ABR82

Or legitimately might not think it was a breach (in spite of it clearly fitting the criteria on the ICO's website) because Classcharts told everyone that it wasn't a breach?

Same with us moving to Arbor - there were several rounds of uploads to the test site, after each round we had a bunch of checks and things to run and report back. As with the second SIMS blogpost claiming they didn't know that people were using backups to migrate until recently - can they really write that with a straight face? Everyone knew. Schools knew, Support providers knew, MISs knew, and SIMS knew because so many people asked for backups files from them for the express purpose of moving. I've said it before. Look at how they've behaved over the past few years - without looking at the product, do you want to be doing business with people who act like this? Desperation from a bunch of people not competent enough to do their homework properly before shelling out half a billion on an ageing, outdated, teetering monopoly provider just beginning to nosedive, and their every action since has precipitated their own decline and loss of market share.

from: https://www.ess-sims.co.uk/resources/blog/mis-migrations-setting-story-straight Any day to day user of SIMS will not be at all surprised at their insistence that you're only getting exactly what you got 20 years ago...

I'd set up some really nice stuff with powerbi years ago, it was (I modestly declare) excellent stuff with some great insights and useful features. It looked great, it was easy to use for staff. We used the free desktop client for staff to access a shared folder where the reports lived, to which only I could write and they had read only access to stop them from knackering everything. SIMS reports scheduled to run via a batch file and dumped into a reporting folder regularly as data source. So a free powerbi solution. Sadly the desktop client always wished to update, but if a client was not on the same version as the main one it wouldn't open the reports, and it opened incredibly slowly on any of our machines, and got worse with each update or new release. For some staff it took over 10 minutes to open the desktop client (we timed it). Once open it would run snappily, but nobody uses a product that basically hangs your machine for 10 minutes when you double click it. Our machines were more than capable - intel i5 with 8Gb RAM. It essentially became unusable. We bought 3 trial licenses to play with - if I published the reports to the powerbi web service, I could open them on my phone in under 30 seconds with full viewing functionality. But people had to have a full fat PowerBI license in order to view them, unless we paid some daft amount (was it over £5k?) for the big corporate license which would allow us to publish online for anyone. We tried publishing the dashboards through teams, but viewing it still needed a PowerBI license. The quote we had back then was that it would cost a lot per user per year, and when we started looking at our list of people who would need access (the dashboard gave attendance, demographic, current behaviour, past 3 year behavioural trends, achievement and suspension data with lots of lovely graphs, tables and graphics with filter buttons so anyone could get essentially anything they wanted with an interface that was universally understood) you begin with SLT, then Heads of Year, then behaviour workers, student support workers, Heads of Department, SEN staff then the prices became thousands. Unfortunately due to the cost of licensing we abandoned all that reporting. Incredibly sad as the data and reporting was better by miles than anything built in to any MIS, it was really useful, live data, and it was quite fun to make. But the price was utterly prohibitive and the free version desktop workaround unusable. This was pre-covid, so perhaps the terms, prices and types of license have changed now. For a couple of years it worked really nicely though.

