GeorgeFaux

All of these are certainly valid issues. I guess all I will be able to do is present the Headteacher with options. Any clarification on any of these issues would certainly be appreciated.

Thank you all for your responses. I understand that the advice is to start a new Dataset. As a technical solution this seems sound. I just wanted to play devils advocate to ensure that this will have no second order repercussions down the line. So:- Week Ranges:- In terms of creating the new data set I should be looking at a 52 week year running June to June (assuming they want to do this again next year.) This will probably create a calendar with too many or two few teaching days (isn't 194 statutory). Will this cause issues? What about the current dataset, should I change the week ranges to reflect when the year is ending, again this will create a year with too few days. Or should I just leave it. Attendance:- As stated this will screw their 2008/9 attendance figures. Is this reported to the DFES anywhere other than SLASC. What other issues might there be on that. SLASC:- As I understand it the final SLASC date for this year is May 21st. Since I will be starting the new timetable after this date this should not be a problem. However what about the Autumn term Slasc for 2009/10, will this be sent haywire by having the first term start in June? Is CMIS smart enough to just take the data from September 1st. Examinations:- I assume we will just import results back into the old database and this should not be effected by Timetabling or shortening the current dataset. Student and staff Records:- Any changes would just have to take place in the new Dataset unless they corresponded to Examinations I would imagine. What have I missed?

I think this document answers this. http://www.sercolearning.com/documents/MIS_technicalspecs.pdf Bottom Paragraph

Interesting there JMC thanks. I think I might try a roll forward on a stand alone system before I look for a SQL solution. Does anyone else out there roll forward their timetable I must say I have been tempted on occasion but never done it.

Top Idea Thanks I'm fine with both the bulk changes and the stand alone machine but yes I see how that can work. Just create it from the existing dataset and then at the end of year process roll over the timetable in full and bulk change the weeks again for next year. Sir I am in your debt.

I am working at a school who have asked me to pop in their designed timetable into CMIS using scheduler. (no problem here done it several times). However they want to begin this new timetable at the start of the last half of the summer term. This would mean importing the schedule into the current data set, otherwise i'm sure that they would have attendance and Slasc issues. Then once the change has been made rolling the timetable into the newly created dataset. The real pain here being that it would all have to be done on thier live database in one massive intergration just before they wanted to make the switch. However assuming this is the case, I was wondering if anyone else has done this before. What effect would it have on the current teaching groups? Would changes mess with current data especially assessment wise. Can it be done vice versa? create the timetable incrementally in the new dataset and then import back into the previous one?

Be aware that if moving from september the academy will need at least the last years historical data in the system in order to do Plasc which accesses the previous datasets attendance figures.

I suggested this once but never got it off the ground: If you have ever played an Xbox360 you will find that when you are playing a game, occasionally a little message will come along saying you have completed x achievement. These achievements are prolonging the life of games that kids were previously putting on their discard pile as they want to 100% complete the games and unlock every achievement. This is the type of psychology we want to be able to harness in our schools. Many children' attitude when confronted with a game is... if there is an objective hit it, if there is a number, make it higher and they are quite prepared to spend hours to reach elite status even if the tasks are very boring and repetitive. So why not use this in schools. Give every child a homepage with achievements to unlock. These can be for social, academic, healthy eating, homework, attendance etc. It doesn't matter but set them targets, make some of them REALLY hard so they are not all knocked out over the first couple of days. Link the achievement to badges or medals and when a student has enough let them trade it in for something, cash off a school trip, extended lunch free food. Special trip to Alton Towers. Ask the kids for the rewards that they would want and start up a leaderboard. Make a public profile so that students can see how many badges each other have got and make it viewable over the internet at home. Here are some ideas: Start a school Forum and have badges for number of posts. Link this to bitesize or some other educational tool, badges when modules are completed. Have bleep tests at break times, kids can get a badge when they reach a certain level. Have some 'fun' games that they can use to get past a certain points score on. (Bring on the hidden educational value). Healthy food linked to your schools cantine badges for eating well. Social action badges for recycling or answering questions on fair trade. Badges for coming up with ideas for new badges. The list is endless but I think if done well this could be something that really enthuses people. And you did ask...

