Linfit

Having spent most of the last year researching engaging and deciding on what to change to I came to the conclusion that either Arbor or Bromcom are both better than SIMS. We went with Bromcom in the end as I think it is the more developed product. From what I have seen, the cloud based SIMS is a fudge and their project to move everything one bit at a time is doomed to fail - it will take too long, and if they end up simply replicating SIMS rather than starting again from scratch it will still not be as good as the competition. There was essentially no development work or modernisation effort on SIMS that got anywhere for 8 or 9 years, and its going to be impossible for them to catch up now.

This has come up at our place a few times and I don't believe there is a way of making the Access Arrangement appear anywhere else.

There is news item on their main page about the Welsh government introducing stricter rules for tattoo parlours. Least we know the filtering works as intended ?!

You cannot create "new" staff in Nova, it has to be done in SIMS as well. You need to create an employee person record in SIMS for this member of staff, with an appropriate start date. You need to give them a Staff code which matches the one you created for them in Nova - this is what is used to link the Nova and SIMS records. You then need to make sure they appear in Manage Classroom Staff for this academic year, and have a valid Working Pattern.

Yes, we do this. We have a timetable block and a lesson called Form Time. For a number of reasons, mainly to do with Tutor Groups with part time form tutors and the ability to create marksheets assigned to the tutor groups.

If you have edited the curriculum panel don't recalculate - that clears it and pulls the data through again. Just revalidate after you have edited the panel.

I'm not sure about Options, we don't use it, so collecting the choices I can't comment on. But a key thing would be how you get it on the timetable to allow registers to be done. If the groups are different for each year group, that's not so bad, you could simply schedule a large block of classes, one for each year group, then allocate students via curriculum management once they had made their choices. Its an admin job but could be done in an afternoon and three times a year is not so bad. The difficulty is if you have options which can be picked by more than one year group where they are in the same "class". This would require your timetabler to set up the block in one year group and then use Derived Bands to allow them to appear in the other years curriculum model. Do-able but significantly complicates the timetable - I would speak to your timetabler about the possible ways of doing it.

and there is an oxymoron if ever there was one.....

You could also set up a marksheet for each subject with the two grades you require on it, then add in SEN as an additional column. The teaching group you can add as the "class" additional column provided the marksheet is linked to a course. This can then all be exported out to excel. Might be quicker than messing with lookups to merge two sets of data.

Easiest way is to configure the attendance widget on her home page - you can configure this to show the attendance for a particular group, such as year, or the individual forms within the year. Its a per user setting though, so you will need to be logged in as that person to configure the home page.

We have been using this quite happily with Edulink for nearly two years - works well and very reliable. We are moving to Bromcom in Feb and will have to more away from it which is a shame. It was significantly cheaper than our previous provider, although we burn through the free allowance in less than a month. Once you have used your allowance up you just get invoiced for what you have used - much better then having to buy bundles in advance.

I also find this annoying. Its just a fact of life that some stuff is not exposed in the reporting engine and there is nothing to be done. Its very frustrating. My patience with this sort of thing ran out last year - we are migrating to Bromcom in Feb.

You do not need to add a timetable - cover uses the timetable that is in SIMS and any changes to it are automatically reflected in cover. If staff are not appearing to be allocated, in Manage Classroom Staff, make sure that The cover option is set to Provides Cover, and make sure that in the Organisations Panel the staff have a working pattern defined that covers the whole of the school day. If there are no working patterns defined you can create one, and can then use that for all your permanent staff members.

Reports>Student Analysis Reports>Student Totals for Year Groups will give you male and female in each year group and totals.

We went through a long evaluation process with Arbor and Bromcom in the summer term. In the end we went with Bromcom as staff feedback was it was easier to find things and fewer mouse clicks. Arbor has a nicer looking interface but not as good we thought for day to day use and Bromcom functionality we preferred. But functionality is similar in both, in that they will do what's needed, and differs only slightly in detail. Pricing is very similar. I thought Arbor were trading on the look and feel aspect rather than the nitty gritty detail of how it all worked - and in the engagement they mainly wanted to deal with SLT, not the end users of the system, whereas Bromcom were happy to deal with support staff who would be using the product day in day out. I thought that was telling as it shows a confidence in the product and a recognition of who really needs to be onboard with a change. But the key point is that both of these are light years ahead of SIMS and I would have been happy with Arbor over SIMS if that had been the only option.

The D code is designed for students who are dual registered and attending two sites at different times in the week. If they are marked as a D on the session register, then that statistically means "Attendance not required" so there will be no attendance mark - they should be marked as present at the other school they are attending. If they are your school for that session they are marked present as they normally would be.

There is no way. Have asked our support about this in the past but if there were ever any profiles created from them they cannot be deleted. They just have to sit there.

Have you looked at what you get with FFT Aspire ? We have a data link to that and our attendance is pulled into that to compare against the national figures. If your school has an FFT sub its worth setting up.

Short answer is, you can't. If you want to tidy them up, only thing to do is to rename one of the redundant ones to something like zzDo Not Use and then you can use Tools>Housekeeping>Merge Agencies to merge all the ones you want to get rid of into one. Its a somewhat convoluted process, so much so that I have never bothered, although we have many unused ones and a number of duplicates, as I'm sure most schools do.

Ah yes - should have paid more attention to the thread name.....Its been a long week.

If I had to do this I would set up alternative curriculum lessons - this is the standard way of dealing with withdrawal period. The pupil can be assigned to the alternative lesson but it overlays the normal timetable, so its possible to put them in their Normal" classes as well. Alternatively you can relax the curriculum rules and assign a student to two normal classes that take place at the same time. The student will appear on both class registers and the register can be completed by whoever actually has the student. On the students timetable in SIMS this will generate a little marker in the top corner of the period which shows the clash, but any printouts will only show one of the two classes.

Focus>School>Academic Structure>Curriculum Assignment by Scheme is the menu route. You will need to assign the students to a base band and then to blocks/classes as required. I that are not in a base band you cannot assign them to classes. The exact process is going to depend on how your timetable is structured, and I would suggest you refer to the Academic Management documentation.

It will not automatically attach them if you just generate and print them - you have to click the upload button as a separate action and is should then upload them to the doc server.

First thing would be, do the students show up in class lists, lesson monitor registers and academic management ticklists. If not - they have not been assigned to classes. If they do, its something more obscure.

Do not change them in SIMS and not Nova - you will get big problems when you next have to do a timetable transfer. They need to be changed in Nova and then the new timetable imported into SIMS. If its a completly new set of class names, thats not too bad - you can create additional classes with the correct name in the same block as the originals, then import into SIMS, use the carousel function in curiculum manager to move the students from the old classes to the new ones. You can then delete the old classes from the model, and re-import into SIMS and the "new" ones will be unaffected.