SIMS Intouch Parent / Teacher appropriate email contact as parent

[twelvetree]

Hi

 

I am a teacher at a school my child attends. School have just decided that because of a data breach that happened a couple of years ago (not told exactly what) they have changed my personal email as a contact for my child to my work (school) email.

 

They insist that it can't be any difference. Is this honestly the case? It really isn't practical.

 

Many thanks

[David44]

SIMS itself should, and does, handle this because the records for people (staff, students, contacts (aka parents) etc.) can have multiple email addresses that can be set to Home or Work (and Primary or Main). You'd think for your record you'd have your school email address set as 'Work' and your personal email address set as 'Home'. Unfortunately, many (most?) third party systems and even Capita/Ess' own semi online systems such as Intouch don't differentiate between Home and Work and instead just pick up whichever email address is set as Primary. I expect your school have sent out something to staff using some system and it's sent it to a staff members personal email address because that was marked as Primary in SIMS hence your school now imposing the rule that people who are parents and staff must have their school email set as Primary (and therefore being picked up as the email address that SIMS Intouch uses).

 

We have raised this with Capita in the past, their suggestion is for people who are staff and parents to have two records in SIMS. This goes against every possible best practice in the book, two records for the same person is a big red flag but we have recently reluctantly started doing exactly this. It seems the only way to resolve this issue.

[twelvetree]

Thank you for your reply. So are parents a record on SIMS in their own right?

I assumed as a parent I was just a field in my child's record for name, telephone number and email. I am Mrs as a parent and Miss as a teacher on SIMS so I didn't think they were linked. I can see how the scenario mentioned with staff emails going to personal email addresses would be an issue. Which makes their suggestion wrong in that I set up a forwarding rule in outlook to send any messages from Intouch to my personal email.

[David44]

Parent (or 'Contact' to use the SIMS terminology) records are just people records, people can be multiple things (staff, student, contact, user, Next of Kin? I think) and SIMS looks like it was designed so that one person has one record no matter how many of those things they are. It has to be done this way as if you have more than one child at the school or you are an emergency contact for another child at the school and you change your phone number, someone just needs to go in to your single record and change it in one place and not have to worry about all the places that record might be linked from.

 

If your title is different as a teacher to how it is as a parent then maybe you already have two records. Maybe the person setting up your parent record didn't realise that the parent called TwelveTree was the same TwelveTree that already teaches at the school. This is 'wrong' but as I said above it's how we do it now by design rather than mistake. If you have access to SIMS, look up your own child's record and see the contacts, if it says Miss in there but when you go to Focus> Homepage it says Mrs then you already have two records and you should be able to have a different email address in your staff record to that in your contact record. Of course, if this is a mistake then if you bring it to someones attention then they may just merge the records if that is the policy at your school.

 

That's what it boils down to, how your school chooses to use SIMS. Correctly, in which case you can't have two different email addresses or 'incorrectly' in which case you can.

[twelvetree]

Brilliant that makes total sense! I was a parent at the school before I was a teacher so I suspect they set me up as a separate contact when I joined the school as a teacher. You have been a great help. Thank you