daturum

You need to consider what age bracket the parents of your students are in and that will influence which Social Media they are most likely to use. I'm a governor at a small primary school and the decision was made before the recent problems to move from X to Instagram because it is the social media of choice for the age bracket of parents at the school. The school I currently work at uses a WhatsApp channel. I'm increasingly of the opinion LinkedIn is great for a lot of school stuff but it is aimed more a professional collaboration rather than informing parents.

It might be something produced via EdExcel online.

You need to check you will get a choice - Arbor had so many schools migrating to them last year, many were being done over a weekend because the holidays had been fully booked. We got in before that and booked for our primaries to go over at Easter and our Secondaries over the Summer. The latter was more problematic, as things like the timetable have to be exported to SIMS and courses set up despite the fact you are not going to use them in SIMS.

I don't use SIMS any more - this is from memory so it's possible things have changed. The alternative is to create the A level as a 1 year course for Year 13s (or end the AS level around the beginning of May and start the A level after in that academic year).

GCEAS should be linked to the AS course and GCE2Y should be linked to the A level course. The GCEAS course would last one year starting in Year 12, and the same students could be in a two year course for the A level.

Most of us went with SCOMIS hosted because it had a reputation of being more reliable than Capita/ ESS. ESS shot themselves in the foot when they fell out with SCOMIS and sent round those libellous e-mails. They are now reaping what they have sowed.

Isn't EDVAL considerably more expensive than the alternatives?

From memory it will roll over on the first day of the academic year, whatever that has been set to (it should include inset days). However, there was longstanding guidance that Year 7s should be admitted on the day they turn up so that the admission numbers were sequential. You can admit them earlier but would then have to delete them, losing information on admissions and creating gaps in the record.

You'll almost certainly have to raise this with support and get them to do something in the backend

Which software do you use to integrate with your tills (assuming you are secondary)? Cunningham's solution iPay Impact was free if they managed your tills. ParentPay are now brutal on the three year contract so make sure you check when your contract ends.

We considered going direct with Arbor Support when our third-party MIS support came up for renewal because our technical questions were getting stuck between our support unit and Arbor and we thought it might be easier to deal with them directly. However, their pricing model appears to be discouraging this because it was not much cheaper and it was actually possible to find a third-party support unit that was cheaper than getting supported by Arbor directly. So I would recommend finding a decent MIS support unit, although it might be a bit late for the next financial year now.

Routines - Timetables - Free Staff Timetable Won't include teachers on PPA/ Meetings however.

Is this in response to Arbor's "The Big AI Summit" which despite its name appears to consist of four one-hour longish webinars: Webinar: The Big AI Summit by Arbor Education

I'm fascinated by the idea that contractually you are unable to keep the SIMS server active once the contract ends. When we move to SIMS eight years ago, around half the cost was the initial license with the other half for the annual updates, and Capita said this was because we had those licenses in perpetuity and could therefore keep the data if we decided to move away. What legal authority do SIMS's new owners have to unilaterally change that understanding?

Haven't had the catering company stop us but this is a big issue for us as a Trust. It's not clear any other company out there currently replicates what Cypad do in terms of preventing parents/ students ordering a meal with an allergen.

We got our third party support to install an onsite archive version of SIMS after we migrated so this is worth a try if possible. It was easier for us because we do not need the updates etc, just the final version of the database and remote access.

I know of one Free School which started off using SIMS 8 and has converted to using SIMS 7 within a term. I was told by someone who used to work for Capita that they had created a new version of SIMS using Silverlight which they then had to scrap when Microsoft stopped supporting it.

I am not surprised Capita are retiring SLG as it is an increasingly outdated piece of software but like you am unhappy with both the timescale of the announcement (I was first made aware of this in the summer term) and the failure to properly replace it with the Teacher App simply not being up to the job - in our case, we mainly use SLG for report writing in Profiles using comment banks and this is not available in the Teacher App and neither is it on the roadmap. We converted to SIMS from CMIS three years ago and were offered the hosted solution with SLG potentially reducing the cost but did not go down the hosted route due to criticism of its reliability from those who already had it. Hosted SIMS does appear to be the main alternative to Teacher App but as you say it does come at a cost. I would have thought an announcement like this would have given at least a year's notice so that schools could look at alternatives to either processes or software. I can only conclude that this move will accelerate the move away from Capita SIMS to alternative providers who are properly cloud based and eating into their monopolistic market-share.