park_bench

Good morning, If you have access to MAT Vision, there are various OData endpoints that could be useful, including: SessionAttendanceCodesByYear, SessionAttendanceCodesByMonth, SessionAttendanceCodesByWeek - These all summarise the count of attendance codes/subcodes in a period by student SessionAttendances - This returns all raw data from the Vision attendance table (including subcode) for the past 7 days SessionAttendanceYTD - This is a live endpoint (not using data stored in MAT Vision) that connects to all MIS DBs linked to Vision and returns all AM/PM marks in the year-to-date, including subcodes and mark meaning If you don't have access to Vision, you could create a Quick Report to find the Attendance Mark count in a date interval (year-to-date) per student. You could then make this report into a Live Feed for use in your PowerBI report. I realise that this probably means you will have to redevelop your Power BI reports, but hope it may be useful information. Ben

I'm really pleased to hear you are finding Quick Reports useful - we've worked hard on updating the Adhoc reporting engine in Bromcom and Quick Report is becoming the default report type, making the others redundant. Quick Report allows really easy cross-domain reporting and, as you have highlighted, you can have as many time intervals in the same report as you need. It has inbuilt calculations and Excel-like functions so you need to do less post-processing of your data, and it's sooo much quicker than traditional report types in Bromcom! If you are using OData from MAT Vision, you should have access to the last three academic years of data. What is it you would like to report on? Feel free to drop me a message if I can help.

Hi @ssouth. In my old school, I would create fairly complex Trackers for 1000+ students using Webmerge so it is definitely capable of running these types of reports. I now work as a Product Owner for Bromcom and look after the development of Adhoc Reports. I can assure you that there are a lot of great enhancements coming to reporting this year but you should be able to create your Webmerge reports right now without any issues - I'm sorry that you haven't had a satisfactory resolution so far. I'll DM you my details - let's get in touch and get this sorted!

We are a small MAT (1 secondary and 3 primaries), even so, the SIMS license alone was going to cost a few £1000 more than the Bromcom system, but bear in mind that Bromcom is cloud-based (we hosted SIMS in school) and has many modules included in the price that previously we had to pay for over and above the basic license. So the total cost of ownership of Bromcom is incredibly low compared to SIMS. Off the top of my head, these are some of the add-ons that we no longer have to pay for because it's all included: X SchoolComms for home/school communication X ShowMyHomework for Student assignments and resources X Teacher App for mobile devices X Parent's Evening Booking system X Room and resource booking system X Discover for data visualisations X Class charts for seating plans X Cpoms for safeguard X Data manager's time in creating decent analysis using Excel X New SIMS server every few years X SQL Licenses for SIMS server X Remote Desktop licenses X Remote back-up solution SIMS server X Network Manager's time managing the SIMS server and client installs X NM's time managing all the 3rd party data connections to MIS X Time spent explaining to parents why they have so many different log-ins to different systems! I realise that SIMS also now do a hosted solution so our savings on the hardware and support side may not apply to everyone, but as I understand it, Capita hosting charge is higher because their product being Windows-based rather than a proper browser/cloud solution. Just with the included modules alone and the reduction in stress of synching-up multiple systems, it's worth it! When our SBM was scrutinising the Bromcom quotes they produced some TCO comparisons for a small MAT - savings against LA hosted SIMS was projected to be about £35K over 5 years and non-LA SIMS (licensed directly with Capita) savings were going to be well over £100K. Feel free to PM me if you want more info.

You certainly need to manage the migration well and fit it into a time-frame that works well for your school/MAT. For us though, we didn't want to enter into another lenghty agreement with Capita so had about 3 months to switch. A bit more forward planning is advised! Our secondary school acadamised with 3 local primary schools in July 2018 which gave us the opportunity to evaluate all our systems and SLAs. The cost of SIMS to us as an academy was going to be seriously eye-watering so it prompted us to look at what else was out there in the MIS market, carefully evaluating Bromcom, Arbor and Scholarpack. We went for Bromcom because it is fully featured for both Secondary and Primary (we wanted the same system in all the trust's academies, which ruled-out Scholarpack) and seemed much more developed for Secondary use than Arbor (Arbor looked great, but during the deep-dive demonstration we couldn't get the information we needed easily). In hindsight, It is crazy that we didn't look at moving to a modern cloud-based MIS years ago - we just put-up with SIMS because "it works and staff know how to use it". 18 months on with Bromcom, and we are really reaping the rewards now in terms of efficiency and time-saving for staff, cost-savings for the finance bods and innovating with new processes and procedures that just wouldn't have been possible with SIMS. Yes, there is a period of strife and hard-work as you migrate staff onto a new system with new workflows, but we managed this upheavel in all our schools within a term. Small pain for big gains. Good luck with it!

Actually, having discussed this with Bromcom support, they have showed me that the system does indeed alert the requestor via the Bromcom messaging system. So that's all good!

