[bromcom] Bromcom Virtual School : Shared Campus

[kennysarmy]

Does anyone have any experience of the Bromcom Virtual School : Shared Campus option?

 

We're having to house a cohort of year 7's next year from another school (yet to be built) on our site, they will use our facilities and network etc It's a temporary solution for one year only.

 

The ideas is to "incorporate" them in to our current Bromcom in such a way that our third party products see all students as one "school" - eg cashless catering, but from a reporting point of view for census etc they would still be classed as two schools.

 

Complicated stuff!

 

They would then physically move to the newly built school for year 8 and disappear from our current MIS!

[RootsSchImp]

I don't think your desired set up would work because the way VS is designed is - School A has a bromcom, School B has a Bromcom - kids from School A and School B mix in a third Bromcom (the virtual school) and have classes and assessments held there, while attendance and behaviour info is fed back to their home school system.

 

Bromcom are pretty flexible though - so they might be able to come up with a way to make this work. Another question would be whether for the money they would charge it would be cheaper to put everyone on your roll, then hire someone to manually separate the census XMLs into two separate returns

[kennysarmy]

I don't think your desired set up would work because the way VS is designed is - School A has a bromcom, School B has a Bromcom - kids from School A and School B mix in a third Bromcom (the virtual school) and have classes and assessments held there, while attendance and behaviour info is fed back to their home school system.

 

Bromcom are pretty flexible though - so they might be able to come up with a way to make this work. Another question would be whether for the money they would charge it would be cheaper to put everyone on your roll, then hire someone to manually separate the census XMLs into two separate returns

 

As I understand it there is Virtual School and there is Virtual School - Shared Campus.

 

I've red the blurb on both and Virtual School would definitely not work for us, whereas the Shared Campus option looks like it might...

[DanSears]

@kennysarmy -“As I understand it there is Virtual School and there is Virtual School - Shared Campus.

 

I've read the blurb on both and Virtual School would definitely not work for us, whereas the Shared Campus option looks like it might...“

 

 

Yes, you are right. Bromcom has two distinct products:

 

1. Virtual School – Shared 6^th Form
   
2. Virtual School – Shared Campus
   

 

 

It’s the Shared Campus product that you would want, I think it would work really well for you. Teachers would be able to use one system for registers and managing the students, but they would be held as separate entities for running census, classes etc.

 

Once they move off to their own school, they would already have the main structure of their database ready that they could take with them.

 

This solution does allow combined functionality for catering etc. But as they are separate databases, reporting can be separated as you mentioned or if required across both schools.

 

NB: In the past we did help out odd schools to split census by data engineering but we felt that this was not a clean process and we wanted a more structured approch. Hence we have developed Shared Campus to meet these requirements. We no longer support splitting census by data engineering which in some cases raised other issues. Eg where school may have had a gender split under one school operation which is no longer allowed by law and had to have two separate schools, two different DfE numbers and two different MIS.