Linfit

We had the same issue with it timing out with very similar symptoms. It was our firewall/filter which needed tweaking: https://edexcelonline.pearson.com https://userportal.pqs.pearsonprd.tech/ https://iam.pearson.com All needed whitelisting. I think we were missing the second one. I recall there was also an issue where the link sent to exams officers to the login page was wrong and an issue where if they had logged into the Edexcelonline site in the same session it tried to get back into there rather than the new page on the iam pearson domain. Fixed by clearing cache. Doesn't help with the many other issues with the Pearson sites and the authentication process. Their online presence is truly dreadful.

Yep same for us. Very annoying. Only started happening in the last few days. The service status alerts are even more annoying - they appear to be related to the status of the service status page which is bouncing up and down like a trampoline at the moment with very short periods when it drops out. Looks like some of their monitoring is too sensitive.

I don't believe there is such a field - the leaving date is only populated if the pupil is taken off-roll. If you need it in SIMS you would have to put in a UDF for projected year of leaving or similar, or create an assessment aspect you can populate and report on.

SOLUS seems to struggle with changes to DNS records, IP addresses etc - if your IT team have had to make any changes to the servers that host DNS or DHCP it may have caused this. The offline status will not prevent SIMS from working but it will stop any updates/patches being pushed out. Best check with them and point out that there may be problems with the next update.

It does seem a bit random. I was invited for a flu jab by my GP, which I had on Saturday, but told I was not eligible for Covid as I was not old enough (59). Had a message from them on the NHS app last night - "We have identified you may be eligible for a seasonal Covid vaccination..... " and a link to the booking site. Answered Yes to the "I think I may be vulnerable" question and got a booking at a local pharmacy for this afternoon, no follow up questions. Fair enough, but I could have had both on Saturday - many of the people there were having both done. Seems to me they are readily available if you don't qualify on the age criteria alone if you essentially "self certify" as requiring one. Last year they just did both no issues.

First of all, are the teachers on board with this? If all their frees are on one day they will have potentially 9 consecutive days with no break from teaching. If you are running 10% non contact in theory you would not need any extra staff, but of course in practice you will to get the timetable to schedule, so it will get expensive very quickly. Its also likely these will be part time, which makes scheduling harder. Do any of the staff do duties in one or more free lessons ? If they do, will this still continue, so their one free day will not be totally free day - same with meetings etc. Is the intention that staff will be in work or as they are not teaching, can they work from home ? This might be one thing that persuades them its a good idea. Its easy enough to do in Nova - just put a non-teaching code in for each teacher that covers a full day, and you can schedule around it. But the practical considerations in the real world mean it would be difficult to implement on the ground.

I don't think this list is editable. It also doesn't seem to have much impact anywhere else in the system. There is another list of roles which is used by the personnel section which is editable in Tools>Maintain Lookups which is used if you use SIMS to managed contracts and personnel records.

Up to a point I think. We keep a hardcopy of essential contact data and things like class registers for emergencies. More important is probably to have an alternative communication option if your comms to parents are embedded in the MIS. We have a subscription to gov.notify which we can use as an alternative for sending bulk e-mails and texts. An outage would have to last several days before it started to have a real impact I think, and back filling things like attendance data would be a pain but do-able. You also have to think about the MIS being unavailable globally from anywhere and issues caused by local internet connectivity problems. You can plan for the latter in a DR plan fairly easily, especially if you are a school in a trust with some centralisation, but nothing you can really do about the former.

We haven't experienced any issues fortunately. I was, I admit, somewhat worried about the start of term with the issues they had last year in terms of slowness, but we have been OK. They had a major issue with reports not working though at the end of the summer which was annoying for us but would have caused real issues for schools that still needed to print timetables etc, so that was not good.

Unlocking the session shouldn't unpick the timetable - unless its a deliberate clash, but it will warn you if that's the case. t

Going from memory I think it's something to do with the class membership dates not aligning with the academic year dates ? I have had it in the past when the class memberships were done from the first teaching day which was some days after the start of the academic year. I think on the first day of actual lessons the brackets vanished.

I would focus on contacts - getting rid of duplicates, any unlinked, this took us ages and you need a special report running to show all the potential duplicate contacts in the system, we got it from our support unit. We found a lot of contacts were not entered correctly, so for example "Grandma" would have a phone number entered under the contact details of mum or dad rather than being a separate contact in the system. There is no bulk editing of these so its very time consuming to edit them. Making sure that all the right boxes are ticked on the contacts details - whether the phone number is mobile or not, who has parental responsibility etc. Some of those fields were not that significant to us as we did not use Intouch and had 3rd party add ins for comms, but we found that Bromcom was very particular about them, so won't send texts to a number that is not marked as a mobile number, will not e-mail out reports unless the Pupil Reports box is ticked, and things like that which in our SIMS setup didn['t matter as all that was dealt with via Edulink. As for timetabling, I am the timetabler here and we have stuck with Nova. We thought the Bromcom e-timetabler was limited compared to Nova, and didn't meet our needs. I think if you are using Nova or Timetabler it might be best to stick with them (I am not sure Arbor even has a timetabling solution suitable for secondaries). Bromcom are re-writing theirs and making it web based and it looks promising but I think it might not be there for doing next years timetable.

