our application platform was we decided that iSAMS would be at the centre, one of our foundation systems and our one version of the truth.

Christopher Blake, Applications Manager at Tanglin Trust School

iSAMS: the central pillar

iSAMS is the place where the most current data resides, and we can leverage that in other applications that we use. We moved away from writing our own applications and we went for commercial off-the-shelf applications that are cloud-based. Having access to open industry-specific APIs (Application Program Interface) in iSAMS made our job much easier. 

Did iSAMS help to solve problems?

The most important thing was integration. With so many iSAMS partners out there, it meant that we could look at the best-of-breed applications that we wanted, knowing that we could use the APIs in iSAMS to keep everything in sync and share the data from iSAMS with these other applications.

It was simply a matter of working with those companies to set up the correct APIs so that the parent, student and teacher data could be synchronized and kept up to date.

Was it easy to add third-party integrations?

You just need to go to the iSAMS partner site – it was very easy. What that means for the applications team now is that we just monitor the logs, making sure that the replications happen on time. If there are any issues, we delve into it and get iSAMS and the vendor involved to look at what has happened. It’s made our lives much easier.  

My first impression when I saw it was, “wow, this is so comprehensive”. It’s pretty evident that [iSAMS] has been well designed and architected and then enhanced over the years with best practices.

What features do you use most often?

There are a lot of existing workflows that have been built in that in many cases we weren’t necessarily following. It was great to be able to see those and understand them, know that they are being used by the majority of other schools out there and adopt them ourselves.

Single-Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which is a Microsoft tech used by iSAMS to produce custom reports; we’re always getting requests for different reports to be sent to Heads of School and various other areas of the school. The SSRS is one of the most heavily used areas.

The other one is the communication capabilities, and this is essentially user-driven driven. The ease of use with which someone in the school office can prepare a custom list of students’ parent names, for example, then put together an email using a template and send it off to the parents to notify them of any changes or update them, that’s very heavily used. One of the best features there is the communications sent out are stored against the student record. We’ve been using iSAMS for nearly ten years, and we can go back all that way and see everything that’s happened between the school and the parents.

There are a lot of existing workflows that have been built in that in many cases we weren’t necessarily following. It was great to be able to see those and understand them, know that they are being used by the majority of other schools out there and adopt them ourselves.

How have you found the iSAMS support?

One is when something goes wrong and that happens from time to time. It’s very easy to load a support call and you almost get an instantaneous response. Even though they’re UK-based there are people across the Asia-pacific region who get involved. The communication updates are great, they keep us involved, give us estimates as to what’s going on even when we’ve made a mistake ourselves.  

Another area is when we need work done, such as a complex report that we don’t have the time and experience to do ourselves. We can reach out to iSAMS, explain exactly what we want done – and yes, it’s a paid-for service in the majority of cases – but it’s done in a more cost-effective manner than we could achieve in–house.