Banjo

Well as grades 5-9 are now classed as 'Good GCSE's' and the points values for Progress 8 are now biased towards these grades i.e. 0.5 pts difference between the bottom grades and 1.5pts difference at the top, then as a target maybe treat 5 as an old C. I believe statistically a grade C should be a 4/5, but as 4 is now classed as ‘bad’ GCSE, grade 5 is what those students should be aiming for and then fill out up and down from there.

Assessment Manager is quite powerful once you get up to speeds with it. You'll soon be adding a missing result columns to your templates and progress calculations for the teachers.

It can be buggy if you are defining it at the template level. Try removing it, saving, deleting all marksheets, re adding it in, and then re-creating the marksheets.

You need to cover three things with your model. Subject, Year and Time (Aut, Spr, Sum etc), You will either end up with lots of Aspects (A) and few result sets (B), or just a few Aspects (A) and lots of result sets (B), with © being the number of results you need to collect for a student. AxB=C What I wouldn't do and would strongly recommend against, is trying to take a short cut and use the 'result date' as a proxy for 'Time' – I’ve known schools do this and reporting the results turns into a nightmare!

Ideology meets practicality I'm afraid. With key staff shared across both sites you aren’t going to want two run two different systems. If the satellite site keeps SIMS they can still use the existing 2015/16 TT for next year, and the timetabler can manage and administrate both sites. In terms of costs – if the schools are happy with SIMS, then the total cost of change to a new system, even if it’s slightly cheaper per year to licence, may take 10+ years to recoup. Money doesn’t tend to be the predominant factor in why schools would want to change their MIS, but can act as barrier in schools adopting a new technology.

I think you need to go on AM training before diving in at the deep end. How do you plan to distinguish between each subject with just 7 aspects and results sets that are year group/time based? Following advice given to me in my other thread, I have: made 7 Aspects, one for each of the Assessment Objectives AO_0 to AO-6. I have allowed scores of 0-9 (where 0 will represent nothing has been entered by the staff) made 35 result sets, one for each yeargroup/assessment point; Year_07_AP_00, Year_07_AP_01, Year_07_AP_02 ... Year_11_AP_06

Schoolcomms is a great addon for SIMS and the people who work for them are 'human' and not robots who blindly follow a script. +1 for Schoolscomms PS If only you could take class registers in the App

You might get away with restoring your exisitng SIMS DB onto the new server, applying the patch to change the school name DfE number, then making all the students not on that site leavers and remove the staff records that are not shared across the new 'federation? Otherwise it's a massive job to start from scratch with a blank SIMS database if this has to ready for Sept?

Are you buying from the LA or Capita at present as otherwise you would have two invoices, one for annual maintenance (Capita) and the other from your SIMS support team?

If you go down the comment bank route then you are using Profiles. That can be a steep learning curve, and your reports will need time for creation and plenty of testing. You will most likely run into permission & TT issues and an SLT that changes their mind as to the process of how the reports are checked online :-. When Profiles has been setup correctly it's pretty good, powerful and easy for the teacher(s). Comments (in your bank) can be auto triggered based upon a grade value in an aspect, "Has worked hard..." or "Needs to work harder..." etc, but their are plently of pitfalls you can fall into in your first year. You can use Assessment Manager to collect comments and merge these with other aspects to create a report. This will be very basic and not so easy for the teachers entering the comments into the aspect cells. I think it might be a bit late in the year for Profiles to be setup, but something worth considering for next year.

I would amend the first paragraph of your privacy notice to say that you may also share pupil information with third parties for the purposes of:- • Support your learning; • Monitor and report on your progress; • Provide appropriate pastoral care, and • Assess how well we are doing. I would not name suppliers and I would also amend “However, parent(s) can ask that no information beyond names, addresses and your date of birth be passed to the support service” to include third parties.

As long as your applications and DB versions match just point the connect ini at which ever server you want. Otherwise you will need 2 Sims apps folders each with its own connect ini to their matching db versions. [sIMSConnection] ServerName=server\SIMS2012 DatabaseName=sims_primary DatabaseMode=OnLine [simsdatabases] FriendlyName0=Primary Server0=server\SIMS2012 databasename0=sims_primary Databasemode0=OnLine FriendlyName1=Secondary Server1=server\SIMS2012 DatabaseName1=sims_secondary DatabaseMode1=OnLine FriendlyName2=test Server2=server\SIMS2012 DatabaseName2=sims DatabaseMode2=OnLine [sIMSOffline] PreviousRedirect= PreviousServerName=server\SIMS2012 PreviousDatabaseName=sims_primary PreviousDatabaseMode=OnLine

Things may have changed, but eportal used to hammer a single core. Overall it looks like the multi core processor is not doing much, but one of the cores may be at or close to 100%. When we used to install facility the app and SQL server used to be memory heavy (16GB+) and the eportal servers - fast processors speeds >(3Ghz). Some schools always experienced slow downs as the dataset grew throughout the year.

