Capita sims attendance tracker

[Jtodd]

My new role in school is attendance coordinator. I want to devise something in sims so tutors and year heads can look at a week by week tracker on sims with traffic light colour codes. How do I set this up please ? Is it in attendance module. Thanks

[Sylv3r]

Your going to be needing a report exported into excel and something like conditional formatting setup on the spreadsheet. SIMS won't do this out of the box I believe. It may be more work than it's worth.

[vikpaw]

Agreed ^^

Why not start by looking at the graphs available on the home page. There is lots to work with there initially.

Next you could schedule some attendance reports to run for them and they would be available on the homepage. If you look at cumulative attendance, you'll get an idea of where the issues are without needing to traffic light in the first instance.

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

I ended up doing this in assessment Manager, using CommandReporter to create an XML file which I convert into a results file for easy import by staff at the school. Schools seem to like it and it's used in about 40 schools so far. Schools seem to prefer it over the Excel route as you can have it as a marksheet behind the registers and an all year group marksheet can be sliced by the plethora of groups in assessment manager without having to re-write an excel report.

[forkies]

I ended up doing this in assessment Manager, using CommandReporter to create an XML file which I convert into a results file for easy import by staff at the school. Schools seem to like it and it's used in about 40 schools so far. Schools seem to prefer it over the Excel route as you can have it as a marksheet behind the registers and an all year group marksheet can be sliced by the plethora of groups in assessment manager without having to re-write an excel report.

 

Have you a report definition and a step by step on the conversion to import into assessment manager you could share?

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

I'm happy to talk about the process but our specific tracker is part of our SLA with our schools, so there would be a small charge for schools outside our SLA. Most of the charge is to cover our time helping get it up and running at each site and explaining how to maintain it. If you're interested PM me.

The reporting definition is really simple,

 

• UPN
  
• Legal Surname
  
• Legal Forename
  
• Gender
  
• Date of Birth
  
• Percentage Attendance Year to date
  

Then output as an XML file

 

Then we use a Powershell script to run the report via Command Reporter and get the current date, then using all that information I use a free XML 2.0 processor called AltovaXML to convert the output using a custom written XSLT file in to an Assessment Manager results file with a unique filename for each week of the academic year.

That way all the staff in school is one a week import the file to SIMS and accept all the defaults as all the data to uniquely match the pupils was extracted from SIMS by the report.

Then I have an Assessment Manager template set up with a data review column for each week of the academic year and whatever formulas the school in question want to perform on the data.

 

The mechanism (i.e. the scripts and XSLT files) we use for a multitude of things, from putting Proficiency in English data in an aspect so you can see it on marksheets to complex calculations like working out which pupils schools should be spending their Pupil PRemium money on (as the ticks need to be used for those that were funded)

[vikpaw]

I remember battling with XSLT transforms to reconfigure the built-in attendance reports, so they would show an arabic week - Sun-Thur. Nightmare.

Does that processor build the XSLT up for you?

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

I remember battling with XSLT transforms to reconfigure the built-in attendance reports, so they would show an arabic week - Sun-Thur. Nightmare.

Does that processor build the XSLT up for you?

 

That would be nice, but no, you still need to write them yourself. It is just a free command line XSLT processor you can use in scripts to manipulate XML files.

[vikpaw]

Wow, even that would have been helpful, rather than run through a report process in SIMS, only for it to hog the file so you can't edit and have to quit to release ! [For each test step ARGH ]

[DSapseid]

We have recently purchased a report for SIMS called 3BM that does exactly this. You give it a date range and it produces the attendance for that time frame. When launched it asks what years you want to look at. Then when in the report you can easily filter the data for form group and it displays the attendance as traffic lights.

 

It also produces lots of nice looking bar charts for SLT!!

 

I've attached a quick screenshot of what it looks like.

[nazma123]

That looks like a very good report.

Anyone got a step by step on how to produce this?

 

Thanks

[vikpaw]

Is it a SIMS report that can be imported or a third party tool that you’ve bought? I suspect the latter...

[DSapseid]

It is a 3rd party report that you import into SIMS. It was only £100/120 or so i think, comes with a staff absence tracker thing as well.

 

I spoke to the company who made it and they put me in touch with my local sims support re-seller for it https://3bm.co.uk/