[sims] SIMS Fake Student

[G1J]

Sorry if this is a really daft question.

 

I would like to create a few fake profiles of students in SIMS to be able to then play about with their profiles in FFT Aspire - to see what kind of target setting comes out for them, without it messing about with our actual cohort of students.

 

Is this a potential minefield?

Is there anything I need to consider?

Or is it an all out no?

 

Any advice before I hit go on this?

[jthompson]

Our data manager has always said that this is a flat out no. For various reasons that I can't remember accurately.

[SchoolDM]

Massive no. You will affect your all important numbers on roll as well as skewing every report that comes out of SIMS.

[MartinT]

Don't do it. All your census and other reports will be incorrect.

[Oaktech]

I'd spin up a second sims server if you have the facility and mess about with that.

 

We joke about testing things in production, this is not the time for that!

[MatthewL]

That's poor design, we have test patients in clinical systems, they are marked as test as such to allow things such as this, Mickey & Minnie Mouse are the common ones!!

[msi_school]

That's poor design, we have test patients in clinical systems, they are marked as test as such to allow things such as this, Mickey & Minnie Mouse are the common ones!!

 

Have you used SIMS?

[jthompson]

SIMS?

Design?

[pete]

SIMS will not let you delete students if any kind of transaction (attendance, assessment, behaviour) has happened with the record until X years after the leaving date.

 

Whoever does the census will hunt you down with a torch and pitchfork.

[ABR82]

SIMS will not let you delete

anything, if it doesn't feel like it. It was hard enough to get them to help you remove anything at all, took a while post GDPR for that limited functionality to come in. You can delete them, but you have to get rid of any attendance or other data too, and yes, they'll show up in the census and reports. Plus if they were enrolled as guest or whatever to try and reduce the impact on reporting, I wouldn't trust them to work as a test student as their enrolment mode would be different.

 

There were a number of parental contacts, agencies and long past students, all dating from years ago, that if you tried to delete would crash the server. So when you went to delete students that were past our removal date/age (as per data retention policy) you could delete 95% of them, but if you accidentally ticked on of the ones that caused trouble....

 

Given the lack of a test student, we had one or two staff with kids at the school, and those poor kids often got used as guinea pigs for testing things! for years I had a test parent account linked to one of them, who used to refer to me as her fake dad when I taught her! (it was worse than that - when I'd originally gone to ask her mam if I could add the extra test parental contact, I'd asked very discreetly, whereupon she laughed and told an entire Y11 class that I'd just asked if I could be the father of her child, which they found very amusing!).

 

I've never come across a test student in any MIS though, although test patients/customers etc are commonplace in other sectors.

[MatthewL]

Have you used SIMS?

 

You should try some clinical systems out there!

[msi_school]

You should try some clinical systems out there!

 

Niche systems are always poor and systems with a monopoly position such as SIMS still believe they have are worse.

[bobsmith]

you can play around with the targets of a couple of real kids in fft aspire - it's not going to be seen by anyone and you can reset it once you're done.

 

For all the reasons given above fake students aren't worth the trouble.

 

That said I've had quite a few real kids linked to me in both schools I've worked at, either teacher's kids or friends of mine had kids in the school - I was the father/uncle to quite a few kids who generally played along with the charade!

Always get explicit permission from BOTH parents (where there are two) before doing that though.

[jmak]

you can play around with the targets of a couple of real kids in fft aspire - it's not going to be seen by anyone and you can reset it once you're done.

 

For all the reasons given above fake students aren't worth the trouble.

 

That said I've had quite a few real kids linked to me in both schools I've worked at, either teacher's kids or friends of mine had kids in the school - I was the father/uncle to quite a few kids who generally played along with the charade!

Always get explicit permission from BOTH parents (where there are two) before doing that though.

 

This ^^

 

I found this workaround for testing when I worked in schools and I was always slightly terrified - what if the child support agency found out that I had parental responsibility for 20 kids? What if.... something bad!?

 

Document explicitly what roles you're giving yourself, with which individuals. Agree it in writing with the head teacher and remove all permissions/roles asap.

[TheCookieMonster]

Sorry if this is a really daft question.

 

I would like to create a few fake profiles of students in SIMS to be able to then play about with their profiles in FFT Aspire - to see what kind of target setting comes out for them, without it messing about with our actual cohort of students.

 

Is this a potential minefield?

Is there anything I need to consider?

Or is it an all out no?

 

Any advice before I hit go on this?

 

Not possible unfortunately