Morning,
Firstly, a disclaimer that I'm not my school's SIMS manager so only have a teacher's permissions to go in a play with things.
I used to be assistant SIMS manager in my previous school but that was several years ago now.
My current school's data manager has told SLT that something isn't possible when I'm reasonably sure that it is so SLT have asked me to look into it - hence coming here for confirmation or a workaround.
Upshot is that with COVID and only opening for keyworkers/vulnerable we have the following system for registering:
- All students are X coded as per guidance and class teachers are inputting a comment with "5" in to represent them not turning up for remote learning so it can be tracked
- KW/Vul pupils in school have the X code overwritten by / or N to represent their in person attendance.
The issue is that staff registering in school have been told that they need to use the "edit marks" function to search through each year group's student list and manually find the students who are in school. Obviously, with a large school this is taking ages!
The data manager has said that it isn't possible to put them into a new "KW" class as this would remove them from their current classes and affect linked systems such as SIMS.
My hypothetical workaround is to create such a "KW" class but let it clash with their normal lesson.
My understanding is that SIMS will allow the clashes (although it won't look nice on a timetable) and student's will appear in both lessons so can be registered twice.
The two conflicting attendance marks will be resolved by the system when reporting the attendance with the 'best' taking precedent.
Could someone with more knowledge than myself (so most of you) confirm whether this will work or not? Alternatively, doesn't anyone else have a workaround?
Many thanks!