Paola Martinez Romero's blog for the MSc in Digital Education

Furlong SchoolBase: Weaving a Digital Web of School data management

Furlong SchoolBase is a school data management system created by Howard Langley Furlong. His main goal at the time was to help schools’ admission process. In 2009, the company purchased Academic Business Solutions and Sage200, a fee billing software. In 2017, it was acquired by Volaris, a Canadian software company, which allowed Furlong to connect with more than 400 other software companies. Volaris is a vertical market portfolio; its education market is still growing, and nowadays, it has 17 platforms. After being acquired by Volaris, Furlong SchoolBase expanded, and it now covers over 250 schools worldwide.

The company’s website states: “Our desire to enable excellence in education continues, our aim is to develop meaningful partnerships with the schools we work with, that starts with understanding their challenges in order to help deliver solutions that make a positive impact.”

Some of the software that operates with Furlong includes:

  • Groupcall: A data protection software company that manages around 7.5 million students every day. In terms of compliance, the company encouraged its users to read and ‘digest’ the addendum to their contracts. While reading it, I noticed a reference to an ‘Alert Customer,’ it drew my attention that the document mentioned the UK as a member of the European Union. This suggests that the company has not updated this information since 2021. I am not sure if this has any relevance in relation to data protection policies.
  • Wonde: Its website claims that it is “a powerful, easy-to-use digital solution to transform how school manage its data.” It works as a cloud-based school data management system that connects teachers and students with learning applications; it also claims to have an easy-to-use API.
  • Firefly: It is an educational technology company that provides virtual learning. The platform allows teachers, students, and parents to publish and access school information. The platform has a new feature called EPRAISE; the company claims that this feature makes it easy for the school to recognize, reward, and celebrate the achievements of their students. It also manages behavior. It also said that by highlighting students’ misbehavior, it saves teachers time. It also claims that: “Manage escalations, interventions, and detentions, track behavior patterns by students, class, and cohort, and identify students and families in need of support”.
  • CPOMS: Its website says that it is an “innovative software that revolutionizes how schools approach the critical job of ensuring the wellbeing of pupils and staff”. Apparently, it can record any incident on its system in a “safe and secure and searchable records”. CPOMS is now part of the American company Raptor Technologies, which works with 60,000 schools worldwide. It has recently launched a new software product that offers early intervention in cases of misbehavior in schools. It allows any member of staff to record any situation that may be used to prepare for early intervention. It can create a chronology of events, and it can share this information with another school in case the student is transferred. The company complies with something called SOC2, a voluntary compliance that helps companies manage customer’s data. Raptor Technologies also offers a visitor management system; In the USA, it links the driver’s license of any visitor to an offender’s database. Moreover, it offers emergency management services and client training. I could not find if parents have any control over the data gathered by this company via school staff. it does not establish how it profiled students. However, it would not be surprising if this kind of monitoring will develop bias against a particular race or social class.
  • My Schools Portal: Basically, it is an app that manages the whole school as an ecosystem where all its actors (students, staff and parents) can communicate with each other.
  • Sage200: This is financial software that promises to help schools manage all their finances.
  • CHQ Beyond the Classroom: Now it operate as Schoolbuddy but there is not update of this change in Furlong Schoolbase website. This software manages life beyond the school; it manages clubs, sports, buses, and after-school care bookings.

According to Marc Andreessen, “A ‘platform’ is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers—users—and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate” (2007). After learning about Furlong SchoolBase, it is easy to establish how this company has been able to elaborate a spiderweb of services that involves everything that happens inside and outside the school grounds. Using services that go from school registration to after-school activities, Furlong covers every necessity that any school may have. As the article written by Janja Komljenovic states, this platform is “an intermediary between users and at the same time the ground on which all the users’ activity happens” (322).

Furlong SchoolBase is an API platform that allows third-party software companies to use the school data without having to duplicate it. The data updates automatically, so schools just need one database system. The company claims that it does not profit from its API interactions. Furlong’s solution says, “we collect only the data which is essential for your operations and enables us to provide you with a better user experience.” Having said that, Furlong may collect data from users’ browsing and searches and other activities. The company also claims that it does not share information “except in cases when that proves necessary.” One could argue that, the company is using the “legitimate interest” lawful base of the GDPR, which is proven to be its most flexible of the lawful bases. I wonder if educational data mining under this base is used to produce more data and therefore more rentiership, as Komljenovic states (322).

