[sims] Allowing Student TT Clashes

[WJF]

Morning,

 

Firstly, a disclaimer that I'm not my school's SIMS manager so only have a teacher's permissions to go in a play with things.

I used to be assistant SIMS manager in my previous school but that was several years ago now.

My current school's data manager has told SLT that something isn't possible when I'm reasonably sure that it is so SLT have asked me to look into it - hence coming here for confirmation or a workaround.

Upshot is that with COVID and only opening for keyworkers/vulnerable we have the following system for registering:

- All students are X coded as per guidance and class teachers are inputting a comment with "5" in to represent them not turning up for remote learning so it can be tracked

- KW/Vul pupils in school have the X code overwritten by / or N to represent their in person attendance.

 

The issue is that staff registering in school have been told that they need to use the "edit marks" function to search through each year group's student list and manually find the students who are in school. Obviously, with a large school this is taking ages!

 

The data manager has said that it isn't possible to put them into a new "KW" class as this would remove them from their current classes and affect linked systems such as SIMS.

 

My hypothetical workaround is to create such a "KW" class but let it clash with their normal lesson.

My understanding is that SIMS will allow the clashes (although it won't look nice on a timetable) and student's will appear in both lessons so can be registered twice.

The two conflicting attendance marks will be resolved by the system when reporting the attendance with the 'best' taking precedent.

 

Could someone with more knowledge than myself (so most of you) confirm whether this will work or not? Alternatively, doesn't anyone else have a workaround?

 

Many thanks!

[RootsSchImp]

Hi, it's been a while since I've used SIMS but I think it should be possible to sort this without creating timetable clashes. Get the data manager to create a Reporting Group (I think that's the term - a custom group of kids, rather than a class) of the KW kids. Then in Edit Marks you should be able to choose group type and select Reporting group and filter to just members of that group.

 

Hope that works - system as it is sounds rubbish so there is definitely a better way.

 

Ed

[RichP]

Have you taken a look at Alternative Curriculum? This floats over the regular curriculum and can be assigned in a more flexible way than the main timetable. Capita have a video on that (if you are the one who understands T6) https://support.capitasoftware.com/sys_attachment.do?sys_id=eed5e6aedb7d2450109770ba689619e5.

[WJF]

Amazing idea!

 

I'd been so focused on creating registration groups to make a better system that I hadn't even considered leaving them alone and simply streamlining the process we already had. That will definitely work and will solve the problem!

 

Thank you!

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Amazing idea Ed!

 

I'd been so focused on creating registration groups to make a better system that I hadn't even considered leaving them alone and simply streamlining the process we already had. That will definitely work and will solve the problem!

 

Thank you!

[WJF]

Have you taken a look at Alternative Curriculum? This floats over the regular curriculum and can be assigned in a more flexible way than the main timetable. Capita have a video on that (if you are the one who understands T6) https://support.capitasoftware.com/sys_attachment.do?sys_id=eed5e6aedb7d2450109770ba689619e5.

 

 

I had considered that but apparently that will work by from removing them from the normal lesson (granted only for that one lesson) and assigning them to a new one.

One of our issues is that Teams is pulling the classes/groups straight from SIMS so if they are removed from a lesson then it also removes them from the Team.

[RichP]

Ok, I should confess we've moved from SIMS to Arbor and it quite happily let's me do that without affecting group membership for other lessons. I assumed it created a clash and left both memberships intact.

How many different groups are onsite with how many staff? Edit marks works nicely with User Defined Groups which (once the group membership is setup) is a quicker way of bulk editing their attendance.

[WJF]

That is what I assumed as well but when I checked the instructions for using it there was a warning that it actually removed them from the membership for that one lesson.

 

We currently have about 10 groups but the supervising teacher is on a rota so changes each day/week. We could assign a load of new classes dummy teachers to go with the 'clash plan' but it is going to get really messy really quickly.

 

I'm definitely a fan of using the user-defined groups as a workaround.

Annoyingly, I've discovered that the Data Manager already had a UDG set up for the KW students but didn't tell us.

It wasn't split by year or bubble so wasn't exactly what we were looking for but searching through those 100 odd names would still have been better than the 280 in a year group! Hopefully they will now be creating new groups for each bubble.

 

Thanks for the help!