serco facility

[garrysaddington]

Does facility/eportal have a reporting to parents function, ie. to produce written reports for mailing? If it does not then what do most people use for this faeture?

[john]

Could you elaborate a bit more on your question as Seco does masses of reports, has masses of templates as well so it should be able to do what you need, maybe not without writing a custom report, but it should do it all for you

[garrysaddington]

I mean that each teacher inputs their own custom comments for reports to parents, followed by comments from pastoral and slt staff as well as exam results etc. The software then assembles them into printable reports to be mailed to parents or displayed through a parent's portal. I think its called statutory reporting to parents that needs to be done yearly?

[Diello]

Yes it does - can be turned into a PDF and published to ePortal using Document Storage. We do it here, though are moving back to SIMS from CMIS in September.

[tmcd35]

@Diello - Any particular reason why you are moving back to SIMS?

[Guest coquet636]

It uses the assessment manager to setup the input of the reports then you use a form report in reports to extract the data you have added into assessment manager.

 

If your school want you to do this i would advise going on the course as it helps clarify what parts need added where!

 

in the three years we have used facility and eportal to produce the reports there has been alot of tweaking but finally got a good useful set of reports....

[tlockwood]

For clarification, input screens and reports can be customised by cutomers or for customers. These can then be made available in the parent portal as pdf files. It is also possible to to allow parents to access results (both grades and comments) directly as they are entered by staff, without the need to produce reports

[powdarrmonkey]

We do this, written by the staff in ePortal, bodged by us and then sent home and published to parents in ePortal. It's a bit of a PITA actually, although I think that's mainly because nobody can make up their minds about what they want on the report. Just watch out for fonts when you build the PDFs: they don't get embedded, so if you use something that's not on the machine it gets read on, it'll be in courier.

[Diello]

@Diello - Any particular reason why you are moving back to SIMS?

 

Two main reasons:

1) An ongoing history of very poor upgrades. They tend to come out right before a Census and are a necessary upgrade, so you have to upgrade as soon as they're released. However, they haven't been tested properly and cause huge issues, so staff completely loose confidence. Serco are aware, and say they are putting measure into place to ensure it doesn't occur, unfortunately it's been a running theme for in recent years.

 

2) Lack of a true "Markbook" feature. e.g. each department being able to have their own reporting structure.

 

When we brought in CMIS, it was light years ahead of what SIMS could do (this was pre-SLG), lately though Serco seem to have rather dropped the ball. I believe they're in the process of re-writing the software from the ground up, (which is very good if you've ever looked at the database structure!), however, it's to little, to late, for us.

 

That's not saying SIMS will be any better of course, but the inclusion of Markbook, slightly less nightmare-ish upgrade, and a change hopefully restoring some staff confidence, it was a necessity.