Only you know your school and your rationale, but I can't help but think 1. Did you ask SIMS the same questions (without 3rd party software)? I cannot see how they could possibly perform as well as more modern MISs. You admit that SIMS is clunky, old and user deterring. I might add that every school I know of with SIMS has a raft of 3rd party software trying hide/mitigate it's failing and interface on the input and output sides. However good they might be (and many are pretty ropey integrations), a single software solution would work better (unless designed by idiots). 2. Nothing is perfect and can do absolutely everything. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and all that. 3. Changing MIS is inevitable. When the new new SIMS comes out (in maybe 2030 or whenever), it will be so different from SIMS 7 that all the migration, retraining, learning, change of processes etc will have to occur anyway. I saw and tried the old 'New SIMS' they demo'd for years (the one they binned in favour of tying people in to multi year contracts for what they already had but with an rdp connection), it seemed pretty good, but it was closer to Arbor or Bromcom than it was to SIMS 7. Staying with SIMS will still be a MIS move when the new one comes out, just in the meantime you'll have a far worse MIS. 4. From a personal point of view, doing nothing until after I've retired makes sense. Our migration was smoother than I'd dared imagine and really quite straightforward. I was surprised how easily it went. It was still intensely stressful from a personal point of view, and not something I'd hope to be doing again for another decade or so at least. However, change was the right thing for the organisation, and the personal stress was not unbearable and has resulted in a far better system. I'm several decades from retirement, so perhaps have a very different viewpoint on this! I know several schools still with SIMS, some of which I'd agree with them that their current circumstances are not ones where I'd be looking to change MIS, but all of their data/tech staff freely admit that SIMS is toast and they will need to move away, they're just not yet in a position to do so. I don't know any who have told me that SIMS is the best software.

Absolutely. If anyone is still with them, look at the way the company acts and start looking at alternatives. It cannot be anything to do with worries about their IPR - presumably a backup from a single school would be enough to work out how the data is structured/stored, and that bird has very much flown. I can't help but wonder if there's a typo in their statement: perhaps they meant to write that their software was designed 30 years ago. ESS and Elon Musk continuing to rival one another for most successful recent IT related company acquisitions...

One of the examples on the above linked ico page under the subheading "what is a personal data breach" is It's hard to see how the ICO's guidance could be clearer, or how anyone who has read even the smallest part of it could claim that what has occurred with classcharts was not a Data Breach. Unfortunately that kind of only leaves the possibility that either Classcharts have not bothered to familiarise themselves with the ICO's guidance at the most basic level, which is quite terrifying, or they're simply being dishonest with themselves and their customers. If a breach has occurred, but is unlikely to pose a risk to people's rights and freedoms then it doesn't have to be reported to the ICO, but the decision and rationale should be documented. So if they deemed it low risk, they might not have to report it to the ICO, however a Data Processor (which they most definitely are) is obligated to report a breach to the organisations it is contracted to. By contacting schools with Classcharts and specifically saying it was not a breach, then Classcharts have clearly not reported the breach to their customer organisations as they are obligated to do so. You know when you were little and your mam would tell you it wasn't what you'd done that was getting you into trouble, it was the lying about it afterwards...

it is, but for larger chains there still has to be a tender process.