At the end of the day the printer soultion is a very poor one especially if someone has to stay in the building for any length of time. Here are two solutions I have tried before. 1. The laptop solution, using an excel spreadsheet after the morning registration period ends, an admin assistant drops a report into excel, the spreadsheet setup to be able to filter between the classes easily. This can then be used for the registration. Does not take more than 5 mins. Pros - Even if the server is burning then this will work, accurate and ready immediately. Cons - Needs a laptop, needs excellent excel wizardry, needs an admin person to actually do it (and bring it out), there is only one copy so each class needs to be registered one by one. 2. PDA - For PE I have seen PDA's and Laptops used very successfully for registration. PE PDAs brought out and access MIS system to take registers. Pros - Accurate. Normal Registration procedures. Cons - Require wireless network and servers to still be working. Requires all teachers to be familar with PDA use. Only so many PDAs. Obviously these are not perfect and to be blunt when teachers took paper registers and can just carry them out with them it was far more effective. However barring getting teachers to print out their form lists this is unlikley to happen. OMRs are obviously still effective. Its just one of the challenges of the paperless office (school) but I have had some success with those listed above.

Well it's certainly a novel approach, but alas quite apart from the fact that it is against workload agreements I can't see the MIS companies able to phase this in until at least 2010. Support seems to vary wildly from place to place depending on local agreements, LEA agreements the composition of MIS systems within authorities and local personel. No company will ever get it right, Capita proberly have the worst of it due to the number of questions they get from different sources being the market leader. But the bottom line is its a conflict between flexibility and support. The more features an MIS has, the more it is used, the more features it encompases, the less able it is to support it. New features sell more product, bug fixes never do. Self defeating circle really, there will always be complaints about support. the most effective support is I feel when you can strike up a personal relationship with someone at the support centre. I always ask for full names and numbers to call back for progress. Often I get the brush off but when it pays off it tends to make life easier. People as well as process are generally the key to effective support.

I agree with Jenny many MIS systems will happily take the first afternoon lesson as the registration period. As to having a session last thing. This is a double edged sword, I have seen it tried but not seen any solid evidence it improves afternoon attendance. Firstly because it encourages long lunch syndrome, especially among those who are allowed off site. Secondly the last session is sometimes more sparsley attended by those students who see no value in it and from a statistical point of view this risks losing the whole afternoons attendance if they skip off early. Of course this is far more of a risk if the school does not use lesson by lesson registration. It all depends on how hardcore the truanters are and very much on the presence of the form tutors.

I was going to say a scheduled services restart and clearing out the audit log seem to be the thing until they fix it.

Indeed, I think that is becoming very popular, the idea of registration is starting to be an outmoded concept. Guidance is replacing it. Consider that two 15 min registration periods per day is over 100 hours of teaching time in a full academic year.

can you paste in an example of what its showing.

1) Students go to classroom to be registered in a very short registration period and then into assembly. That was initially however doing what you suggest will raise your attendance figures significantly and means you can use a registration period as guidance or do away with it completely. Certainly in my experience starting with a lesson as opposed to registration which is not valued by students will improve punctuallity for the less hard core offenders. 2) A Seperate broadband line into the offsite changing rooms and then e-portal on a laptop as if it was being accessed from offsite. (suprisingly cheap to do) 3)In an Ideal world yes, but there are resource issues here. Most MIS have a button for an instant print out of registers in a fire situation. The issues will be procedural, how fast can you print and do you have an offsite printing facility. What if the fire is in the server room. The only truly safe argument is to do what you suggest but there must be a better way. Certainly a PDF file can be created of the registers and kept on a laptop. 4)I have never seen anyone try to do this non school wide if only because it will seriously compromise you abilitiy to get accurate summary data and SLASC returns.

Hi Matt, When you say its not allowing whitespace, do you mean that it is putting %20 in between each word?

