[bromcom] 2 sites & timetables on same licence?

[panosthegreat]

Our school has 2 sites (a primary and secondary as the main part of the school, and a smaller satellite primary school a few miles away) and 2 timetables (the main site and the satellite site have slightly different working hours)

 

We're looking at moving over to Bromcom, from SIMS. Historically, we've had 2 SIMS licences (1 for each site) but I'm wondering if there's a way to timetable this better so we use just the 1 licence when we move to the cloud. We're registered under the same DFE number, so rather than have 2 separate Bromcom sites, we'd have 1 and just increase the number of students we pay for access

 

The satellite site closes early 2 days a week, to allow their staff to come to the main site for meetings/training. I'm thinking I could make a class called 'Blank' and assign it to the teachers of the satellite school for the days they finish early. Their timings are slightly different but we could live with that. I think we'd have a small issue with setting cover, we'd have to manually work out which teachers were in which sites when assigning it.. but again we can live with that.

 

Are there any problems anyone can foresee with this? or a better way to manage 2 timetables? I've been using NovaT6 with SIMS, but would timetabler or Bromcom's own version do this better?

[Bromcom_John]

Hi Panos,

For the satellite staff I wouldn't use a blank class. The system has Non-teaching codes configurable for that purpose.

So you could have a Non-Teaching code of "Main Site Meetings" (or whatever you want to call it) which will show up on their calendars and have impact on cover etc.

[RootsSchImp]

Our school has 2 sites (a primary and secondary as the main part of the school, and a smaller satellite primary school a few miles away) and 2 timetables (the main site and the satellite site have slightly different working hours)

 

 

Hi Panos - if you use a single instance of Bromcom than you'll need a single period structure. So if the difference between main and satellite is just finish times and periods start and finish at the same time you'll be fine, if however, main site P1 starts at 9am and satellite P1 starts at 9:15 you would need a period from 9 to 9:15 etc. This has the potential to make your timetables look pretty ugly as class info is repeated for every period and in this instance your lessons would be doubles or triples.

 

Bromcom are usually happy to supply a demo system for prospective clients so my advice would be to ask and check it out for yourself. You can define period structures in Bromcom via Curriculum | Period Structures.

[panosthegreat]

Hello again John, thanks for the info, that makes sense.

 

RootsSchImp > thanks for clarifying, we should be good then as our timings are the same, they just don't have a lesson at the end of some days where we do.