The trouble is that what you refer to as feelings are often very real and valid considerations, just very difficult to quantify in financial terms or put in language that is perhaps legally watertight enough. In reality, the fact that our staff already knew how to use SIMS and needed retraining when we moved was a real consideration, and yes, it gives the encumbent an advantage (in that case, SIMS). Retraining/reskilling, in some cases changing staff responsibilities because a staff member didn't wish to learn to use new software, all of this has real financial, morale, time and productivity costs. We had to weigh that against the advantages that could be gained from moving MIS. That did not stop us from moving, but it did perhaps delay our move a year or two as we'd made the decision that we needed to look elsewhere pre-covid, but postponed the move until things settled down as the practicalities and costs involved made it non-viable. SIMS trying to force us into a 3 year lock in tipped the calculation in favour of change. There is much that is informal which is of great value in decision making processes - if a friend at school x down the road (which is not in our MAT nor do we have any official relationship with them) has been happily using some software for years of course I'm talking to him about his experience. Is it good? does the product get developed? is support responsive? are they pleasant to deal with? Knowing that if stuck I can give someone I know a quick ring, or even pop over and have a look at how they're using it and ask what they'd do rather than having to go through the full corporate support rigmarole is a very useful thing, even if officially there is no link with that person or school. If I were choosing between two similarly priced and capable products, having access to a bunch of staff within my organisation/trust already familiar and proficient with one is probably the single best reason to choose it rather than a competitor, and wilfully ignoring that would be utterly stupid. I'd value the actual real experience of people I know and trust elsewhere far more than I trust the claims of competing sales and marketing teams and their quoted uptimes. I would suggest that the publically quoted figures on these for most companies might not tally with the experience or perception of their users/customers. Ultimately, we don't want to know that software x is technically always available, our users have to actually work with it every day, so what does it feel like for an actual user - technically available but frustratingly slow or often kicking you out/crashing is no good. We have some schools in our MAT who are still on SIMS because they weren't in a position to move when we did. When they come to make that choice, unless our experience is bad, they'd be stupid not to go to the same MIS ourselves and another school in the trust are on. The only scenario for them to justify choosing a competitor is if we were dissatisfied/unhappy with our MIS or they were absolutely certain that an alternative MIS was miles ahead and offered vastly better capabilities, otherwise you'd just follow suit so you can help/support/share best practise with one another. Nobody asks us to put our exam boards out to tender and to justify why we've chosen to spend thousands with AQA (for example). Many MAT chains get everyone to follow the same boards so they can share resources/training. Usually it begins with the Head of Dept knowing that specification, or liking the course content better. Does it matter if they're all equivalent qualifications and they're all ofqual approved? It doesn't now. Perhaps WJEC missing a trick? they could just be suing anyone who hasn't chosen their board? asking where their tender process is - in a MAT chain it's a hell of a lot of money each year. Why no calls for transparency here? To be honest I do often wonder why on earth we have to deal with Pearson! Essentially there ought to be a list of pre-approved MIS suppliers, and any school/chain picking bromcom, arbor or sims is making a reasonable decision and doesn't need to prove it's thinking - it will work, and it is a known, established entity. I might think SIMS is a decade out of date, but it does work, and is a valid choice. If on the other hand I was going to move everyone to "NewMIS", in which my uncle and sister hold 25% of the shares, then it would be very fair to ask me to justify my choice.

by putting the 3 in quotations, you're making it text, rather than a number, so it isn't included in the sum. Put just 3 for your value if false (no quotation marks). You can see this in how it formats it - left aligned in the cell for words, rather than right for numbers). Quite why adding them rather than using the SUM function allows it to recognise it as numeric is a different question! but the sum and average functions ignore cells with text in and return the overall result, whereas if you put 3 in cell A1 and write TEN in A2, then using =A1+A2 it will give you an error, whereas SUM(A1:A2) will return 3. Not sure there's an answer there as to why, but perhaps knowing how the different functions behave helps?

Thank you. Hopefully all schools respond this way. We're not prepared to vouch for you unless you can fix how you act. Companies need to be told in no uncertain terms that the way in which they behave matters, never mind what they think they can legally justify or get away with (See also Bromcom's lawyers leaching public money from the education budget at every opportunity). It all leaves a bad taste in the mouth - fundamentally the question is "Do I want to get into a paying relationship with a company that behaves like this when there are similarly capable and priced competitors who don't."

Might it be worth pointing classcharts to something like this: from: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/report-a-breach/personal-data-breach/personal-data-breaches-a-guide/ "A personal data breach means a breach of security leading to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, personal data. This includes breaches that are the result of both accidental and deliberate causes. It also means that a breach is more than just about losing personal data. Example Personal data breaches can include: access by an unauthorised third party; deliberate or accidental action (or inaction) by a controller or processor; sending personal data to an incorrect recipient; computing devices containing personal data being lost or stolen; alteration of personal data without permission; and loss of availability of personal data."

I have 3 22" widescreen monitors. I used to have 2, but when the new PCs came in there were 3 outputs (HDMI, VGA, Displayport) and we have a pile of spare monitors, so we put in 3 just to see how quickly someone else got jealous and asked for three! Actually its pretty handy at times in terms of parking different things when you're working on stuff. I think I'd rather have separate physical devices rather than a giant monitor.

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.