We also use Bromcom for room and resources booking. It's fairly basic at the moment but works well for our needs. The way it works is that a member of staff can access the calendar (diary) within Bromcom and there is a button for them to fill out a request for a (free) room. Another button allows them to request a piece of equipment that has been logged in Bromcom by an administrator as a bookable resource. The administrator then reviews these requests and approves or declines the booking. Approved bookings show on the calendar and the room or resource is marked as not available to book during that time. It would be nice if email alerts to the relevant staff were sent when a request had been logged/approved/declined - I have logged this as a development idea with Bromcom and am hopeful that they'll pick it up for a future release as they are usually really proactive when it comes to listening to their customers. Parents Evening bookings also work well for us and our parents via Bromcom's My Child at School app.

We started the migration from SIMS to Bromcom in our small academy (1 secondary and 3 primaries) about 12 months ago. No regrets! I think a crucial part of the process is to get all key personnel around a table with one of Bromcom's account managers and address any concerns that staff may have about changing the MIS - Ask tough questions - and then carefully evaluate the pros and cons together. Ensure anybody who is resistant to change is part of the decision-making process, empower them to express any valid concerns and weed out those who just want to stay in their comfort zone. It's a big decision and potentially a big opportunity to make a difference in your school/MAT. Cheers, Ben

Application pack states closing date of 3/6/19 - but this is still open for applicants. Job Vacancies

For years I felt the same way about the MIS; we had always had SIMS... that's just how it was... and even though it felt as if we were constantly flogging a dead horse, that's how it would always be. We'd just kept purchasing more and more bolt-ons, kept spending inordinate amounts of time and money developing systems to compensate for the inadaqute reporting/analytics and kept just hoping things would get better... one day. When we found out that the cost of flogging the horse was going to go through the roof when we academised, we just realised it was a crazy sitation and we needed to look at alternatives. We started having a look around schools using other systems and invited some companies in to school to show us how they could do things better. It was a real eye-opener to see how much more effecient and productive we could be given the right tools! Change is never going to be straightforward, and you have to make sure you have buy-in from all stakeholders in school - get staff at all levels involved in the discussion about the pros and cons of switching. We made the decision to switch from SIMS to Bromcom in June this year. Migration of data was done over the summer and I'd say, as we approach half-term, we've just about got over any fear and anxt surrounding the change and the vast majority of staff are now very happy we switched.

Partly due to economies of scale; the thinking being that the more schools in the MAT that use Bromcom, the better the discount we can negotiate. Partly for operational ease; it was appealing for us to streamline our SLAs across the MAT and only have to deal with Bromcom regarding our MIS. Also, running two MIS systems would double our trainaing overheads for the central team and ICT support which services all schools in our MAT.

We looked in depth (we got to the stage of inviting the companies in to demonstrate) at a couple of alternatives: Arbor and ScholarPack. We ruled out ScholarPack because it is only suitable for Primary schools and we thought it important to have the same MIS running across all our academies. Arbor looked very nice, but we found it's beauty a little skin deep - it didn't seem to be as fully featured or easy to operate under the hood as Bromcom. Of all the companies we invited to demonstrate to us, we felt Bromcom were head-and-shoulders above the others in terms of wanting to listen to, and act upon our feedback. This was another important factor for us, as prior to switching, we felt we had zero relationship with SIMS as our provider - so the prospect of being able to have an influence how the MIS develops is very appealing.

+1 Bromcom We are a small MAT in Lancashire (1 secondary and 3 primaries) and we have recently all moved from SIMS to Bromcom. Initially, the reason to look at alternatives was financial - SIMS was going to cost an absolute fortune once we converted from maintained schools under LEA control to academy status. You will certainly save a lot of money making the switch away from SIMS, as not only do you save on the core MIS, but you can also cancel all the subscription to third-party packages that you need to make SIMS useful (Schoolcomms/Sisra/CPOMS/ParentsEvening in our case) - Bromcom has all this functionality built in. Migration was a painless process and although there is always going to be some angst when switching a major system, the training plan provided by Bromcom was really comprehensive and they looked after us during the transition process. The Bromcom system is intuitive and learning/using just one system instead of SIMS plus 2, 3, 4 other bolt-on systems is so much more palatable for staff and much more efficient. One of the major benefits I've noticed using Bromcom is that admin staff are becoming so much more self-sufficient with using the MIS. Previously our support for SIMS was via the LEA; we could be waiting days for resolutions to issues and the call logging process was tedious - this put pressure on the technicians who were the in-house fonts of all knowledge - now staff are happy to put a call into the Bromcom support team, who are superb and usually get you sorted in a few minutes. Early days for us, but we're very happy we switched.

Hi I am trying to do this for myself but it is complex. The method you describe is good but it doesn't take into account the fact that different courses have different GCSE equivalences (Depending on how your data is set up I guess) and that short courses are only worth 0.5 of a GCSE although they could be one of the top results. It is tricky... I'm working on it though.

OK - the above is a live link on the DofE website to an out of date document. The present method of calculation can be found here (Value added technical information) Ben