What text do you include in your privacy notice? Suggested text below:- Privacy Notice - Data Protection Act 1998 We (Name of school / academy / establishment) are a data controller for the purposes of the Data Protection Act. We collect personal information from you and may receive information about you from your previous school and the Learning Records Service. We hold this personal data to: • Support your learning; • Monitor and report on your progress; • Provide appropriate pastoral care, and • Assess how well we are doing. Information about you that we hold includes your contact details, national curriculum assessment results, attendance information and personal characteristics such as your ethnic group, any special educational needs you may have and relevant medical information. If you are enrolling for post 14 qualifications the Learning Records Service will give us your unique learner number (ULN) and may also give us details about your learning or qualifications. In addition for Secondary and Middle deemed Secondary Schools Once you are aged 13 or over, we are required by law to pass on certain information to providers of youth support services in your area. This is the local authority support service for young people aged 13 to 19 in England. We must provide the names and addresses of you and your parent(s), and any further information relevant to the support services’ role. We may also share data with post 16 providers to secure appropriate support on entry to post 16 provision. However, parent(s) can ask that no information beyond names, addresses and your date of birth be passed to the support service. This right transfers to you on your 16th birthday. Please tell (Insert name of School Administrator) if you wish to opt out of this arrangement. For more information about young people’s services, please go to the National Careers Service page at https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/aboutus/Pages/default.aspx We will not give information about you to anyone without your consent unless the law and our policies allow us to.

When you buy a licence from Capita you pay a big bill in year 1 (let’s say £10k) and also Annual Maintenance £4k. (All prices are made up ) Year 2 and beyond, you will just pay the £5k (plus any price rises) Something to think about….. If a school moves away from SIMS to another MIS, they stop paying the AM to Capita. The school after just 12 months changes their mind and decides to move back to SIMS. The school owns the original licence which cost £10k, but now owes £4k of backdated AM for the year they didn’t use SIMS. This needs to be paid to bring the original licence up to date. Then the school then has to pay this year’s AM of another £4k which brings the total to £8k. If the schools hadn’t used SIMS for a number a years, then it would make financial sense to just re licence the whole lot. SIMS LA’s Teams own the schools licences. When a maintained school becomes an academy the school goes to Capita for its licence and AM and the LA licence effectively becomes free, then ‘dies’ overtime, as the annual maintenance doesn’t get paid on it and backdated AM is due. However, if a maintained school that doesn’t use SIMS wants to move to SIMS, they could potentially use one of these free licences (within their LA). If they get their timing right, with other schools in their LA converting to academies, they might not have to pay any backdated AM on the licence, just the current years AM charge. If they don’t they could end up having to pay 1 or 2 years backdated AM to bring the licence up to date.

You cant buy AM from another LA :-(

@mjk I'm guessing that the LA 'owns' your SIMS licence, and you just buy Annual Maintenance and support from them. If you were to move away from your LA for support, then you may have to re-licence the whole of SIMS (like academies do) and pay annual maintenance directly to Capita. You would then be free to choose your own MIS support provider that may or may not be cheaper than you’re current LA. To compare these prices you need to find out what a (secondary) academy pays the LA for MIS support in your authority and then see if other LA's or providers can beat this on price and quality. However, by moving away from your LA you will certainly end up with a big bill in year 1 from licence costs, so even if you buy support cheaper elsewhere, you may not see any actual for 5 or more years. >The official line 'was' that AM prices via an LA are lower than maintained schools going directly to Capita - but I've seen AM invoices to schools from Capita and they look 'very' similar :-)

So when can we expect MyAccount to be rebranded as Support Net

You have to right click and remove the result history from the marksheet (top option) one by one. OR you could remove the lot in one go from tools | performance |assessment | system utilities |results (be very careful with this)

Might be worth checking the server log files to see if SQL has crashed and recovered.

Just be aware there are hidden permissions with Sims 'groups' that are linked to these default categories that cannot be replicated in a 'user' own group.

I would highly recommend Perspective | Angel Solutions Ltd They are a good company who listens and responds to their customers.

From memory (haven't used it for 3 years) Caspa and B2 folders can be copied and pasted to the new server and shortcuts redirected.

You can grant them unattended access if they use Logmein, and give them a LAsuppoort account (local admin rights) on the SIMS server

Backs up SQL and the document server. Attix5 Pro | capita-sims.co.uk | capita-sims.co.uk The only Capita accredited SIMS backup product