PhilNeal

IanT I would be happy to arrange for one of our Strategic Partnership Team members to visit your new school to listen to their issues. Almost certainly a small investment in training will have a massive impact in the school and will be a lot cheaper than changing systems.

Your support unit manages releases. Support units generally want to make sure that they understand the new features before releasing them to the schools they support. BTW around 1000 schools automatically upgrade on release night.

Gatt, I know that a few LAs discourage schools from using it but it is open to all schools to get an account.

The message suggests that the data isn't in the CTF file. If you have the KS info in a spreadsheet that can be imported through the assessment section.

Nick, full details of our release plan are available on SupportNet - the Roadmap tells you exactly what is on each release so that you can decide whether you have to take it or not. Sept is a minor fixes release.

There are limited options I'm afraid. Assessment data is the exception where if you can get the data into a spreadsheet with a few identifiers such as Surname, Forename, DOB importing into existing Aspects is straight forwards.

I thought I'd posted a reply to this thread but I can't see it now! If you would like to drop me an email I can ask one of our partnership schools to host a visit for you. We have around 100 so there will be one near you. [email protected]

If you drop me an email I will arrange for you to go to one of our partnership schools. There are around 100 across the country so one will be near you. [email protected]

A number of contributors have commented on us releasing several patches to improve the PI calculations and some have complained about having to install the August release. The following is background that may help to explain the situation. A key function of the SIMS Examinations Organiser application is to provide to the SLT the earliest and most accurate possible approximation to the school’s performance by the standards specified for the annual Achievement and Attainment Tables. It is understood that an approximation is the best that can be hoped for: for example, the MIS cannot be aware of results achieved by candidates who were on the school roll for the January Census, but have left and taken their exams elsewhere. Nevertheless, many schools place a high value on the calculations that the software performs. For a number of reasons, the process is neither as straightforward or robust as it could be. 1. Procedure: in previous years there has been a Statement of Intent around April, a chance for comment, and a Final Decisions document in July. Since the Final Decisions never differed much from the original Statement, it was reasonably safe to specify and code on the basis of the earlier document. This year the Statement of Intent appeared on 4th July, and included two new measures relating to Modern Foreign Languages, which had been foreshadowed in last year’s documents. No Final Decisions document has appeared at all. DCSF and its agents have the luxury of using the three months between release of results and their own publication to iron out anomalies, so that enquiries in July regarding exactly how a particular measure will be calculated do not always produce a clear response. That said, the officials at the AAT unit have been as helpful as they reasonably can be. Unlike the School Census, the AAT process does not include MIS suppliers as part of the loop, but this does not stop our customers from assuming that we are somehow privy to earlier and more detailed information than they are themselves, which is the opposite of the truth. 2. Discount Codes: there appears to be little coordination between the various agencies concerned. QCA, we understand, are responsible for issuing them in the first place; the UABs publish them as part of the Option basedata; DCSF incorporate them in the Post-16 Learning Aims QAN data, originally as a sledgehammer to crack the Art and Design nut, but now, particularly in the context of diploma-related data, resulting in a lot of misleading, inaccurate and stop-gap data in the published tables; finally LEAP and Forvus actually process them for AAT purposes. The 2+ A*-C in Science measure, now in its second year, was made more complex by the introduction during the year of new subject codes, with no information beyond what we had gathered in 2007 as to what combinations were permissible. To compound the issue further, the apparent absence of co-ordination or direction as to the use of these codes meant that every board, other than AQA, issued erroneous data, which was only corrected after we identified the errors and pointed them out. Not all corrections were in place by the end of the year, so we had to document the anomalies to users, to ensure that they had updated their basedata to the corrected version, or were able to make the necessary manual corrections in time 3. Key Skills and Functional Skills remains a very confused area. There is no standard way of indicating that certification has been achieved. To overcome this we make a practice of issuing ‘proxy basedata’ on behalf of OCR, WJEC and Edexcel (including ALaN) to enable users to record completion in a calculable way. However, even once this is done, calculation is still problematic, in that Functional Skills counts 0.5 of a GCSE, Key Skills 0.75, but the UABs tell us that the same tests are used for both. 4. Edexcel Digital Applications: In setting up a four-unit scheme, Edexcel created awards for candidates who gained 1, 2 or 4 units, but apparently did not foresee the possibility of candidates achieving 3. Hence the late emergence of ‘CiDA+’, which has no distinctive level code, and cannot therefore be distinguished from CiDA other than by reading the title. The opportunity to rectify this in the 2008 version of the Formats has not been taken, so we do not expect this situation to improve next year. The problem is further compounded by the fact that schools apply for all ‘widths’ of certification, presumably so that they may be awarded the best certification achieved; but Edexcel respond by issuing them all, even if they are U. This can make discounting unreliable, even allowing for the masking of CiDA+. 5. ONAT: OCR have introduced EDI for OCR National qualifications for the first time, starting with registration in September 2007. Edexcel do the same with BTEC, but issue certification results for July. OCR however have insisted, over several months of discussions, on issuing results against the original September registration, which schools do not find intuitive. They finally announced their mechanism in the last week of term in July. 6. Hybrid qualifications: FSMQ and Functional Maths (AQA 93001P). These qualifications have two parallel personalities: as grade-bearing certifications in their own right, as FSMQ and FSKL, and mark-bearing units contributing respectively to GCE and GCSE certifications. We have argued with AQA that it is not conceptually possible without misrepresentation to combine these two into a single record, and there is no provision in the Formats to do so, either as basedata Options or as results. Two option records and two results for each are required. 7. We have raised the timeliness of the necessary information to calculate the tables with DCSF in the past and will be raising it with them again as this situation is difficult for all parties.