Well one of those chains will presumably be getting Bromcom's lawyers on them for having the temerity to choose to purchase someone else's product... Change is difficult, no matter which direction you go in. I thought our transition was as smooth as it could've been, and staff/student/parent wise there was barely a bump. To be honest I was amazed at how easily we moved from one to the other. As the person leading the change, it was an incredibly stressful 7 months or so (both leading up to and after the switch). Everyone within the school shouting and asking me how to do everything (which I often then had to find out), not listening when it was shown them, and not bothering to use the help files at all. However, we got there, and I'm glad we did it. Even the aged die hards don't want to go back now. I know of another school who made the same move we did at a similar time, but without any single individual to 'push' the change through, and their experience of the transition was a lot less happy/smooth, although I don't think they regret the move now. I went to help out a former colleague at their new school a while ago and they're still using SIMS, but with classcharts to try and cover some of it's more glaring deficiencies (I wonder what proportion of those schools still with SIMS are doing this?). Looking at SIMS again 2 years on from moving it seems so backwards (not just in it's grey windows 3.1 appearance, but in operation and limitations). Classcharts is OK if you do your analysis within it, in their way, but getting data out of it to do any analysis elsewhere is pretty hard (in particular, the export data to excel button just gives you a nice blue bar on the screen that never moves). A bit spoiled when you've got used to custom reporting and live data exports! Equally, paying for a MIS then paying for another system to take attendance and behaviour in (which should absolutely be a core MIS function) is daft, but then trying to straddle the two for analysis is a nightmare. Get a decent modern MIS rather than continue to pay for a poor one, then paying more for lots of other bits and pieces clunkily bolted on to try and make it work slightly better. Using additional software to work with data you've taken out of your MIS is fine, but you really shouldn't be using 3rd party software to feed (some of the) data into it as well.

For clarity, we chose Arbor, and have no regrets at all. Either product is so far ahead of SIMS that I suspect anyone making a shift won't have cause to regret it. Whilst Arbor does have some safeguarding stuff built in, when I spoke to the Sales guy he asked what we used, I told him CPOMS, and he replied: "That's better than what we can offer, so I'd stick with it if I were you, and we'll just set up a data integration." I like honesty. It's nice to fold things into the MIS where it works, but if a 3rd party product works better in your environment/case and is worth the money, then better to stick with that than be dogmatic about pulling everything into one place, be it Bromcom, Arbor, SIMS or whatever. Looking at Bringmoredata's market share and churn blog posts for the past few years essentially shows the overall truth. Churn for either Bromcom or Arbor is very small, but higher for Bromcom at the moment, which tells you more than that pointless PR puff post they stuck up the other day on here about winning some tiny primary chain who switch their MIS every year - looks like there is no real dissatisfaction with either product. Timetabling wise, we're a secondary and Edval has been very good and easy to use, plus whilst their current product works well, they are interested in changing/improving it over time, and do so. That isn't really the case with some of the more er, traditional timetabling options!

Chances are that if you're posting on here, you'll do fine with whichever of Arbor or Bromcom you choose. The schools I know of that have hard harder transitions to a new MIS lacked a member of staff to drive the process and make the decisions who was also the key operator/trainer/user of the software. In our school, it was essentially my decision, my tender process, and me implementing most of it, so if people didn't know how things worked or were unsure, they asked me. I won't say that didn't put a ridiculous amount of strain on me personally (and that is no comment on other support/training options - staff will always go to someone they know/trust inside the building before contacting an outside agency). A nearby school asked to borrow my rationale, costings etc for our choice and made the same move at the same time. Their experience of the transition was more awkward than ours, as there was nobody there to drive it with the correct experience (there were members of SLT who were convinced by what I'd written, but they weren't the ones making it work or explaining how to do things on the ground), plus there were some users with an aversion to any changes, and nobody to talk them through how to do it, or how changes could make their lives easier. I spoke with technical and leadership staff at several schools using both options before making a decision - I'd rather hear their real world experience than sales personnel. As for timetabling, we moved to Edval and I've found it very good. Previously used Nova-T6. Of course that may involve changes - when we made the decision to move our timetabler decided he didn't fancy learning new software, so I went from helping/altering/doing bits of the timetable in NOVA to being the sole timetabler in Edval. Either way, the timetable was created much more quickly and available and uploaded to our MIS earlier than it had been for many years! Subsequent timetables have of course been easier. Mid year alterations on the fly within the MIS are much much easier than they were in SIMS. There are one or two things that were easier in SIMS, but mostly it is just a vastly better user experience all round, from reception/admin/classroom staff all the way through.