Obviously, Furlong gains monetary rents and data rents. As it is established in its users’ policy, one could argue that the company may profit from the legitimate interest clause of the GDPR as it may record “the digital traces that students and staff leave behind when interacting with [this] digital platform… which may be identifiable or non-identifiable” (Komljenovic, 324). As Furlong SchoolBase’s plug-in platform collects data from inside and outside school life, it has power over learning and work patterns. As Komljenovic says, “it is first about experience and nudging behavior. Indeed, personalization and tailored teaching and learning processes are seen as key platform services adjusted to the education sector’s specificity” (325).

As Furlong allows third-party software direct access to the data, it is not very clear to me, as Komljenovic questions, “how the integration and nestedness of platforms play out at the aggregate level of de-identified personal data and at the level of metadata” (327). As Komljenovic highlights in her article, Furlong Schoolbase is a clear example of an educational rentier that is weaving a strong web with data extracted from its customers which could lead to a higher rentiership and assetization of this company in the future.

Bibliography

Andreessen, M.L. (2007) “The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet,” September 16, 2007. Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20100615060031/http://blog.pmarca.com/

CPOMS. Available at: https://www.cpoms.co.uk/ (Accessed: October 2023).

Firefly Learning. Available at: https://fireflylearning.com/ (Accessed: October 2023).

Furlong SchoolBase. Available at: https://furlongschoolbase.co.uk/ (Accessed: October 2023).

Groupcall. Available at: https://www.groupcall.com/ (Accessed: October 2023).

Komljenovic, J. (2021) “The rise of education rentiers: digital platforms, digital data and rents,” Learning, Media and Technology.

Sage 200. Available at: https://www.sage.com/en-gb/products/sage-200/ (Accessed: October 2023).

SchoolBase. Available at: https://schoolbase.online/ (Accessed: October 2023).

SchoolsBuddy. Available at: https://www.schoolsbuddy.com/ (Accessed: October 2023).

Wonde. Available at: https://www.wonde.com/ (Accessed: October 2023).

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One response to “Furlong SchoolBase: Weaving a Digital Web of School data management”

  1. nruiz Avatar
    nruiz

    ¡Hola, Paola!

    Sorry for the delay with the feedback on your blog post.

    I want to begin by discussing the formal elements of your blog. First, I would like to point out that you effectively use hyperlinks and bullet points. I enjoy witnessing how the modality of your blog transforms with each blog post. Second, I would like to remind you to reference the source of the images that you use. You can add the reference under the image.

    Now, let’s get into the content! I am pleased to read your blog post because I can see that you are doing this week’s task thoroughly. Mainly, I can see that you investigated SchoolBase rigorously. You clearly depict the web of applications that compose SchoolBase and trace the business back to Volaris Group. I have learned a lot from this blog post, as I did not know about these different platforms. I find Firefly particularly scary, as it seems to operate similarly to China’s social credit system. Finally, I can see that you analyse Schoolbase under the concepts of rentiership and assetisation.

    Nonetheless, I don’t find any references to Pfotenhauer et al.’s article. Remember to reflect on all of the readings each week. Also, I would like to know your position on the issue you are discussing. Thus, I will focus my feedback on two strands. First, I will prompt reflections related to scalability. And second, I will ask you questions to help you define your position in your next blog post.

    In your blog post, you state that the acquisition of SchoolBase by Volaris Group allowed SchoolBase to scale up to new markets by connecting to new platforms. Pfotenhauer et al. (2021) propose that scalability is related to solutionism and problem definition. Notably, they state solutionism is based upon quick technological fixes and that “Problems are cut into smaller, discrete pieces that warrant ready-made solutions, which are in turn owned or controlled by specialised organisations or individuals” (Pfotenhauer et al., 2021). It is clear how the different platforms you name work under the atomisation of problems, followed by the technological solutions. Thus, the bullet point list that you provide supports this analysis. What is the particular problem that SchoolBase is trying to address? Is the problem framed in a way that reduces the complexity of the educational system?

    Pfotenhauer et al. (2021) also invite us to think that scalable technological fixes tend to obliterate non-scalable solutions. For instance, when Pfotenhauer et al. (2021) analyse EUREF’s case to problematize the politics of scaling, they ask, “Why is the scaling-up of electric vehicles seen as a more plausible response to climate change than the redesign of urban spaces around or less car-centric forms of mobility?” In your case, how do the proposed solutions obliterate non-scalable solutions to the perceived problem?

    Finally, I invite you to take a position towards the phenomenon you describe. For instance, would you value a future in which platforms decided how education happens? How do these platforms shape education, and how do you position towards this?

    Keep up the effort!! Looking forward to reading your next blog post.

    Reply

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