TASC PARS Connect VS IRIS Behaviour?

[pleipper]

Hi Guys,

 

I have been looking at these 2 behaviour management systems and it looks like TASC PARS has a lot more features?

 

I was just wondering to hear from different schools who have bought either of these what made you choose 1 over the other and why?

 

Kind Regards,

 

Phil.

[FN-GM]

Its been a long time since i have used PARS but when i did the support was excellent. They where really helpful and the way the upgrades work is great. You simply downloaded a .exe run it on the server and thats is. You can also downgrade using the same method.

 

Not what you have asked but might be worth noting

[pleipper]

Hi FN-GM,

 

Thanks for the speedy response!

 

Can I ask, why haven't you used PARS in a long time?

 

Also, is PARS entirely web based or do you need to install client software?

 

Thanks again,

 

Phil.

[FN-GM]

It was used at my first school. That school closed so I had to leave. Since then my other schools haven't used it. They have used SIMS only.

 

At the time it wasn't web based, it was a client. That was a simple .exe. When the server updated the client updated itself.

 

Thanks

[pleipper]

Thanks for the info FN,

 

Seems strange why schools wouldn't want to use this... SIMS is very basic and cumbersome for teachers.

[Ephelyon]

There's a .Net-based client you can install on workstations, or you can use the web interface Connect. The web interface is the newer of the two and new feature requests are likely to appear in Connect first, or solely. It's a resource hog though: I've had to give our IIS VM 4 cores and 16GB RAM to get acceptable performance out of it for whole-school use!

 

The problem with discrete solutions like IRIS is that they do one thing very well, but don't always integrate brilliantly with your other systems. PARS writes back to SIMS so everything's in one place, plus you can avoid forking out for things like InTouch because it has built-in texting functionality etc.

 

Support from TASC is excellent overall, though recently I've been finding myself required to justify what I want more and more, with responses like "the developers have decided this isn't worth implementing"... sorry, but developers are there to develop, not make decisions about what development work is required! They should have input, yes, but the overall decision should be determined by liaison between customers and internal BDMs...

 

Still, that's a lot better than Capita, where the standard workflow seems to be: 1) Make request > 2) Wait 18 months > 3) Receive response saying "no". TASC operates a "release early, release often" model, which is good for (often smaller) schools that have a lot of unique requirements. It's one of the main reasons why we continue to use them.

[Steven_Cleaver]

Used PAR's now in a couple of schools now over the last 10 years, introduced in from the ground up in one school so installation, configuration and training of staff with various features Registration, Behaviour, Detentions and Reporting ( to extent).

 

Completely agree with past comments in regards to Support is excellent and again about asking for extra features or fixing any bugs they are excellent, upgrades are very painless.

 

I feel the big advantages with PAR's is the user front end is much easier for staff to use also PAR's has a mass of pre-created reports that you can run to get various information these can then also be filtered easily, as well as a custom report feature and although Lesson Monitor and the SIM's front end has improved over the years still feel it isn't quite up to PAR's in regards to this or accessing reports although I have looked at this in a couple of schools a couple of times. We have numerous staff in various roles in school with a little training are then using the various reports themselves to extract various information, Exams\Reporting Officer, Heads of Year, Pastoral Head and Attendance Person, all find PAR's extremely useful in their roles and easy to use

 

If you are looking at TASC and PAR's would also suggest you look at Insight their Parental Portal option which has worked brilliantly in giving Parents and Students access to Behaviour, Attendance, Reports and Exams information has also saved the school money as we now upload all reports to Insight so has saved money in printing, collating and sending these home as they are now accessible on Insight including past reports, we are also looking at integrating our web based Tracking and analysis into Insight so Parents and Students can also see this in insight so really they have a whole picture in one place.

[Ephelyon]

Seconding Insight as well - it's our Parental Portal too and has been very well received!

[pleipper]

Hi Guys,

 

Thanks for the great and indepth responses!

 

Couple of questions:

 

Isn't getting Insight and PARS connect quite expensive (I heard 5k per product?) is it really worth that much??

 

Also, One of the main problems in my current school in regards to recording all behaviour incidents is that teachers find it very time consuming to record behaviour incidents on SIMS and so generally they try to avoid it... this ofcourse means a lot of things are not monitored...

 

How easy is it to add the say the same behaviour incident for a group of 20 students? / Can an incident be adding easily in class (Less than 5 seconds to input?).

 

Many Thanks,

 

Phil.

[Ephelyon]

(Around 700 students.)

 

PARS was £5.5K for us up front and is now £2.2K ongoing - for us, that was cheaper than buying Lesson Monitor (which we never did). Insight was around a grand up-front and ongoing. You could stop renewing Lesson Monitor to help with the migration; you won't need it if you've got PARS.

 

You can bulk-select students for whom to add a single incident. Five seconds is just not a realistic timeframe in which to do anything useful, but there are ways of making things easier. You could use the rule-based behaviours/detentions and automated reports to simplify a lot of workflows, which would be reflected in the overall time taken by staff to do their jobs across a lot of roles.

 

There's a Green Abbey-based demo site available here. Username: blacka. Password: abcd.

[Edu-IT]

It's very easy to use. It's all been positive for us. Support are very responsive when it comes to making changes to improve the functionality or UI.

 

I think the intention is to make it entirely web based before too long and do away with the desktop version.

 

I'm not too sure how I feel about that though.

 

Regardless of whether you use the web version, you do need an IIS server to be able to use PARS.

[Steven_Cleaver]

As Ephelyon has said can't quite remember what PAR's was upfront but is £1,375 and Insight £1,347.50 yearly based 1040 Students.

 

Again as Ephelyon has said for Behaviour from a class point of view can easily multi select a number of students or whole class to allocate Behaviour incident against Staff find this pretty quick to use, Drop down Box for Criteria, Radio buttons, we set points against specific incidents and staff can enter comments if they want, is really well used here because it is easy to use for staff but also SLT make sure staff are using the systems put in place and use the analysis from these systems well.

[Quackers]

I think the charge is £1.10p per student per year for insight . Just go for PARS , doubt you will find anyone who has anything bad to say about their products or service. They are well made , easy to install, easy to upgrade and support is the best of any company I've had dealings with software wise. We have been using PARS for almost 10 years now since the days of PARSql (before PARS.net) and they have always been consistent and cannot recommend TASC Software enough.