MattMitchell

Someone I know in Sheffield is at a school that uses SERCO and apparently they like it very much. I suspect it's a bit like SIMS, in as far as people don't realise what it can do until it's set up properly. Or maybe SERCO's just not any fun to deal with...

The whiteboard thing is a big issue. Making best use of SEN information means using it to inform classroom practice and lesson planning, which means making it easily accessible to teaching staff. I think training and making people aware of the issues is the best way of countering the problem of sensitive information appearing on the whiteboard: how do you make sure that it never happens?

How are people finding IEPWriter? I'm having a look at our SEN stuff as part of the whole "let's do everything with SIMS ad unify data management" plan, so I'd be interested to hear if people find it productive/unproductive/whatever. As far as the licensing side goes, I personally would push for a site licence; if you want to offer inclusive provision to pupils, you need all classroom teachers to be aware of things for good lesson planning and personalised education (IMnsHO!).

Our network dept have set full access on the contents of the SIMS program folder, as it's needed to let the updates go through properly - if the rest of the environment is carefully managed this shouldn't cause you too many problems! It is definitely worth signing up to SupportNet though - it's free - as you can search various KB and previous solution entries; also, you get more SIMS-focussed advice from other users, and a large number of Capita staff too.

It's probably a bit of both - Schoolcomms will also be helping Capita to sell SIMS by extending the available functionality and (hopefully) making the suite into a Good Thing to have... Effective business relationships do tend to work in this way!

Hi there Ignatius! Good to see ya - hope you like it here. Matt

I've downloaded the brochures and case studies and one of my jobs for today is to try out the live demo for it! I'm a little concerned about the licencing costs associated (sharepoint server, maybe changing web server platform, etc) but it'll be interesting to see what SLG can do; and to be honest, a solution that *doesn't* require me to develop and maintain the nuts and bolts has a lot of appeal...

We've got a slight speed issue on our site - some reports can take minutes to open, and admin staff report the same "lock-up" problem sometimes on editing single records, although I do realise this can be a subjective thing. Our SQL server is quite substantial, but I'm going to have a look at the hardware side with ICT this term and look at bandwidth and profiling memory usage. I'm presuming that SLG would run on an application server, with one queue on that end communicating with the RDBMS, rather than opening multiple connections as the number of web clients increases. Most apps that scale do that, and I'm assuming SIMS does the same!... Becta are still ruminating on the whole authentication issue - whether to go with Government Gateway or UK Access Management Federation in order to provide seamless single-sign on (feel the buzzword power!). Certainly I would prefer a solution that allows authentication from a robust, accepted and officially sanctioned provider rather than knocking up my own scheme in Perl and praying that I meet the LA/DCSF official policy. The general impression I get from ICT is that if we have to have it, the LA will provide a solution and (hopefully) fund it. Certainly we get our SIMS support there, and this includes a lot of support in terms of data services, template creation for TAs, etc. Like the attendance information, I think this kind of thing has to be provided to parents in context - we're looking at other schools' models on things like termly/annual reports and the communication of "on target"/"above target"/"below" rather than a stark emphasis on numbers. Even teachers who are used to reviewing the grades and forming judgements seem to prefer the visual clues of traffic lights, and I think that something along these lines (but simpler maybe) could work. I think a lot of this will get easier once the 21st Century Schools report card consultation is finished, as at least this will give an indication of the direction things are likely to take; similarly it looks like they're putting together a replacement for KS3 SATs and a target-setting framework and you know these are going to have implications for all the direct access stuff... Overall, I think allowing parents to see at least some information is a Good Thing; we just have to make sure it's in a clear context with clear explanations and as little educational jargon as possible!

Attaching a template to the homepage is pretty much the approach I'm after - it fits well with the "make reports available without effort" model we're going to! And thanks for the answer - I quite like the free support you offer in here! ;-) (We do have a support contract, don't worry...)

