How King’s Baptist Grammar School replaced its SIS and LMS while keeping the rest of the school’s systems running.
In 2025, King’s Baptist Grammar School in Adelaide replaced its student information system (SIS) and its learning management system (LMS). Most of the staff carried on as though nothing had happened.
Projects on that scale usually get put off, but they become necessary as systems age and new regulations are introduced. King’s Baptist went ahead and achieved success by building on their existing tools and partners, rather than starting the project from scratch.
Here’s how they did it, and what it meant for the wider school.
Out with the old, in with the new
Joanna Arvanitis, former Project and Systems Manager at King’s Baptist (now Director of True & North Clarity Co), led the switch from the school’s legacy SIS and LMS to new ones. It was no mean feat, but it was needed. The old SIS supported fewer and fewer app integrations and was reaching the end of its lifecycle.
That position is a familiar one for Australian schools. The usual drivers for change in SIS and LMS are:
- Products reaching end of life | when a vendor sunsets an SIS, you are pushed to find an alternative.
- Switching to the cloud | older systems can’t support app and software integrations that cloud-based systems can.
- Integration limits | every app that can’t connect to your SIS properly becomes a manual export.
Plus, sitting behind all of this is a demanding compliance picture. The Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles dictate how student data is handled, and frameworks like Safer Technologies 4 Schools shape what schools check before they buy. So, you need to know where student data goes, and be able to show it. Your SIS is an important part of that picture.
We’ve written a plain-English guide to who controls your school’s data
Reservations and roadblocks
SIS migrations are among the biggest changes a school can undertake, so the decision to proceed comes with a long list of what-ifs. Data security and accuracy are the obvious ones. The bigger worry is usually the impact on everyone else within the school.
IT’s time disappears into managing the migration. If a system goes down or records come through wrong, it isn’t only the IT team that feels it: teachers lose access to class lists, students lose access to their work, and lessons stop. This is fundamentally what makes timing so difficult; term time offers no quiet window.
Why is Wonde the place to start?
King’s Baptist already used Wonde to connect their SIS to the apps across the school. Building on that existing connection got them past three roadblocks. Here’s how managing these roadblocks looks with and without Wonde:
App connections
Without Wonde: apps connect straight to your SIS, so each one has to be rebuilt against the new system, one by one.
With 
Wonde: the apps read from Wonde. So when the system underneath changes, everything above it carried on.
In Joanna’s words:
“We have connected many apps that we use at our school via Wonde to support the integration. And essentially we wouldn’t have been able to go live on our broadscale digital transformation project if it wasn’t for Wonde supporting the different integrations along the way.”
Legacy to new LMS transition
Without Wonde: the Learning Management System (LMS) would have had to change hands on the same day.
With Wonde: the new SIS kept talking to the school’s existing LMS while the rest of the migration caught up. Nobody lost access to a system while they waited.
In Joanna’s words:
“We also worked very closely with Wonde, specifically to connect our new student information system with our legacy LMS, just to keep us ticking along in the background while we’re making some more changes.”
Access to the data fields they needed
Without Wonde: you work with whatever fields the integration already supports.
With Wonde: King’s Baptist asked for the specific SIS fields their new systems needed, and the Wonde team extended the mapping so the integrations worked properly.
In Joanna’s words:
“I worked very closely with the brilliant Wonde team to help us expand upon some fields to help us map children from other systems. And that has really enabled us to serve our teachers.”
The results
Their SIS stayed the source of truth throughout, the apps kept receiving data, and the LMS stayed reachable. Two systems were replaced, and there was no gap where staff couldn’t get to what they needed. For the wider team, it was a change they heard about rather than felt.
“From [the teams] point of view, the use of our school systems would be virtually uninterrupted.”
Making the most of the connections you already have
King’s Baptist got through the project because the layer between their systems and their apps stayed still while everything on either side of it changed.
If a system change is on your roadmap for next year, these are the questions worth answering first.
- Which apps connect through Wonde, and which are wired straight into your SIS?
- Which fields do your new systems need that aren’t mapped yet?
- What can you see today about where your data goes, without raising a ticket?
Take 20 minutes with the Wonde team and we’ll go through your connection: what it already supports, what Wonde Premium would add, and where the gaps are.
This is your sign not to put that change off another year.
Still weighing up the data question? Here’s who really controls your school’s data