If its SIMS, then it is broke. They need to see the alternative systems - either demos or in use at other schools. The difference is light and day.

This this and this. We spent literally months housekeeping SIMS before our migration: we moved to Bromcom in Feb half term but worked on SIMS tidying on and off for the whole of the Autumn Term. It really helped, and the migration in terms of data was very smooth. We had a big migration document which tells you exactly which data fields in SIMS are moved and where they end up, and this was invaluable. Whichever system you choose, its all in the prep really. I feel sorry for schools that have been forced to move at short notice because of external factors, as it would be very difficult to get all the required data prep and training done. For what its worth, to answer the original question, we went with Bromcom because we felt it was a more rounded product - we felt Arbor looked nicer but actually the workflows in Bromcom were better. There were also one or two things in Arbor we just didn't like, the App being a good example. In the end, either are miles better than SIMS and I would happily have used Arbor if required in order to rid ourselves of SIMS.

No access to MIS before start date, no logon to network. They might, in exceptional circumstances, be given an e-mail address (We are a google school) but thats as far as we would go. If they need access to curriculum resources stores on google we ask current staff to share resources with them as appropriate. Until their actual start date they don't work for us. We have had cases where people have just not turned up in September - admittedly not teachers but other staff.

The way to do this is to implement on demand testing and move away from the everybody sits the same test at the same time model. This would reduce the burden on schools as we wouldn't need 200 laptops/devices all in use at the same time. The issue wouldn't I think be a at the schools end anyway, it would be the complete inability of the Exam Boards to run IT systems (I work closely with our EO and this year has been terrible from all three boards), the massive bank of questions that would be required to avoid the exams being too predictable, and the quality of the software platforms they use. At the moment, you would never get them all to agree to use the same platform. Yet another reason why the current boards should be abolished. I have thought for some time there should be just one board for England - works well enough in Wales Scotland and NI.

I think Framework is the only area where Health Background appears as its associated with the Student profile. If you give save permissions that should work. The permissions are not particularly well documented - there is no equivalent of the SIMS spreadsheet that gives a list of all the permissions a particular role grants.

Most of the permissions you need are in the Framework module under New Student Details - Health Background. We have slightly modified the default permissions of the Support Officer role and assigned that to anyone in our SEMH Dept who needs to edit this data, add SEN info etc.

Yeah, you usually would not want to do much scheduling until all the blocks are built. You can build them in bulk from the Auto screen, but you need to check the results to make sure they all will build - if not you will need to resolve why - usually an issue with the block shape being wrong for a class or the proposed staffing not being possible within the block.

I know that STAR was the original core module back in the DOS/dBase days - that was the module that held the basic student data and all the other modules were sperate .exe programs. They were all run from a simple text menu system. The updates came on 3.5" floppy every quarter. The documentation still refers to core features using STAR and some of the server folders required for reporting etc still have STAR in their names. Pulsar is obviously the current client app, pulsar.exe which originally was chained after the SIMS\setups folder was checked for updated files. I have not come across superstar, but it may have been an intermediate point after the changeover from dBase backend to SQL, before the 32bit windows inplementation came in - I remember us doing the dBase>SQL migration in the the early 2000's, but the details are very hazy.

Our system did not do that - weekdays only. I think its to do with something set in Apply timetable but we are Bromcom now so I can't easily check.

I have done this and its OK providing, as you say, you get the start date right. The issue is that if you attendance officer has pre-populated attendance marks - for known holidays, exclusions etc, these will be lost and will need re-entering.

We are also new to Bromcom and doing our first data drop in it now. I have created a summary marksheet which shows all the assessments for each year. Once this is populated its very easy to pull the data out as its the exact same process as in SIMS. Setting up a summary marksheet is not as straightforward though - as each template must have an associated base subject we used a dummy subject called Summary to create the marksheet and then pull each actual subjects assessment as a column. This template is then associated with the relevant year group. You can get data out through Manage Data - apply a filter for the relevant assessment/subject combo and it appears in the grid and you can export it, but this only allows you to see one subject at a time, not all the subjects.

Have just done this here. You need to fire up the stand alone client version of A2C thats likely on the Exam Officers PC and in the settings section go through and remove each exam board. You can't have two live A2C connections for the same board.

This. Most of our engagement involved the support staff who actually use SIMS all day every day to really look at the software and what it could do. We had SMT in one or two sessions but they need the outputs, not a detailed understanding of the mechanics of the system. We were lucky in that the decision was devolved to just two of us, and so we did it bottom up not top down. Its far more important that your Exams Officer, Attendance Officer, HR person are involved than any number of SLT, as they will quickly find out the pro's and con's. I would also echo the point about training - we have done hours of it with key staff prior to going live, but only an hour with teachers - just the basics of taking registers and what they need for the go-live day. the modern systems are fairly intuitive for most staff to do their day to day but a lot of schools think about teacher training but don't think about putting the time aside to allow the support staff to get comfortable with it and explore what it can do.