I'm toying with the roll-your-own aspect,as it's my background; however a few schools in our LA are using SLG, and there's a convincing case for basing things around a package that will have strong LA support (creation of templates, standardised schemes, etc) and also that a successor in post can handle if you fall off your perch or run to another job/school/country. Received wisdom is that most schools have at least one inaccurately recorded register group with probability P = 1 * y^2 (where y is equal to 1 on days ending with a y...) I think it's a question of how you interpret the information, and how you present it to parents in a clear, jargon-free way. Attendance data is (IIRC) meant to be shown, but presumably "Your child has attended 80 out of 100 days so far this year" would be a better bet than "Your child isn't in Maths but then everyone knows <$mathsteacher> forgets to take the register". Are you sure on this? I know that the timetable for primary schools is a lot longer; I did get the impression that the actual reporting requirements haven't been formalised yet (hey, it's not like it's next year or anything...) so maybe the specifics will change. The push for parental engagement seems qutie strong still, but the MIS developer guidelines mention termly progress summaries for parents as "desirable", so maybe full realtime isn't expected. I'm aiming things at a realtime = last known good setup, where any summary or analysis will display things up to the last collection point (termly, yearly, etc, depending on the scenario). I think the uptake of VLEs will push realtime-realtime reporting forwards though: it won't look good if you can see live assessment results and targets from a VLE, but the latest teach assessment is over two terms old. Where parents *are* directly engaging, I think this will make realtime happen in a lot of schools anyway. My main concern is that the data in the system is current and accurate; maybe if parents can see the information teaching staff record in the system live, it will force staff to enter data in a timely and accurate fashion! ;-)

But if 22,000 of them are using the same base product, that's a hell of a lot of inertia! The existence of a statutory schema for data transfer files (CTF/CBDS) means that all MIS systems need to have a certain amount of interoperability in terms of file transfer formats for import and export; I think that some kind of common interface specification between software could be the way forward - then schools would be able to buy a solution like TruancyCall or GroupCall and know that it will integrate with whatever MIS they're using (SIMS, Serco, whatever). It would also make purchasing guidelines and requirements for MIS software in general a bit clearer. There are some "suggested" requirements for MIS software already, and there is some mention of interoperability: not just file transfer, but raising the issue of live access between systems. Personally, I'm a believer in separate software packages than can communicate using clearly-defined protocols. It's a situation that promotes choice, but also improvement since users aren't stuck with a single market-standard product. Look at the massive number of email clients, mail servers, database utilities that are backend-independent, etc. There seem to be quite a few products on the market that interface with SIMS, and I hate to think that buying your core MIS system from one company would mean that all your add-on products would have to be from the same supplier. When you tie all the functions into one system, you tie your users into that system for life in most cases.

Let me know how you get on with this - I've got to look at our behaviour management stuff in SIMS next (after the assessment and targeting bits....)

Hi everyone! I'm Matt, and I've already been spounting off a bit on the forums but here's the proper "hello" part! I've recently started as a data analyst in a secondary school in Nottinghamshire. I am new to education though - before this I've done doing business analysis, database app development and web development over the years, along with a side order of software and network support. The thing I'm finding hardest is learning the jargon! Education seems to have more acronyms and abbreviations than any other area I've worked in, and people join them all together like some kind of weird pig-latin. Hopefully I'll get to know lots of people here and also manage to stay sane in the process! Rake care.

AMPARK might be the way then! Certainly I've seen some very good things being done with SIMS at Serlby Park (there's a good interview with their data manager online). I'm probably being a little unfair as I haven't been through any formal training yet on what SIMS can do; it's just the frequent responses of "you can do all that with it in excel" tend to give me a bad impression! I'm still going to push at the LA for the business objects link as well, if only for certain other things we're likely to be doing in the medium term. PhilNeal - one feature I do really like about SIMS is the way related records are linked; for example, viewing a student's records brings up links to related assessment, behaviour, etc. Similarly the ability to drill down into summaries (at least I've seen this on the multifunction panels) and view the lists of students in a particular grouping is very good, and allows teaching staff and leadership teams to identify key students. I've not seen it link right through to the actual student focus though - can this be done from the panels (or ideally from analysis reports!), or is it a planned future improvement?

OK, I'll rephrase myself. The reporting and ouputting of data IS good, it has a good interface and allows setting up reports with year group / subject group / whatever selection by users at runtime. What is a little more lacking (as far as I've seen so far) is the analysis side of things. As soon as row and column headings become field values rather than field names, it seems not have all the features one might want then.