Applying all patches via SOLUS is on the cards. It is something that I am very keen on us doing but it does involve some re-engineering of systems at our end to make it possible.

So if I understand you that is how it is meant to be! Anyone with access to Exams Organiser is trusted.

To put this another way: We have updated the software in August 2008 to use the new codes and aspect definitions ready for next year. If you take August and then import of the revised September 2007 basedata it would fail for the affected items with a 'Level does not exist' error.

Sorry Penfold that is beyond my knowledge. Please try your support desk. Thanks Phil

We've had a few reports of this and there is a solution available on SupportNet. Basically try again and on your fastest machine.

Just a word of explanation about the PDF files being on workstations. It was because we allowed off-line working with Teachers Desktop and this allowed the manual to be accessible. We have dropped TD so the manuals no longer need to be copied to workstations. It was horrible though!

JCollings, sorry you have had conflicting info I'm glad it hasn't caused too much of an issue.

JCollings, I am keen to follow up the advice that you were given. There is a news item saying that the release is optional so it is odd that you were told otherwise. Please let me have the case number.

August is an optional release for English and Welsh Schools - there is no need to upgrade to the August release to download results into SIMS. We have encoroprated some new PI calculations that were released about 3 weeks ago but the qualifications affected are not commonly taken.

The licence has to be applied - this is supplied by your support unit. The upgrade is part of your entitlement under annual maintenance.

Just for the record - there is absolutely no way that we can move from SQL Server!! Penfold I can't say what our revenue is but if your estimate was close I'd be very very happy! A primary school of 100 pupils will pay around £260.

I can assure all readers that the change request has not been deleted but I don’t know what has happened to it. This week we are considering all requests with a view to forming a programme for next year and it could have been moved. I will find out. Somewhere in this thread someone says that it has taken a couple of months for us to acknowledge a fault in the OpenOffice links. I’d be grateful if you could post the case reference number so I can check when we were alerted and improve our response rate if we really have known for so long. I cannot justify spending development funds on minority requests but if there is significant demand we will respond – for the record I do not feel that the number of responses on EduGeek to date is significant as we have 22,500 schools using SIMS. I notice that this thread has attracted over 1100 but only 50 have voted and not all support the proposition. I urge people to cast their votes one way or another. This is not cheap change for us to implement and bear in mind that schools using older MS software cannot use XML outputs. You can already use the free MS viewer for all SIMS documents and personally I would rather spend the money on things that will help schools improve behaviour, attendance, assessment results etc and generally make SIMS even more useful. If I was building a new AM, Profiles etc I would ensure that Open Standards were built in from the start but we are where we are.

The driver to create strong links to MS Office was to ensure that our users did not have to grapple with intermediate files nothing more sinister than that. As the overwhelming majority of our users use MS Office it seemed a sensible thing to do and indeed schools that have returned to SIMS from other providers often comment on how useful that feature is to them. I understand why OpenOffice users wish to have the same degree of integration but this is not a conspiracy. Capita does not profit from sales of MS products. We are a development house, free to choose the best tools that are available and .net and SQL Server are excellent products. I have asked my team to look at how much it will cost to support OpenOffice more actively. I can confirm that at the moment the link is broken and you get a com error. I suspect that a change that was made to ensure that the free Word viewer worked may have introduced this error. This is an example of how introducing permutations increases an already complex test matrix and at the moment OpenOffice is not in the matrix.

James, I saw your posting on SupportNet about you'd been told and am following it up. SIMS including Profiles is tested and works with Office 2007. (The maco controls are different in Ofice 2007) The outputs that work with OpenOffice are: report generator assessment manager profiles - excluding graphs We don't embed drop downs in OpenOffice so creating templates for profiles or AM is best done with Word. Our standard reports were designed in Word which puts a header into the document which means that when you try to open it from IE it ignores the default program setting. (I'm afraid I don't understand this point!) What is true is that as a company we aren't set up for handling OpenOffice as at the moment the demand is low.

Capita do not force the use of MS Office. Most outputs can go to OpenOffice.

I think we fixed this issue within a couple of days. If you let me have your details I will get someone to call you and sort it out.