Keep Kids Safe

[kmount]

Morning,

 

I've been informed that our SMT are looking to purchase "Keep Kids Safe" to alert parents when their darlings don't turn up to lessons... Now, whilst I'm all for improving attendance I can't find anything on their site pertaining to how it works etc from a technical perspective, IE, firewall needs, SMS gateway etc?

 

Any advice (info on costings would be fun too) welcomed.

 

Cheers.

[mwnci]

We are trialing this at the moment. You have to install an agent on your MIS server which passes relevant details to the Keep Kids Safe site - hosted remotely. All of the SMS stuff is done at their end. Install was pretty pain free and it certainly seems to do what is says it does, with a few nice features thrown in. I'm not sure about the costing of it.

[CheeseDog]

Using this here at the moment.

 

Seems to run fine and is hassle free admin seem more than happy with it.

 

Installed the client here and forget it's even there sometimes so not causing me any work here.

[Domino]

I assume the main sticking point would be making sure people actually do their registers though - or you'll be sending out loads of spurious txt's

[kmount]

Precisely my thoughts. - Last thing I can imagine the reception staff needing is some angry parent calling in to say their child was reduced to tears the evening before for being accused or truanting.

[CheeseDog]

It requires a member of staff to authorise the texts so any issues like this would be down to an error by the admin staff.

 

It would be quite easy to see a register that hasn't been called.

 

Not sure but I'm think in the situation described above an attendance code is needed and an uncalled register wouldn't contain any.

 

This is what the page looks like where you select the pupils

 

http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee184/CheeseDog/kks-1.jpg

Edited May 19, 2008 by CheeseDog

[GrumbleDook]

We have a similar one here ... there are a few on the scene at the moment, SchoolComms, Groupcall, etc ...

 

They hook into SIMS to get the contact details of the student and their primary contact person. Once they have all the student / paren / staff data they then hook into attendance to get a list of attendance marks.

 

The general daily process for us is as follows.

 

The registers are taken (on OMR at the moment) in the morning registration period. Anyone who is late is recorded at the gate by our inclusions staff (who also deal with attendance). Any late to their tutor time we now know about it. Anyone who gets into school before tutor time but bunks off tutor time gets marked as absent ... their fault for bunking off tutor time!

 

The sheets are read in via the OMR reader, the really late comers have signed in at reception and this list is passed on the Inclusions to update Attendance. Schoolcoms is then run ... picking up the missing people and giving you the option of email / SMS / other (used for recording that we have phoned etc).

 

A quick check is made as we have some parents who have said *NO* to the service (which we allow as long as their son/daughter is not a likely truanter) and those who have to have phone calls get taken off the list.

 

The email goes out ... a suitable period is waited and then the phone calls start. "Sorry ... he was meant to have a note..", "The little scrote ... I'll kill him when I get home!"

 

The message we put across is that if they are not registered in the morning then they are pulling a fast one for at least part of the day. We don't care whether it is tutor time or the first period ... failure to register is failure to attend. We have had this attitude for a number of years so it is not just an SMS thing.

 

It can be applied to any attendance notification system really.

[pete]

For those of you who have this or a similar system in place, what's the effect on unauthorised absences over time? Do the more immediate notifications encourage punctuality and attendance by pupils who might be a bit slack otherwise?

[CheeseDog]

We've found our attendance has improved quite a bit.

 

At a primary here as well so that might tell you something about parents' response to getting nagged by SMS. (Might be something to do with it being harder to get away from than just not answering the phone)

[LawrenceRoyston]

In terms of the results on unauthorised absence over time, an interesting example is Dundee, who installed Groupcall in 9 out of their 10 Secondary schools.

 

After an academic year using the system, they compared the attendance figures to the previous year and found that unauthorised absence had been reduced by an average of 20%. The one school that didn't use the system had no change in their figures.

 

Lawrence Royston

Groupcall

[GrumbleDook]

It is worth noting that other such communication companies report similar figures to GroupCall, and there has been a Govt initiative to make use of such technology in schools, including funding for it.

[marshharrier]

Just need to watch out for 'false positives'.

 

My sister works as an admin at a 2000 student secondary in Essex. They got bombarded with parents complaining about incorrect text messages. I don't know what system they were using but it took absence data and fired automatic text messages out to parents.

 

Students on trips or legitimately off-site for whatever reason were being pinged for being absent (or their parents were!)

 

It caused such a problem they stopped using it. Human intervention as always in the key in appropriate places.

 

As a consequence the school has seen a poor take up of subsequent technology based initiatives

 

Not being funny .... but Mr Royston woud say that wouldn't he as the MD of GroupCall !!

[kmount]

We don't use auto alerts, our admin team select who to send them to; and certainly with KKS there's an exclude list such as for sixth form etc.

[LawrenceRoyston]

I would be very surprised to find out that the 2000 student school is Essex is a customer of Groupcall, because our messaging system does not sent messages to parents automatically and never has done. I completely agree with you that human intervention is important here and that has always been our view.

 

It is also worth mentioning that the Messenger system runs locally in school and looks at real-time attendance information. Schools can search on specific attendance codes (usually 'N') to bring up a list of students marked unauthorised absent. Therefore, if students were marked correctly in the register as legitimately off-site, they would NOT come up in this type of search and therefore not be 'pinged'. I can only imagine that the system being used in that school was not looking at real-time MIS data.

 

Unfortunately, all systems are not the same and I am sorry that the school had a bad experience of this type of technology, but it does work and I am not saying that because I am MD of Groupcall, I am saying it because hundreds of schools have proven it to work over 7 years.

