[sims] Creating new marksheets every year?

[ICTLady]

When I started my job (my first SIMS role), my predecessor showed me how to clone templates at the end of each academic year and save them as a new version for the current year. So 2013-14 Y9 French Grades becomes 2014-15 Y9 French Grades. We use generic result sets so there is normally very little difference between the versions of the templates.

 

I've spent a few hours today cloning all my reporting templates ready for our first set of progress reports and it hit me - I don't actually need to do this, do I? Or do I?

 

Can't I just have a template called Y9 French Grades and hang the new classes off it for this academic year? Am I missing something?

[Seb1780]

When I started my job (my first SIMS role), my predecessor showed me how to clone templates at the end of each academic year and save them as a new version for the current year. So 2013-14 Y9 French Grades becomes 2014-15 Y9 French Grades. We use generic result sets so there is normally very little difference between the versions of the templates.

 

I've spent a few hours today cloning all my reporting templates ready for our first set of progress reports and it hit me - I don't actually need to do this, do I? Or do I?

 

Can't I just have a template called Y9 French Grades and hang the new classes off it for this academic year? Am I missing something?

 

Annual markbooks maybe, but not annual templates. You're right in your assumptions.

[vikpaw]

Just add new marksheets to the templates.

That is a laborious enough task in itself. So long as nothing needs to change in the template itself. But, it can depend on the design of your templates, and particularly the reporting periods used.

Usually though, the marksheet has the annual year appended to it, so it will say 9a/fr1 1314, and new ones you create will be 9a/fr1 1415 or whatever the class code is.

[CarpeDiem]

We don't use the 2013 - 2014 style so I can just add new marksheets. It is only in 6th form that people would ever repeat a year, so Pupil X would only ever have one year 9 French grade. We obviously have data collection points but these are also called Week 1 etc so if we ever altered them (which we did this year groooooan), the templates were still valid.