emmaburt

Thanks for the suggestion IT are having a look at it right now to see if they can recover it. fingers crossed!

I had a look at discover and i can get the information by half term but we want it weekly. Also when i look at 2 years ago it still looses the ethnicity for students that have gone off roll - - - Updated - - - thanks for the tip SJT i'll have a look at that, i thought there maybe something in history but wasn't sure where to go with it.

WE are trying to look at Exclusion data by subgroup over 3 years. However when students go off roll their ethnicity blanks out in sims so when i run a historical report and student that are now off roll have no ethnicity in the report. We look at ethnicity quite a lot as we have around 30% EAL on roll. Any ideas anyone? thanks Emma

ooh sounds interesting? going to have to google PowerQuery, is it a add on to excel then?

ok thanks for the tips, i'll see what i can do. just frustrating to have to faff with it after it comes out of sims

I do that but it still doesn't actually change the format of the content in the cells as my vlookup doesn't recognise it as a date. The format is comes out of sims is eg. 03 November 2016

I regularly run a number of behaviour reports from sims and pull them out into excel. However the column with the behaviour date is formatted as Text, I use a vlookup formula from this date to calculate the week that the incident happened in for a summary sheet, however without manually changing the date from text to date by going into each cell i can't make it work. does anyone know of a way of ensuring the date comes out of sims in date format rather than text?

Hi LosOjos, yes it was your programme and its been great, we did find though if candidates have a exam number startin with a 0 its not happy, but have worked around that by just not giving anyone such a number. It works great as long as the users are savy enough to do some check and make sure the outcome files are correct rather than getting in a flap about it! I'd love to have another solution though that would just make it work directly form sims, i think there is a possible solution that will work for most things but it depends on how the exam boards provide the base data, if all boards created their base data in the same way Edexcel (and i think WJEC but i don't personally use them) then in exams organisers there is a separate exam board for GCSE and GCE and you can allocate centre numbers directly to these exam boards then you don't need to split any files but AQA and OCR just have one exam board in the base data so this doesn't work.

oh you are lucky, we have one database for both sites, and luckily someone kindly create a splitter programme that splits out the one file into the 2 centre numbers so its a bit of a faf.

oh joy! thought that might be the case, thanks for the info. can i also ask Oaktech do you use sims? and then how do you split your entry files out to the 2 different centre numbers?

Can anyone help with my quandry please. we are a split site with 2 different centre numbers 1 pre 16 and 1 post 16. At present we are without an exams officer on the post 16 site so are managing all entries via the pre 16 site, does anyone know if you can download a key for each site and put in on one version of the A2C programme to allow it to pick up entry files for both sites. We wouldn't ahve had this problem if we had an exams officer at the other site as we just installed the A2C programme on the 2 exams officers computers and then they had their individual keys on their computers but as we are trying to manage both sites at the moment from one place we're a bit stuck! any ideas greatly received.

got it! thanks Sividam, looks great!

thanks Peter that looks really good, has already given me some ideas!

thanks for that, yes i think the data we have is workable. we report on predicted grade, current grade, attitude to learning (a level of 1-5) then a homework mark of satisfactory, unsatisfactory of not completed. I use traffic light systems on our marksheets so could copy over the colours. is there any chance you could give me an example of yours? I am looking for some ideas and will be taking them to senior team next week for discussions. thanks

Has anyone got any good examples of progress reports created on sims individual reports. we are looking at changing from the traiditional school report to termly progress report for all students and i am trying to come up with ideas for format with some more information other than just a table of current and predicted grades. has anyone used the graphs before? and have you any advice thanks Emma

Well so far what i've done seems to have worked, they tutor grups haven't imported over night back into the membership of year 9 so fingers crossed i can make it work!

yeah thats a possibility, i'll wait to see what happens overnight tonight and take it from there. thanks for all the advice

yes that seems to be exaclty what they say! hence why i've ended up involved as one of the teachers involved in setting it up were saying it was the data from sims but there isn't any other way of having sims set up. The network manager had a long conversation with Fronter the other day but to no avail, they just said it was a sims issue.

yes that is exactly it, as we are the opposite was around so our year 12 and 13 are separate from the vertical tutor gorups in year 7-11, Well, i've resigned the tutor groups from year 9 and i'll see what happens overnight. If anyone can make this work permanently that would be great!

hmm ok i've found the groups within the members, thanks for that. It is picking up our tutor groups as they are vertical, as i suspected. however it then adds in all the students in those tutor groups. does anyone have anything similar? what i'm going to do is resign the tutor groups for the membership of a year group and see if that works, but worried that the import overnight will just add them back in?

Yes i have admin rights and can see into the sections you've pointed out, when i look there all the groups look fine. However when i add members into a room and i select say year 9, when i'm looking at that room on its front page and i click members i get a list of all the students in the whole school, even though i've only added year 9 as members. when i go into edit it says that there are 147 students in that year 9, which is correct, but it says there are 114 groups within year 9, which i don't think is correct but i cannot see how to find out what these groups consist of? don't know if that makes any sense what so ever. yes we do use the automated import from sims to fronter.

Thanks Vikpaw, we've spoken to Fronter who say its a sims thing. I've only just got involved as i'm the MIS manager, so Fronter is new to me also, i'm just having a play around now It is very weird, it doesn't let you see the contents of the groups that have imported in, and you haven't asked it to import in any groups other than a group of students in a specific year but it seems to add in all the classes attached to that year gorup and because they are also in a derived year for afterschool and tutor time it brings them in as well.

We have a problem with Fronter which we are int he process of setting up to go live next term with some year groups. I think it is to do with how our timtable is set up. When we import a year group of students into a room in fronter it also picks up all groups attached to that year group, however some groups have students that are in all year groups as in nova t6 i have created a derived year that contains all years groups to timetable tutor session (vertical tutoring) and afterschool activities. therefore its importing into that 'room' in fronter all students from all years when we actually only want it to pick up some years. Anyone got any ideas how i might get around this isse.

thanks for the tip, i think i've managed to sort it, there was a date that i changed in the EMA set up to the end of the school year (even though sixth form students finish earlier which is what we had put) and now it works!!

we just use year 14 to put in any adults or students that have stayed with us to perhaps repeat a year 13. I will have a look through the pastoroal structure again its worth checking little things like that. I'm sure it is something small.