PhilNeal

I was in a school recently that recorded the book band that a child was at in AM. They then displayed these in a tracking grid which revealed that a few children were reading well below their age. If you're interested I'll try to find out more.

I think you make things happen!

I don't think you can tell from a "job title". I would expect it to be all about making sure that the school is doing everything possible to ensure that every child meets their full potential. That's all about spotting trends and getting the SLT to act on the information. The type of thing I have seen work well is introducing behaviour monitoring- getting rid of paper records that take days to act upon when the child has completely forgotten what the issue was. Ensuring that the behaviour policy is being acted upon i.e. 3x as many positive as negative points. Seeing which staff are way off etc. Then there is the more obvious assessment target setting to make sure that children will achieve their full potential and ensuring that they attend on time. I was speaking to Sprowston School last week who have reduced lateness by 70% - all done through their MIS. Ofsted is so interested in data now that SLT need to take this area very seriously. Here's a link to a paper we wrote with ASCL to help SLT:http://bit.ly/ZHJQLB (sorry I can't get a link directly to the paper click on the link a few lines down the screen)

Running an application against a database that is not in step is just far too risky there would be data corruption. SOLUS 3 is designed specifically to allow teachers to boot and go straight into SIMS having downloaded the upgrade in the background i.e. no waiting around.

Yes I realised after posting that I'd encouraged people to move prematurely!

I was speaking to Sale Grammar School yesterday - they have SIMS on W8 and apparently "it flies".

It's early days as yet but no issues raised so far. I'd like to think we'd have spotted this type of thrashing in our test environments and early adopter schools. The suggestion of looking at the refresh rates on the home page widgets is sound but the defaults shouldn't cause these issues.

It's good to see that @bossman & @Whitclark have some success. Feedback at the Southern LA User Group was that those that persevered were getting there. One LA reported setting SIMS up in two new school networks as working like a dream (no not a nightmare!). The next set of enhancements are due out at the end of this year and that should close down the odd failures to upgrade.

It's called the census so yes

SLG comes in several flavours: There is the install SharePoint in LA option - this can work out very cheaply for schools and provides an enterprise solution There is an install in your school option - this requires a number of days consultancy which puts costs up. You'd only take this option if you want an enterprise solution and intend to use SharePoint fully. We also offer it as a hosted option and that is a simple install and is much cheaper in year one.

This is definately an SLT job. Whilst that person might need some technical assistance this job is all about policy.

@glennda yes please drop me a line [email protected] as this price is way over what it should be and is more in line with what we might charge over 3 years for both the parental & staff side of things.

@glennda - I'd be grateful for more detail on the "£13K for set up" as I don't understand where that figure comes from.

If the LA owns the licence they can decide who supports the school. If a school is unhappy with its LA, it is always possible for a school to have a direct relationship with Capita.

Here's what you have to do to obtain the historical FSM data and get it into SIMS. Log onto Key to Success Go to right hand side & pick "Pupil Premium" Download file Go into SIMS|Routines|Data In|CTF|Import CTF Select "Roll Roll" Uncheck everything except CTF History This will then populate the table. In autumn there is a report that lists all pupils with FSM over last 6 years BUT remember this is not a definative listing of pupils with the pupil premium.

We think the DfE's position has changed (or we misunderstood) Key to Success is showing pupils that have had FSMs but this is "not the same as a download of which pupils precisely are being allocated the Pupil Premium centrally but .. it gives schools a much better chance of being able to reconcile their own data with pupil numbers from the allocation". The quote is from our DfE contact. There is a report in the autumn release (in the reports library) that looks at the FSM values on census day over the last 6 years. LAs have a report from the DfE that provides schools with data for children that were on FSM in their last school. You only get the premium if a child was on FSM on census day as that is all DfE know about it.

Vik one of the key objectives was to make it possible to push SIMS onto new PCs so the idea of the client pulling can only be a back stop.

I will re-check our sources!

Thanks for the feedback - this has been harder to pull off than we expected. Around 16% of our schools are now on S3. We are now implementing the final backstop - if the client detects it isn't up-to-date go to S2 mode and upgrade youself.

Schools aren't supposed to know who gets the pupil premium but are supposed to demonstrate that they are spending the money on those pupils! In spring 13, possibly the summer we will provide a flag for these pupils in the marksheet unless we are told otherwise by DfE. It is more complex than FSM.

This is about the definition of a class - our definiton is same pupils same subject and any number of teachers. The pupil's class is the main reporting vechile.

You aren't being thick! Until now there wasn't a requirement to retain FSM data and SIMS didn't keep a history. We do now. SLT almost certainly want this because its one of the things that indicate that a child is getting the pupil premium and the SLT need to demonstrate that they are spending this on the right pupils. Schools aren't allowed to know who gets the premium! There are other factors such as service children. We will be adding more in this area.

I still don't understand why would want to report to parents by teacher if its the same class?

I suspect there must be something that I'm missing but if your teachers are reporting separately it sounds as if there is more than one class? Is there any reason that you can't create two classes and give complete freedom for reporting on all aspects?

The current position we believe is that there are no missing cases - we did find 40. Anyone that hasn't heard from us about cases raised last week then something is wrong and I'd be grateful if you could contact a desk manager to alert them. We do still have some case update visibility issues. Sorry about these issues.