Obviously I've yet to get at the docs so asking this question may be irrelevant anyway... Although it's not allowable to write to (or read) the backend database in SIMS, is it possible to import data into SIMS from file, say to create a custom aspect and then populate it that way? For that matter, can it be done with things like assessment grades, etc? Obviously it'd need the right fieldnames and UPNs and so-on, but is this kind of thing an option?

I feel better now!

I don't think porting it to a web interface is such a bad idea overall - for starters, it will make things like direct access for parents potentially simpler to implement *if it's part of the standard package and not an expensive add-on*. One thing that does really worry me is the training cost though. Not just the financial and staffing implications of having to get everyone who's using a completely different version (it *will* be different, after all), but also the potential for mishaps with everyone on a site being inexperienced with a new package. How many schools have thought "we're bored of our current MIS solution - next time an upgrade cycle comes, let's install something completely different and try and make that work instead"? I'm guessing not many. What could be handy would be if they make customising and modifying the interface feasible - there are well-established mechanisms for typelibs and so-on that are largely self-documenting anyway, and I for one would like to see some flexibility in order to present a different interface and subset of data, reports, etc to staff with different roles. Or will it be some big partner program instead?... And what will the implications for hardware be? Will it ease up on the DBMS server load? Will it require a massively-powered web server with all the associated hardware, software licensing and support costs? Hmm.

Sorry, I misread you before! So I can have (for example) subject names as row headings, and then the dates of the results as column headings, with the grades at the intersections?

Oh, and IMHO the general interface to SIMS sucks! There's not a lot of customisation available, and although there are "Categories" (a bit like tags to aid people in selecting reports/fieldnames/whatever from a list) most of the time, users have to select a choice from a long single list of items.

Close, but "business objects" in SIMS terms is not the SAP Business Objects that can swallow the GDP of a small developing nation. It's a COM-based api to SIMS that allows access to the data. It's free to licence holders for read-only use, or to other people (e.g. third-party developers) for (I think) about £5K. It is possible to write back using the API, but obviously this brings with it support charges and the potential risk of having to pay Capita to fix the data if something goes wrong. To use the API you have to get Capita to licence you first - the free use setup is dependent on the licence holder agreeing (for support implications). Apparently the documentation on it is slim to none in this scenario, although I'm hoping to see some myself soon so I'll let you know then! It sounds like you are wanting to do the kind of stuff I'm going to be implementing over the next couple of months where I am! I'm new to SIMS (and education) but not to databases and development. On the plus side, the reports can do some stuff - I've not found a way to do full cross-tab queries yet, but I have seen it do something close to it. The reporting isn't amazing, but it can do a few things that will be helpful to you. Mostly it's oriented around outputting rows from one of the main tables (students, staff, grades) and letting you select which fields you want, but it's not quite as limited as all that. As far as the difficulty factor goes, mostly this comes down to learning how it works and describes things. Most schools aren't very expert in using the package, and it sounds like most people using it here are coming from a network manager direction rather than a developer direction, so you may find it easier than you think. If the worst comes to the absolute worst, it will output data into an excel template, which would allow you to build the analysis in at that point, with appropriate OnOpen event handlers to tidy/rearrange it first. I'm trying to avoid the excel route mostly, as my remit involves creating live report data for people to use without needing to know how to produce it.

I've only just started in the post! Result sets we will have, believe me. Apart from being good practice, they're needed for robust reporting and tracking, and also make it possible to examine things like which teachers haven't put the marks in yet... It does look like SIMS can't do analysis reports on cross-tabulated data though (i.e. like pivot tables) so I'm still probably going to have to interface with it for some stuff. Or am I missing this - in other words, can you have something like a grid with different grades as column headings, class/set name in row headings, and count of records in each intersection?

I've just found out today that it *is* possible - you create result sets to tag the aspect values for a certain point in time. I now just have to tag 5 year's worth of historical data now and then I'm done!

That does sound like it's along the lines of what I'll need! Although per-child and per-teacher views are useful, the key focus is a statistical overview of what's happening on an aggregated basis... The tricky thing is that I haven't used SIMS before and the only people at the school to teach me how to use it are non-technical users who haven't used it heavily before! I think some phone calls to support and some training are in order...

One thing tha does spring to mind though: I'm presuming that analysing data in a SIMS database data dump, outside of the SIMS database, is acceptable? Obviously this would have to be done by restoring a backup into a different database. Trying to think outside the box a little here...