[sims] How are Staff Groups determined

[Seb1780]

We're having a problem with the data SIMS is providing to an external system. This external system uses the Staff Group feature of SIMS, the problem is that currently SIMS is not showing these correctly following some extensive timetable shuffling.

 

I can see the groups associated with a teacher by looking in the staff record and clicking on the Staff Groups link. However, I cannot see how these associations are made and I cannot seem to be able to amend them in any way.

 

I assume (perhaps wrongly) that these group associations are generated from the timetable and, therefore, are something to do with NovaT6. But my knowledge of Nova is very weak so I have no idea if this is correct and, if it is, what to do about it.

 

If anyone can shed any light on this matter it would be extremely helpful.

[Cache]

I'd suggest having a careful look in Course Manager (as Course Manager has become such a critical component to various things now such as the cnesus and exams) - I've not looked at it in great detail, but I'm guessing if you find the subject whcih the groups are linked to, the classes and supervisors sections in there will probably contain the details your looking for which link else where.

[Seb1780]

@Cache, I hadn't thought of Course Manager but when I looked in there I realized a) we don't set course supervisors and b) this will only affect KS4 and post-16 classes and we're having the problem across all year groups.

[Timetable]

I think you are right to assume the issue lies in Nova-T. You have to make sure the right teacher's are assigned in the classes section/button of Nova-T. if you single click on the class name within the box it will show you who is assigned as the main supervisor. We had a lot of issues with the wrong teacher being assigned. update all the classes then re-import the timetable.

 

Before doing this it maybe worth running update course memberships from TOOLS\ACADEMIC MANAGEMENT\COURSEMANAGER. This can be a quick fix, or even in the same menu there's an apply timetable. When we had issues with the wrong classes in COVER this fixed that...

[Cache]

Course manager still gets used for KS3 even if it isn't actively maintained (Census used to pull class activity information from there, but can't remember if that's been scrapped now?)

 

The other possibility I spotted today was:

 

*Pastoral structure, obviously for your Heads of Year/ Form Tutors/Joint Main Supervisors

*Focus -> School -> Academic Structure -> Edit Lesson Staff and Rooms

 

It should come from Nova-T6 though thinking about it, Main Teacher can be set on the classes screen by double clicking on the class name and the drop down at the bottom of the box.

 

Still might not be the right area, but not sure where else it could come from.

[Seb1780]

Thanks for all the suggestions, but so far all attempts to resolve this have flummoxed me. We've now resorted to bringing in outside help - when this gets resolved I'll let you all know.

[Seb1780]

Well, after an afternoon spent putting our heads together we *think* we understand what has happened and we *think* we have a fix but we are still completely in the dark as to how what is actually happening is happening.

 

1 - We *think* that amendments made prior to and after Christmas have become "temporally twisted", this is causing a large number of temporal locks to appear whenever we create a maintenance dataset.

 

2 - We *think* our only way out of this is to generate a new construction dataset.

 

3 - We still can't get our heads around the fact that the (correct) timetables in SIMS are not the same as the timetables and class lists in Nova-T6; indeed, we have one teacher who no longer exists in NT6 happily taking registers using SIMS!