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Our Business manager thinks we should move to the Capita hosted SIMS. We currently use PARS for registers and behavior management and INSIGHT as our parents' portal. Capita will provide a VPN for us to use but TASC think it will be much slower moving data. Does anyone have any experience of this or advice?

Phil, are there any minimum contract periods connected with the figures you have given?

We used to use SIMS & FMS but new bursar didn't like FMS(who does....) and persuaded powers that be that Corero(Civica??) was the way forward. Just a year later bursar left and nothing seems to work properly, especially linking SIMS Personnel data to that in Corero (is it even possible??) and also synchronizing with our payroll. From my point of view it is a nightmare as we get new staff who need timetables etc but who are missing from SIMS as finance and HR cannot seem to cope with having to enter data twice. Have been advised that the best solution is to revert to FMS, especially as it is much better now. What should we do? Moving from SIMS is not an option and we are a single, 11-18 Academy.

As said earlier INSIGHT is a parent portal, that said we do use the AD link so that all pupils have accounts but, as yet we do not make use of the teacher accounts. Because we use PARS for registration the teachers can enter Homework assignments and the pupils and parents do see this information. Registers can be done remotely using CONNECT and we are moving to this next academic year, mainly for PE staff.

Hi sent a PM but not sure what happened to it! Would like more details of the Job description if they are available as I cannot find them on the website as presumably the job has been filled. Thanks in advance

Have to agree with this. We use PARS for registration and behaviour management, INSIGHT for reporting to parents, INSIGHT for students so that they can see their behaviour points and homework etc and to make option choices. You can also do parents evening booking and probably a lot more but as yet we do not. It does not do access to assessment or reports for teachers as SLG does but we do all of that in SIMS in school and it does not give us any problems.

Here we use Remote Desktop but do not give access to all staff. I also use LogMeIn Pro directly to my work PC. (I also use Logmein Ignition on iPad and iPhone)

The latest upgrade has a PDF option when exporting individual reports.

As LosOjos suggests there are grids in SIMS that will do it per class or course - I would use a Chance Analysis for this. I also use aspects to collect the result for each subject as it is difficult to use the Examinations aspects because they have complicated names. Eg 'Ma GCSE result' instead of 'OCR J562 Result Grade F' etc. One other thing I do is use a grade difference aspect for each subject, eg Ma GD, that has grades defined as -6,-5,...0,..+4,+5,+6 with the same values that is recorded for every grade that is collected by result set(I use a result set named 'GCSE result). I would consider doing this for the result against the prediction and then working out a mean per class and also a grade distribution per class. Lot of work.....

Have to admit that when I am told that the marks had been entered I very rarely believe the teachers (it always seems to be the same ones). When it does happen it is normally because they have lost network connectivity on their laptops. When I am working on mark sheets and SIMS hangs I have never found that data I had saved earlier is missing.

Tombry, surely you could use his sheet as the basis for an Excel template for a report in SIMS...... (Just a thought)

I am trying to set up mark sheets in SIMS to analyse pupil performance at KS5 and am having problems assigning the correct points to the grade sets I use for the vocational courses. I thought that a D* would be equivalent to an A* but that does not seem to be the case (even though UCAS points are the same as far as I can see). Does anyone know where I can find this information as I have not been able to find a definitive guide?

They count double in the sense that they count as two subjects, hence the need to divide by 10. It means that the score is weighted towards the English and Maths results. As to the point well it is DFE/Gove driving all of this and it defies most logical systems.

Maybe that, I am in the Assessment managers group and have green ticks against all of the options. worth checking perhaps?

Not sure if this helps but I use the approach outlined above to get specific results into normal reports in SIMs that are fed into customised Excel templates to do all of the work. You can get any data you want so long as you can identify the aspect, result set etc.