[sims] Timetabling Reg Groups in Nova T

[ICTLady]

At the moment we do not timetable our Reg group periods. They're set up via Lesson Monitor and students are allocated into tutor groups via the Pastoral Structure in SIMS.

 

I have next year's timetable loaded into SIMS and all my pastoral and curriculum assignments are done ready for the new year (well, almost all, still sorting out the odd issue as is inevitable). SLT have just said they would like to add Reg groups into Nova T for next year. I'm trying to find out what impact this will have (esp bearing in mind that I work part time and have two working days to go before the end of term ). Does anyone know please:

 

- What are the implications of changing the timetable cycle for 2016-17 at this stage? Will we lose the curriculum assignments that have already been done for our students?

- If Reg groups are put into Nova, do these classes appear in SIMS as academic classes or do they go into the pastoral structure?

- If the Reg groups from Nova go into the academic structure in SIMS, does this interact in any way with the Pastoral Structure or will students need to be allocated to their Reg groups in both places?

- If Reg groups are timetabled via Nova, how do teachers complete the registers to ensure that session marks are correctly recorded? Will registers taken in the "Nova" sessions need to be mapped to AM sessions or how does this work?

- We have vertical tutor groups across Y9-11. Is there a whizzy way to timetable these in Nova or is every teacher going to have three separate registers to complete (one for each year group)?

 

 

Any advice from you wise geeks would be much appreciated.

[ICTLady]

No-one?

[RootsSchImp]

HI @ICTLady,

 

Most of the bad stuff you're worried about won't (shouldn't) happen. You should be fine to change the structure without affecting curriculum assignments as the periods with the assigned lessons won't be changing. As far as SIMS is concerned these reg groups won't have anything to do with the pastoral structure though. You can make the reg group registers record the session mark in Tools| Lesson Monitor Setups.

You don't need to timetable three separate groups, you can just timetable in Yr 11 on Nova, then in sims relax the rules when assigning students to put students from yrs 9 and 10 in the class.

 

I'm struggling to see the benefit though, especially as the vertical TGs makes the curriculum assignment a pain - what's the advantage of having the periods in Nova? Is it just so the Tutor Room appears on teachers' timetables? If so my advice would be to use NCCs to put the info on teacher timetables and continue registering via LM as per this year.

[vikpaw]

Some additional points:

 

They are not linked to pastoral structure at all, so any changes in one needs reflecting in the other manually. Hopefully there are not too many changes occurring though.

The periods can be linked to the session attendance so there is no hassle there.

 

The main benefit is that you can see the 'Reg' lessons appear in cover and allocate staff to them, plus you see the room and can change that as with regular academic lessons. Unless something has changed NCCs don't have this benefit.

 

EDIT: Just checking back and I think NCCs did appear on cover, but maybe not exactly how we required, so we definitely opted to timetable the lessons as opposed to making NCCs which were a pain anyway. A lot had double tutors which again I think was easier as a regular class.

 

I've always been in favour of timetabling reg periods. The only potential downside can be if you want to do analysis of cover, or count the period allocation for staff, because 1) the length is usually abnormal and also 2) some places don't consider reg cover a real cover.

 

On my current system I exclude those periods from reports, but I'm not sure how easy that would be to do in SIMS. Particularly if using built-in reports / analysis. But, it's a small price to pay to be able to cover Reg.

Edited July 13, 2016 by vikpaw

[ajp233]

We used to have the reg groups in the timetable as well as the pastoral structure. I had to keep reminding the admin staff that as well as changing the tutor group in the registration panel of the pupil record, it also had to be changed via the student curriculum.

[ICTLady]

Thanks so much everyone. Fortunately it looks like we are no longer considering this for 2016-17 (I say fortunately as we break up on Tuesday and I already have my summer holiday working weeks over-full with exam results and analysis) but I will keep hold of this useful information for 2017-18.