Show My Homework Parent logins

[ozydave]

Had an issue where a student’s foster parents changed and the new foster parents wanted access to the students SMH. SIMS was updated to the new parents but within SMH the old parents were still showing.

I contacted SMH who replied with a link

 

Parent Data is no longer pulled from SIMS. Worries me that things could get missed and become a manual process. Foster parents change but previous carers still have access.

If relying on a PIN / activation code that will create up to 5 accounts that are linked to students I can see things going wrong. We send the PIN home Mum and Dad sign up, they lose the code or throw it away, its easy for 3 more people to sign in.

 

Seems like a data protection nightmare to me?

[hardtailstar]

We havent had the Foster parent issue yet but I agree that the new way they have set up the parental logins is a nightmare.

 

We are trying to get parents on board with using it but because each parent isn't registered now, we are finding that parents both use the same code to access it which puts out reports that are false. We have sent letters home about it and had angry parents reply saying that they are.

 

Also had issues with siblings joining the school and the sibling link does not always show up in the parents login if they have a login because they had it before the new parental login.

 

The students are linked within SIMS as siblings but SMHW seems to have issues with it and creates a new login code for the parent instead of adding them to the already created parent login.

 

Also we have one parent that uses her daughters login because she can see the same information in that so just checks when her daughter is using it that she has done her homework.

[stevec_]

Recently had a back and forth regarding this issue, see SMHW response below:

 

Apologies for misunderstanding the original question regarding foster parents.

 

The answer still stands, in that leavers are not automatically removed from Show My Homework, this is part of the work admins need to do, e.g. at the end of the academic year. Similarly, admins will need to manually unlink the previous foster parents when they print letters for the new foster parents.

 

The concept of removing old accounts is one we have been discussing more recently and we expect to be able to make some changes in the near future.

 

Not what I was hoping for and will be pursuing it further with SMHW.

As our data processor they should be ensuring that the correct data that we have in SIMS is also correct in their database.

[ozydave]

Cheers,

I dont think their responce is good enough to be honest.

I agree with you they shoudl also ensure the data is correct as well.

I have started discussions about ditching SMHW with SLT and we plod along with GDPR

Edited January 26, 2018 by ozydave

[johnpd]

I only recently spoke at length with smhw about gdpr and he said this was a new way of working with parent logins. Our current solution is skooler and they use our sims data. They both have negatives and positives. I can elaborate.

 

Situation A)

School receives CTF file from another school who entered the parent information in the student details email and telephone fields (quite common). This is synchronised overnight. The child’s email now shows as parent Mailto:. In their vle.

 

Bad

 

The other thing is your vle is only as good as the data QA process your admin teams follow. So now I run a nightly bulk change of student details and set the work email to main and primary so if any ctf imports put crud in, my solution wipes it. It shouldn’t be in the student detail, so it moves it to a safer non sync place.

 

Different Mis systems are doing this I’m sure in their own way. Our systems are capita sims and the sync is done by groupcall xporter.

 

I have read into how xporter works and many of these firms could solve the bad ctf import issue by using a template which only imports work field emails and then your bulk update scripts from a csv keep everything healthy and data breach issues are removed.

Edited January 26, 2018 by johnpd