Devaleth

Yeah that was my thinking in an ideal world. Does mean that P1 gets hit - Lee, I imagine you want that excluded because you use that register for the AM session and this is focused on internal punctuality rather than late to school?

You could run this through quick reports. Start with the "Attendance Basic" data area. Add in attendance code, period display name, register date, then get student names from the sub-menu at the top. Then filter to your marks and period and save. It will default to the current day's marks so if you ran that at the end of each day as a scheduled report it should suit your needs? There may be other ways to do this - linking a behaviour to the mark in question (behaviour -> automated events), or possibly pulling oData and doing this through PowerBI?

Just to throw a datapoint out to you as to "who is to blame", coming from a Bromcom school using InVentry it only touches our session marks, not lesson marks and works how you'd expect for L's and U's. We could even have got it to set an "M" for medical mark if a student came mid-morning from a medical appointment. There's no world where I would want InVentry touching lesson marks because there is no guarantee that after a student enters the building and signs in using InVentry that they make it to the lesson.

Exam results come over in the migration from SIMS to Bromcom as data on the student record. There's no need to export/import this data. Teacher assessment data is the main thing you'll need to have a plan in place for.

I've not used SIMS in a little while, but I think from memory that you could put a filter on the assessment template itself. It'll be one of the two options at the top, in between the template name box and the aspect grid. One of these options will be specific to linking the template and marksheets with a particular course (so the class column functions correctly), whilst the second will allow you to filter the visible students to a particular group/type of students. It's this latter one you would use. Lets say that a group was Year 9 and Year 10. You could create an assessment template with Year 9 results sets etc, and then apply a filter for Year 9 to it. When you create a marksheet for the class, the teacher would only see that specific year group of students. You could then clone the template into Year 10, amend to appropriate Year 10 results sets and put a Year 10 filter on for a second marksheet. The teacher would end up seeing multiple marksheets for the same class but you would be assured of getting the right data in the right places

Hi Gareth This may be a Welsh specific issue - I'm in a school in England and SEND documents are separated properly, as far as I can see, in our version of Bromcom.

I timetable for a two week cycle. For me, the biggest benefit of being able to see the whole cycle in one go is building in consistency wherever possible. E.g. if Year 11 has Maths P1 on Monday morning, I'd want to try and get that in the same place for both weeks. Having to flick backwards and forwards between the weeks not fitting on the same screen would be very frustrating if you're doing this (potentially) hundreds of times. When updating your timetable you have two approaches: 1. Make all further changes in Bromcom directly, via the group screen. This is ideal when it's small, simple changes (like a teacher or room swap) 2. Make amendments in NT6 and reimport into Bromcom as if it were a brand new timetable. This would be the approach if you are doing big changes, but does wipe out any work done in the future (e.g. any cover assignments, attendance marks...). I've also had some wierd issues in the past with it wiping out cover assigned to historic non-contacts (e.g. a duty), lesson covers weren't a problem though. You do also need to be aware that the import only takes the systematic class name from NT6, so if you are in a habit of renaming a class in NT6 or Bromcom, the import syncs with the old class and you'll end up with empty classes and terminated memberships. You'd have to manually amend the class names in the XML export from NT6 to match Bromcom if that is the case. Trying to do both approaches in a year could lead you to problems - e.g. if you made a number of small changes in Bromcom, then made a bigger change via NT6 but didn't include those changes, so wherever possible I'd suggest sticking to a single approach.

When we last did this I'm fairly certain we used Salamandersoft to automate it (moving from SIMS to Bromcom, backing up older students). There were some limitations (e.g. number to run at once), but at 75 a time you'd be fine. However, if this is a one time thing you'd probably spend more time researching, setting up etc then just spending an afternoon exporting them manually.

The only lever in Bromcom that I think you could pull would be to change permissions on the 3rd Party Wonde account so that it can't access attendance. I don't believe there's a way to make the permission read only so it would completely cut it off, which would mean that any other Wonde plugin (such as the DfE data pull) wouldn't be able to access attendance information either. There may also be unintended issues with that clogging up data exchanges (if it's setup to do things step-by-step and stop if it detects an error) - so I'd treat that with real care.

There's a page on the knowledge base that covers this ("how to report on staff absence"), but you may want to build your own quick report - you would need to use the Staff absence domain under the school section for this info.

What MIS are you writing marks back to?

Specifically on this note, if you have laptops or monitors that recommend 1080p @ 150% scaling this will cause you issues even beyond not seeing much on a page. Menu items will be entirely missing Timetables will not display key information such as rooms Changing to 125% scaling mitigates most of this, but 100% is preferred. Sadly this is a struggle for staff with weaker eyesight.

Moved from a SIMS to Bromcom two years ago. It works, but not convinced it's as big of an improvement that others might say it is. Whilst it can do a lot more as a baseline, some elements are a downgrade even from SIMS, let alone from competitor addons (like roombookingsystem, SISRA, 4Matrix etc). You might come away from demo's thinking that you will be able to save a lot of money with cancelled licensing - you will save some but not as much as you think if you want workable solutions. Both starts of year have been really poorly supported due to Bromcom's public technical difficulties. Longer term I worry about the size of the saved pupil reports (there is a relatively low cap on Bromcom servers and additional capacity is expensive compared to cloud storage pricing generally) and how we will archive for longer term storage of student records. Overall it's a bit of a hodgepodge of a UI with most modules falling into either an old or a new style of interface You will likely have persistent issues with double period attendance registers not being taken by staff for the second (or later) parts Cover is a chore Room/resource booking is incredibly basic Homework is dreadful to use wTimetable is awful to use Assessment analysis is basic at KS4 and little more than an exams report at KS5 2FA implementation is heavy handed (in my opinion) The built in reports are overly formatted and trying to use them in place of csv exports adds time to tasks I sometimes need to do (I really miss the "period to a cell" exports from SIMS/NT6) Pluses I will say though that the scheduling of reports and behaviour workflows is an improvement on SIMS where these are almost non-existent. Being able to pull data through PowerBI is also great. Viewable audit logging of changes is also another plus. On the fly timetable adjustments are easy MCAS and the Student App are decent Teachers seem to find it ok. No complaints from their side although they were using a web interface that hooked into the SIMS database before this so anything would have been an improvement.

Viewpoint of somebody moving away from NT6 (10+ yrs experience) to Timetabler this year. (Bromcom school - used wTimetable last year and it was a disaster; using an excel spreadsheet was easier!). I've been playing around with Timetabler for about 15 hours so far: two week timetable for Y7-13 like you, most of KS4+KS5 is more manual and planned in nature, with the software doing the heavy lifting at KS3 most things feel like I have a reasonable analogue to NT6 which has been reassuring I've had to spend more time getting things setup in Timetabler than NT6, and more thought has had to go into it. This is mostly due to how Timetabler structures the curriculum plan and might speed up in time with experience By and large, the in-software support for timetabling solutions has been helpful, but not a guarantee of success Having greater control over how the timetable blocks get timetabled (e.g. particular combinations of classes not appearing on the same day) has been really helpful - in NT6 I would have had to spend a lot more mental energy making sure that these scenarios didn't end up happening. E.g. not having GCSE PE and core PE for a year group on the same day. Too early for me to make a whole-hearted recommendation, but its promising.

No idea what the official line is but I used to setup XMLs to run from the Office XML Handler as a default program. SIMS has both word and excel file exports as xml so this way it would chose the correct program to launch them (there's a line at the top of the XML that says which it is). However, depending on what version of Windows 11 you are running I think that feature might now be removed unfortunately.