Tribal becomes a Founding Partner of MortarCAPS and adopts the Higher Learning Data Standard (MCDS)

Tribal becomes a Founding Partner of MortarCAPS, embracing the sector-owned data standard across its student management systems

The Higher Learning Data Standard will be built into Tribal's student management systems, starting with customers in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Tribal Group, the education technology company whose student management systems support institutions across the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, has become a Founding Partner of MortarCAPS, the sector-owned data standard for higher education. Tribal will embrace the MortarCAPS Higher Learning Data Standard (MCDS) across its student management systems, beginning with customers in Australia and the UK.

Every university and college is really a federation of systems. Admissions, student records, finance, wellbeing and reporting are built by many different suppliers, and almost none were built to talk to each other. Making them work together has meant expensive, hand-built integrations that break the moment anything changes, with valuable data stranded in silos.
A shared data standard solves this at the root. When every system describes a student, a course or a qualification in exactly the same way, they understand one another by default. Interoperability stops being a project and becomes a property of the estate: new tools plug in cleanly, data flows where it needs to, and the numbers add up the first time. Reporting becomes simpler and more trustworthy, not harder.

“Our customers should never have to choose between the systems they rely on today and the freedom to change their minds tomorrow. A shared, sector-owned standard is how we give them both. This is what a genuinely composable campus looks like: an institution that can plug in what it needs, replace what it doesn't, and reshape its technology as its ambitions grow, without being tied to any single vendor. It's also the strongest possible foundation for AI, which is never better than the data beneath it. Get the standard right, and everything built on top of it stands on solid ground.”

Adam Fox, Chief Technology Officer, Tribal Group

"Tribal's student management systems sit at the heart of institutions across both hemispheres, which makes their support for the Higher Learning Data Standard especially valuable. Interoperability only becomes real when the standard is embedded where student data actually lives, and Tribal's commitment takes us a significant step towards that."

Charlsey Pearce, CEO of MortarCAPS.

As a Founding Partner, Tribal will contribute its student management expertise to the working groups developing the standard, and will build MCDS conformance into its product roadmap so customers inherit the standard as their systems evolve.