[Progresso] Keeping behaviour notes confidential

[Ditto]

Our primary head has made a very reasonable request - I know, I know!

 

We have quite a few staff with children at the school. She wants to record pastoral notes against some pupils but restrict access. Currently, all staff (teacher role) can see all behaviour notes. If I we were able to restrict access in the same way as attached documents can be restricted (i.e. restrict viewing to SLT roles) then I think I could make it work. But I expect I'd need to check all the reports available to avoid circumventing the UI block? Any one had to deal with this or have any suggestions, or should I look at 3rd party solutions - not an entirely desirable option...

[hallb15]

I was going to do something along those lines using groups in office365 and a simple sharepoint site. However, our local cluster of schools have signed up to CPOMS so its been taken out of my hands. I've seen the demo of CPOMS and it does look good, but we haven't started using it yet. It uses groupcall xporter to update itself from SIMS. That's my only involvement with it so far.

[Ditto]

We're progresso and GSuite for Education so a slightly different environment. It has occurred to me we can store a Google Doc links in place of actual comments, and then we can control access as we wish. The downside I see is that when it comes to reporting, we'll see the link only - unless anyone has a snazzy solution to that! Even then, it'll be quite a lot of report rewrites. I had seen CPOMS and that may be something for us to investigate - thanks for the reminder.

[djrscally]

I'm not sure you can actually restrict the confidential comments to particular staff. Might be wrong; can't see the option in the permissions tree though. In which case you'd have to tie down viewing behaviour entries through the front end heavily and just create reports which filter out confidential comments for the staff that aren't meant to see them.

[Ditto]

Currently, I've come to a similar conclusion. It's a shame as the permissions control for document attachment would probably work equally well - although I think it would need to be an option to call upon and let the default behaviour stay as it is. Perhaps I need to log this as a feature request on the support site if it's not there already, but I guess it'll be a long time coming....

[SimonHooker]

It might be that finding a system to work as you wish in this regard might be tricky. One of our schools was looking to do the same - confidential notes etc - and in the end we ended up creating a system for confidential pupil notes to accommodate that. Overall it's probably better to look outside of the MIS as it would likely be easier to lock it down independent of how the MIS operates and whoever has elevated permissions within the MIS, assuming they shouldn't necessarily have elevated access to notes.