 

Kind Regards

Lawrence

[Sivadam]

I completely agree with the above. We do not use Groupcall or KKS but another system more closely aligned to and interactive with SIMS.

The procedure is the same, however, and it needs Human interaction with the software to ensure that correct data is being sent to Parents.

Edited April 2, 2009 by Sivadam

[marshharrier]

Hi Folks ... I deliberately didn't mention any names because I honestly don't know what system they were using.

 

It's a bit of a pet subject for me in as much as we need the intelligent application of IT in schools rather than technology for its own sake.

 

Some of these systems are quite complicated with lots of functionality and much of it is aimed at saving time on the part of administrators or school managers.

 

IMHO this often amounts to technology for its own sake and systems which require human intervention in places are seen as 'deficient or backward' when actually they are more 'thought through' in terms of real world use and consequences.

[Mr_Writer]

Just a word of warning to anyone looking at Keep Kids Safe. If you trial their product and do not tell them you wish to cancel they AUTOMATICALLY SIGN YOU UP FOR A THREE YEAR CONTRACT.

 

For me this is just the type of company you do not want to be doing business with; underhand practice from the off!

[Oops_my_bad]

If it requires manual intervention (ie, a member of admin staff having to take on additional roles (and we all know how snobbery public sector workers are when it comes to this)), then doesnt this sort of defeat the whole object of it!?

[Edu-IT]

If it requires manual intervention (ie, a member of admin staff having to take on additional roles (and we all know how snobbery public sector workers are when it comes to this)), then doesnt this sort of defeat the whole object of it!?

It doesn't take long. All the information is pulled in and it's just a case of clicking a few buttons.

[IrritableTech]

Just a word of warning to anyone looking at Keep Kids Safe. If you trial their product and do not tell them you wish to cancel they AUTOMATICALLY SIGN YOU UP FOR A THREE YEAR CONTRACT.

 

For me this is just the type of company you do not want to be doing business with; underhand practice from the off!

I know people don't like to hear from first time posters in this way. But this is entirely true.

 

A member of staff here signed up for the trial, and it wasn't until I had a telephone call from a rival company, I checked the small print. You are meant to cancel within the three months trial, possibly by registered post (we got a number of conflicting answers by the telephone staff).

 

I did like the KKS web front end (although we had a little trouble with the program on our sims server), and our attendance officer loved it. We are now working along side our LEA's ISP on a new system based on the Janet text messaging service. Which we can tailor better to our needs.

 

I have to echo Mr Writers post, and tell you it was these questionable tactics which meant we stopped our trial immediately.

[Michael]

I was asked recently to look at several applications which offer such functionality. Ease of use most important, costs involved and how it keeps data up-to-date. Some are live and some run a batch file every evening. If you want to know which one I chose, drop me a PM.

 

Interestingly none (as far as I am aware) of the applications on the market work directly with Sims, or whichever MIS system you have, but typically make requests directly to the SQL database.

 

Eventually I can see MIS, miscellaneous solutions (as discussed here) and learning platforms all becoming one, but no one yet has done it. I think the Government's demands are a little too optimistic and either the idea will be abandoned completely or dates changed. No consideration has gone into training and implementation and secondly, licensing the product. If it operates on MS SQL, you'd need a CAL for every user, be it a pupil, staff or parent. You are talking thousands and thousands of pounds many schools do not have. A SQL CAL (to give you an idea) is about £19 education price, so multiply that by say 400 pupils alone it's a lot.

[marshharrier]

Michael - I have to agree & disagree.

 

In the commercial world (which is normally way ahead of the education sector) .... no one company provides a solution that 'does it all'!

 

IMHO there is no way that anyone will provide MIS/VLE/Finance/COMMS successfully in one package. There are many examples of 'jack of all trades' type products which end up being inferior than other specialist products.

 

As the latest Becta advice states clearly ... "It is unlikely that schools will find everything they need from one product or supplier".

 

However, I agree totally that Gov't targets are unrealistic and are likely to be extended or even scrapped once/if the Tories get in.

Edited May 28, 2009 by marshharrier

[Michael]

I agree that for a while, multiple solutions working together is the only way, but longterm I think something more all-in-one will be required. The development costs would be huge and with something like 30,000 UK education establishments there's a huge market out there for such a product.

[MattMitchell]

longterm I think something more all-in-one will be required. The development costs would be huge and with something like 30,000 UK education establishments there's a huge market

 

But if 22,000 of them are using the same base product, that's a hell of a lot of inertia! The existence of a statutory schema for data transfer files (CTF/CBDS) means that all MIS systems need to have a certain amount of interoperability in terms of file transfer formats for import and export; I think that some kind of common interface specification between software could be the way forward - then schools would be able to buy a solution like TruancyCall or GroupCall and know that it will integrate with whatever MIS they're using (SIMS, Serco, whatever).

 

It would also make purchasing guidelines and requirements for MIS software in general a bit clearer. There are some "suggested" requirements for MIS software already, and there is some mention of interoperability: not just file transfer, but raising the issue of live access between systems.

 

Personally, I'm a believer in separate software packages than can communicate using clearly-defined protocols. It's a situation that promotes choice, but also improvement since users aren't stuck with a single market-standard product. Look at the massive number of email clients, mail servers, database utilities that are backend-independent, etc.

 

There seem to be quite a few products on the market that interface with SIMS, and I hate to think that buying your core MIS system from one company would mean that all your add-on products would have to be from the same supplier. When you tie all the functions into one system, you tie your users into that system for life in most cases.

[Sivadam]

Some Texting Software products interface better with SIMS than others do. It is not a coincidence that Schoolcomms is on the SIMS Homepage!