behaviour and attendance systems g4s v sims v cpoms etc

[Stobbsa]

We already use g4s for assessment and reporting, despite the need for HOD's to manage marksheets this has been working well. I've been investigating different behaviour management systems with a view to moving behaviour and attendance to g4s (avoiding the need for staff to have two systems on the go simultaneously).

 

most of the threads I've found about behaviour date from 2015 - any thoughts/advice on how the system is working currently (detentions and report cards especially) and how well does attendance work?

 

thanks

[tombry]

We use all of G4S, including the behaviour and attendance modules.

 

I don't mind the attendance module, but the behaviour module leaves me wanting. First and foremost, there is no detention system, you can add actions to behaviour categories/incidents, and one of those can be a detention, but you have to pull the data down daily (as we have detentions daily) and then try to keep track of detention attendance - we ended up scrapping the system we used and now our pastoral office keeps track of the higher level detentions themselves, while low level ones are handled by departments. As the person that streamlined and managed the previous detention system, it is extremely frustrating at times. I also don't think there is a report card feature - but I couldn't get our school to move to the electronic SIMS ones, so even if there was, they'd still use their color paper.

 

Attendance is pretty good actually - as long as your teaching staff do their registers, and as long as your courses are set up correctly, it works very nice getting all the data out you want - make sure to use the student attributes to set up some extra groups you'd like to monitor, and the overall KS4 attendance page will do all your breakdowns for you. Only issues I have with attendance are that it doesn't write back lesson marks to SIMS (only session - unless it's a different tier?), and there are some codes that have to be entered in SIMS, as they aren't allowed to write those back (from the top of my head, the snow day code is one of those - not that that's been an issue here...)

[bigdannyb79]

you not considering a new MIS if the your having to outsource so much functionality that should sit with your MIS ? Cost if nothing else makes the bolt on approach unappealing surely ?

[tombry]

we went with G4S for the markbooks, but the line of thought was that staff wouldn't use it unless we moved everything to it, so we moved everything to it.

 

I wanted to move to Progresso, but as I don't run the school (nor the school checkbook), I was overruled.

 

Right now we are looking at academy wide MIS changes, but that won't be in place till the 2018/19 school year I imagine.

 

G4S is fantastic at most things I need it for, as well as for teachers, honestly, the lack of a proper detention management system only bothers me so much because I ran the old system in SIMS - and that was humming.

[bigdannyb79]

From what I've seen SIMS pricing aint cheap so when your then paying for additional systems I would have thought the Academy checkbook would agree with a change of MIS !

 

What academy group are you in if you dont mind me asking. And tbh I'm pretty sure progresso would have give you more headaches than missing detention functionality . . .

[tombry]

it's not an academy group, just three local schools that are one.

 

SIMS can be pricey, ours isn't that bad really, and when I got the initial quotes from Advanced Learning, Progresso was going to be about the same.

 

You also have to factor in the time/cost of training everyone on the new system and getting all the data transferred over, it's not a simple comparison of initial/running costs.

 

Honestly, the G4S layer over the top of SIMS as we use it is fantastic - and I've played with progresso a few times, nothing really jumped out at me as being a pain, but then again, it was just playing with their demo data.