Sounds quite reasonable but I would say that the job is less data manager and more of a Technical position. I agree that if you are not looking for the manager to do the analysis of the data and present it to your SMT you can probably find some consultancy out there to do the techy parts for you. I certainly got outside help in on the technical parts when I was a data manager asking for very similar things and it only cost about £3k in total.

I think a lot of the misunderstandings come from the days when there was only really original SIMS on the market and the data was far less powerful. It is only in the last five or so years that using data heavily at an individual school level has really taken off. A lot of the staff who use the system are very usure when confronted with CMIS or .Net as the flexibility goes against what they know. When I have been into schools directly after a change over the first thing that people want is the new system to do exactly what the old one did before they see anything else. However again I'd stress that it is not usually the MIS which fails to give the required data but more the interventions that arise from it. The student who is predicted a U in year 10 on a course is allowed to sit in a class for 2 years in a bottom set when it is obvious that they will fail at the end of year 11. The mindset should be, can we get him a G, with extra tuition, with a different teacher, with after school help. If not could we get him a better grade in x if he was removed and allowed to swap bands or go to a different class. What is holding the child back, is it attendance, behaviour, punctuality, relationships. How can we solve this. Can we provide a Teaching assistant, a Learning Mentor, an academic coach. Should we involve SEN, EWO or other agencies. Is there an alternative vocational qualification. The mere fact that there is a U anywhere should automatically flag up this conversation but it should also flag up. Why has the student got to year 10 in this condition, why did we not teach them in a different style earlier, who were their teachers, is there an issue there, who were they taught with, would mixed ability be better, what was the learning style used, have they had ongoing pastoral problems. To every one of those questions there should be a possible answer, the only thing I am interested in getting out of a management system is who is failing/succeeding, why, and they once an intervention is in place what are we doing about it. The point was raised about outside consultants, I agree that the lack of this type of mindset keeps people like myself in business but I do see a change coming, I see a fair number of non teaching positions designed to do the above in the £20-35k. I hope that MIS systems develop to include individual student intervention tracking, Flagging systems which identify failing students, personalised learning information, information and tests to determine learning styles and pastoral summaries.

If it helps its not just limited to MIS companys.

Phil Neal... I agree that SIMS and CMIS has the tools to do a more diagnostic analysis, the problem is the mindset of staff who either do not know how to pull the data out or how to use it properly, the ability to change things in mid flow is difficult and goes against instinct. Fisher, Raise, and MIS data are usually used to sit in a meeting and say this is the situation, no further. Limbo we did the same thing using vb scripts to migrate data into excel sheets, we did the sessional attendance and it worked beautifully. Yes SQL is easier to work with but I do think that if you are having to go third party you may as well make your own MIS. Its a real failing we had to do that.

Raise online looks ok, but not really up to the standard of information in Fischer. The fundemental issue here is schools not really having a handle on what their data strategy is and not knowing either how to a) extract data from the managment system or b) have anything to do with it once they have it. The questions should be; How are the students doing? Why are they performing like this? What are the interventions we can put in place to change this? Most schools and management systems are totally concerned with snapshots of how students are doing not putting targeted interventions in place to change this which is the hard part. All management systems can get out data, the only question should be can it give out the data to allow managment to make changes for the better.

I think its untrue that everything needs to be exported to excel, certainly I only did this in CMIS when other people needed to make additions. Te problem is as people have said in this thread that cmis does not come with default reports and forces you to create. Schools and organisations are proprietary about sharing and hence this creates a large amount of duplicaiton.

Of course they have a plan, they wait until the census is coming up and say blimey we are legally obliged to make this work. Then they pick a few things at random and chuck them in as updates. I have been to a couple of focus groups for them and they show some really nice features but then seem to go off on a bit of a tangent i.e. the complete redesign of e-portal (I still prefer the blue). Testing also seems to be a bit redundant for them due to people running the system on different platforms or with authority specific versions. This drives me nuts.

Of course, but then once you get into the advanced reporting areas its pretty much do your own thing. Besides I get fed up of being told "it will be put on the development list".

Try to get the number of your regional co-ordinator.