SISRAOnline

Hi all, we are looking to grow our Support team at our offices on the Wirral, Merseyside. Our ideal candidate will be someone with experience of exams analysis (Residuals, Capped 8 Points etc) or at the very least someone who understand schools data (students/exams). If you fit the bill, please contact us via our website: SISRA ONLINE : WEB BASED EXAM RESULTS ANALYSIS : HOME You will also see the job posted there on the jobs page. Thanks for reading Jon Williams

Chris, feel free to register for a free no obligation demonstration of SISRA via our website: SISRA ONLINE : WEB BASED EXAM RESULTS ANALYSIS : HOME - we won't bite, honest! The demonstration will give you a very good feel as to how easy the service is to use.

Nah, not having that Matt, lol. There is no way that we would force a person to get a CRB check for something they are actually unauthorised to do in the office. That's like saying "I don't trust you to just come in here and do your job that has absolutely nothing to do with kids at all in any way and also I think that you may at some point illegally force your way onto our servers and look at some data that would say something like 004040 Joe Bloggs, WBRI, FSM=Y, LAC=N, which you wouldn't know what to do with anyway." If you look at these two Category codes regarding CRB: Any office, employment or other work which is concerned with the establishment or operation of a database under section 12 of the Children Act 2004 , and which is of such a kind as to enable the holder of that office or employment, or the person engaged in that work, to have access to information included in the database. Any office, employment of other work which is of such a kind that the person is or may be permitted or required to be given access to a database under section 12 of Children Act 2004. Off the top of my head I think these are the categories that refer to us and both of them state that these people would be permitted access etc to the databases. At no point do they suggest that even users who are not allowed access should be included. There's covering all your bases and there's taking things way beyond the point of reality. Next it'll be that if someone walks past they need a CRB check as they may just at some point break in!

LOL on the 4 check for 1 technician, it is madness what goes on! We have staff who do not have any kind of access to student data in any way and would never visit a school on our behalf. In fact, the cleaners here wouldn't even know how to switch the computers on, let alone log in and then launch Query Analyser and come up with an SQL query! . I'm pretty sure that even the grey areas do not include such people. The whole thing's madness though isn't it!

All relevant staff have been CRB checked

We do like our current 'one size fits all' use of Excel as a staging post for school data. It gives us plenty of flexibility; there always seems to be schools who don't have everything they need to report/analyse on SIMS (students studying out at college etc) - and also if we did this sort of thing for SIMS then our CMIS/Phoenix schools would also expect something similar. I'm not dismissing it, I see where you're coming from and it's something we'd perhaps look at in the future - but we'd have to study the return on investment

Pity you're so far away Matt, we're recruiting at the moment!

FAQ now changed accordingly. As I said earlier, we always listen to our customers (no offence Tony, lol!)

No I think that's fine Tony. The question is 'DO WE MANUALLY INPUT OUR STUDENT DATA ONTO YOUR SYSTEM?' The Answer is No. You upload it. You also don't MANUALLY create the CSV files, the data can be pulled out of SIMS/CMIS/Phoenix etc. (we tell you what you need, StudentID, Name, Ethicity etc) into excel and then uploaded into SISRA. Just to clarify, SISRA is marketed to users such as exams officers and the like. Not neccessarily techies. So what a techie considers manual is very often different from what an exams officer would consider manual. In this context, manual means "Manually type each and every piece of student data into SISRA". If you showed that FAQ to any of our SISRA Administrators in any of the 75 LAs that we have a presence in then I'm confident they would agree that it is not misleading in any way.

We don't extract data from SIMS. We don't interface directly with schools MIS. Schools upload their data into SISRA as CSV files via https.

Yes, HTTPS. We are registered with the ICO and recommend all our schools add us to their Fair Processing Notice.

Hi Matt & Matt, just thought I should provide some clarity here with regards to our hosting before it snowballs! We use gradwell for our email and nothing else. All web traffic comes to the web servers here at our offices (in sunny Birkenhead). All hosting of school data is done by us! Thanks to Matt Mitchell for the kind words though. One of the huge benefits of our system is that each school pays for a site/school license (I won't discuss costs here but it is the same for all schools), meaning each school is free to add as many users as they wish onto their SISRA system. Some of our schools have 100+ users, all with the ability to analyse exams, mocks, assessments and targets from anywhere with internet access (not just from within the school). Users don't have to develop and build reports. Administrators simply upload data and prepare it. Then publish reports. Job done. All reports, (tables, charts etc), which a fully interactive and filterable, are then available to all users. With regards to sales, we don't really use 'salesmen' as such. Our support/technical staff provide online demonstrations to interested parties. Also, many of our member schools allow us to host a Roadshow event at their school so that any interested local schools can come and meet us and view a demo. The Roadshow demos are (more often than not) carried out by a nice chap called Michael Surtees. Michael is Deputy Head at Madeley High school in Staffordshire and he gives up his time to talk to schools about SISRA because, and I quote "It saves me so much time during the year that I want to tell everyone about it". We don't use pressure salesmen. You either want it or you don't. Admittedly most schools that see it are interested and I'd put that down to the fact that we have always listened to schools' requirements and will continue to do so, updating and enhancing the service as we are asked for more functionality etc - with all enhancements provided free to existing customers of course! Anyhow, again thanks to Mr Matt Mitchell for the kind words. It would be good to see you on the SISRA Forum at some point Matt! Only accessible from within the SISRA members area, but a good place for you to talk to us about how we could make our service even better for your school! Cheers Jon Williams Head of Development