As a recent mover to Arbor, I'd agree with you that timetabling integration with Edval could be better, but that is a once a year thing to do. Having said that, I did make a timetable with Edval and import it without any problems, which wasn't bad for a first time timetabler (I'd been modifying/maintaining things in Nova/SIMS for years, but previously another member of staff was responsible for making the timetable itself). There is definitely room for improvement, and I look forward to seeing better integration (particularly if Arbor could write back changes you make into Edval) Changing staff/lesson times through the year works quite well within Arbor. The little delay between you making the changes and them actually taking effect is irritating, but once I'd realised that was what happened it was better (at first I'd change some kids classes, then click on their calendar and wonder why it hadn't worked, go to do it again, then check their calendar and wonder why half of it had changed....). A bit more speed on that sort of thing would certainly help. I would definitely agree that assigning students to courses was vastly easier/better in SIMS, particularly where you would right click on each option band and pick from the available choices, where you could see the teacher and class numbers whilst choosing. It is the only bit that really stands out to me as being much better in SIMS. Being unable to report/export attendance properly using custom report writer for clubs and interventions is a glaring shortcoming, but SIMS didn't even give us anything for interventions in any case. Interventions have been invaluable from a safeguarding point of view in terms of tracking when/where students are out of lessons. I think it is a really nice bit of functionality to use, just spoiled a bit by the reporting end. So far as the Parent App goes, I'm not sure it really offers anything more than the website, and I'd agree that the web interface is pretty rubbish in mobile view - I always put it into desktop mode and zoom in. However, compared to the massive chew on with parents having constant issues with the SIMS parent app and its multitude of different ways to log in and forget how you logged in, I swear about 5% of my workload was gone just from not having to deal with SIMS Parent App issues (I personally didn't find it difficult at all, having set myself up a dummy parent account to test/monitor issues, but our parents clearly found it awful). Being able to log in as a parent with 2 clicks is wonderful, and giving that to our reception staff has really helped them see what the parent is looking at to talk through problems when the parent cannot find their way to do things. We have had a lot of trouble with emails sent from within Arbor going into parental junk/spam, but we're trying to do something about that. Overall, after 9 months, I'm very happy that we moved. Its the little things - I can set off a census run, then duplicate the tab and get on with something else, or have 3 different instances open on each screen looking at different things that I find really useful. I've done a few nice things with live data exports and excel to give staff constantly updating reporting on things - the built in reporting does what it does, and in it's own way only, but being able to pull live data out allows you to configure your own reporting solutions to suit your needs. Another school in our trust moved at the same time as us and have found it harder, I suspect because they didn't have any one person driving the change and helping/training/easing things. For me, the workload was pretty heavy because I was (and still am) essentially the single point of call for answers/solutions/help, but that has lightened significantly since October. What I would say is that for the most part the help files in Arbor are actually pretty useful - after years of never bothering to click help in software because it was always utterly worthless, the Arbor ones are surprisingly decent. Not perfect, and sometimes if you're trying to do something a bit more technical they're not so great, but for day to day stuff they're useful for staff to find their own answers. Can't comment about payments as we don't do those in Arbor - we'd time to run on our parentpay deal and to be fair, though their website looks awful and their customer service/support is utterly abysmal, it works, and our parents and finance staff already knew how to use it, it isn't that expensive and sometimes it doesn't seem worthwhile pushing changes through!

