[sims] Supply Teachers

[speckytecky]

We recently went over to SIMS for registration and behavioural assessment - what is the standard practice when supply teachers are in?

[Rawns]

As in how to give them access to SIMS being they are not set up in Personnel? You could set them up in System manager 7 as users not known to the system, assign them to the appropriate groups, and then when the leave, deactivate their account.

[BKGarry]

I do something similar to Rawns, but we have a supply teacher as supply teacher in "Manage Classroom Staff" (your timetabler/personnel officer/cover supervisor should be able to help you there) and linked the account to that, it then shows up the cover entries from Cover 7. When they leave (usually at the end of the day) we reset the password.

[Ecclesbury]

If you can, using Cover to do this is definitely the best way, as it can also be used to keep records of which supply teachers have been in, and when. They can then use the same login details when/if they return (security issues should be covered by the way that network access for these temporary staff is managed)

 

Try to set up organisations (supply agencies etc) first and then assign supply teachers to the agencies. Also try to make sure you don't end up creating duplicate accounts when you get the same staff (or ex staff) for different agencies. Remember that a single entity in SIMS can exist as a student/parent/teacher/agent/supply teacher etc etc. It is well worth sitting down with your cover manager and/or personnel people to ensure that they understand how to do this properly or things can get messy very quickly (and they are very hard to undo!)

 

If all else fails, the accepted Flinstones solution is the supply teacher hands a bit of paper round and the kids write their names on (cue hilarious additions to the register) and this is handed to the ever suffering attendance person who updates them in SIMS.

[BKGarry]

If all else fails, the accepted Flinstones solution is the supply teacher hands a bit of paper round and the kids write their names on (cue hilarious additions to the register) and this is handed to the ever suffering attendance person who updates them in SIMS.

 

Or there is the option to print the class cover sheet when cover is published in SIMS, this prints out a paper register with class photos, we use that quite a bit for one day only people

[WithoutMotive]

Long term supply teachers (maternity leave) are give their own SIMS user account and the timetabler give them access to the classes of the teacher they're covering for.

Day-only supply teachers take a paper register.

[silver_uk]

Can Sims not have a generic supply account for more than one user to use?

Serco did.

[PhilNeal]

Well you could do a generic BUT this would defeat the facilities offered. Firstly in Cover - use the name of the person to keep an accurate log of when they have been used. Secondly the cover teacher will have access to the class register (only the pupils that they should see) so they can take it, add behaviour or achievements and see class photos.

[Ecclesbury]

The biggest stumbling block when it comes to giving supply teachers SIMS access is the practical one, not the technical one.

 

From a tehcnical point of view it would be great to have each supply teacher have their own SIMS logins and you would get all the great benefits that Phil describes.

 

From a practical standpoint this means every morning, when the cover manager frantically phones round the agencies and gets sent a new supply teacher at the last minute, they would have set them up correctly on SIMS, phone the IT team and/or SIMS manager and ask them to drop everything and issue login details for this new supply teacher all while juggling the usual morning cover madness. Even if all of this works, they then have to spend the first 10 minutes of a lesson, when they should be covering something else, trying to explain to the new supply teacher how to turn the computer on.

 

Issuing generic logins is also easy enough to set up despite it's various security risks! But even then you have the added complication of having to not only explain to the new teachers how to turn the computer on, but also the more complicated way of accessing the registers that they need. In practice 50% of these would probably just do a paper register anyway.

 

Final practical issue - if you set up a precedent where supply teachers will have IT access, more and more teachers will set up Cover lessons which require IT access. When the inevitable happens and a supply teacher has no IT access the lesson becomes impossible and student's learning is affected.

 

All this and more has led me to the opinion that the best way to do things is to assume that all supply teachers don't have any IT access. If you have a situation where a longer term, or regular supply, can have extra access then great, but don't make it the rule.

Edited November 19, 2013 by Ecclesbury