Pretty much the same as what we did. Shown it by reps, had a play. It might work, if that is how you assess, but it felt more like a desperate attempt to jump onto the assessment without levels bandwagon rather than something that had been planned/thought out for a while. Not entirely user friendly to my mind either. We went a different way.

fortunately (!) SIMS is pretty poor on audit trails, so in general if you make a mistake then fix it, nobody can ever find out!

In some respects it is a silly question, but only because you need to be able to let your manager know when you stuff up, especially if it's because you're not sure how to do things. Any manager who overreacted to something as simple as this is a poor one indeed. All staff need the ability to make mistakes, own up to them, and fix them, otherwise people end up making mistakes they can't fix and burying them under the carpet, which usually comes back to bite the school later on. I am fortunate that I don't make too many, but when I have dropped a big one, I've just told those who need to know, and then we work out how to fix it. It was a bit nerve racking years ago when I realised there was an error on a good proportion of the reports we'd sent home, which I had printed (I had proofed a dozen picked at random, which was our standard procedure, but just through bad luck hadn't caught any of the dodgy ones). I went to see the Head, having only been in the role a a year and explained what'd happened/apologised. She was excellent, just said "OK, so how do we fix it (full reprint and post) and do we need to luck at how we prevent this happening again?". I appreciate not all management are like that, in many cases as they fear or worry about their own position, but if you aren't like that, then the culture in the organisation will lead to far worse problems in time. However, it is very easy to fix. go onto student details for the individual in question and change the leaving date. Save it. If you look at their attendance you'll see there are now days with missing marks (assuming the current leaving date is after the one previously set). You will now need to fix those missing marks in focus>lesson monitor>edit marks and sort them out.

When the 'Soft Drink method' became known, we tried it. Interestingly on the fake positive we generated we could make the T line disappear again by rinsing it down with a pH buffer solution. Not as useless as the CO2 meters they sent us. We might have subjected one to a few tests... Although the packaging, leaflet and specifications claimed it could measure from 0-5000ppm CO2, it bottoms out at 400 (roughly the expected environmental air concentration) - the software is clearly set to not report lower numbers - even after 12 hours in a vacuum! It also got a bit upset when we put it in a gas jar we'd filled with CO2, and we found that putting two next to each other in a room would often result in results so widely different that even their rather high stated acceptable range of measurement error was clearly exceeded. However I won't be too critical of the decision to send us a big box of gimmicky semi functional chinese made plastic tat in response to union/press whingeing, presumably sourced from a company owned by Michelle Mone or Matt Hancock's Landlord. In the first week, one of our Maths teachers evacuated an entire Y8 class onto the yard and wouldn't allow them back in to collect their bags and coats, she'd propped all the doors and windows fully open. When this was noted (large bunch of kids slowly turning blue on a cold day in the yard in the middle of a lesson), we went to ask the reason, to be told in a panicky voice that the CO2 meter was reading in the red. When we asked her exactly what the exact reading was, she said 812. Now I shouldn't really need to explain to a maths teacher what 812 ppm means, but I was able to hold in my laughter long enough to point out that your exhaled breath is probably 35000-40000ppm, and we had no policy on evacuating rooms for that either. So those are worth however many millions we paid for them, useless though they are.

gone and done. Awaiting the start of our migration process. Though I have plenty of other stuff to do in the coming days so I'm quite OK with not having heard anything post christmas!

I suspect the Govt might be looking for anything at all they can make an announcement about today to get the current news cycle moved on... ESS/SIMS will be receiving a nicely timestamped email from us. Sadly for them our parentpay renewal is up next year and our new MIS should be able to handle all our payments too. Not that I have much against parentpay, but it makes more sense to integrate everything from a parents' point of view. Rather unfortunate for them that their misguided and unpleasant action towards their loyal customers has resulted in the loss of business for other divisions within their company.

Like a sudden focus on how to extract cash and maintain a monopoly position in the short term, for instance?