Banjo

Ask your LA, they can export the file from Keypass with student name, UPN etc.

Sims is a patch or fileset - Facility is has to be reinstalled. Facility census releases have always come out late, usually just after you have updated to the latest census release, another one pops up to fix another bug.

Primary ~300 pupils, it runs pretty quick with teachers doing attendance AM/PM from their laptops as well as a the front office having access. This was not OUR setup, but they buy ICT support from a non-educational provider and that's how they have installed it on their network.

We have a school that runs everything from a 'shared drive' with no local install !

Seriously - you don't!

It takes us a week to convert a primary school to SIMS from another supplier using CTF's. Staff records have to be entered manually as they cannot be imported. CTF's can be read in, but if your an academy without the LA support then you have the job of typing in 1000+ student records, with the hassle of start dates/end dates for post 16 students. Depending on when it happened you would have to go and put in attendance for last year for the census. If your school was prosecuting a parent for their child's non attendance, then that case would collapse and you would be wide open to appeal on any successful prosecutions. Exams would be fun with UCI and candidate numbers, and you would have to cross your fingers that Nova was on a standalone laptop and the TT wasn't created on a shared drive on the MIS server. Lot's of schools do backup's but how many actually test them on a regular basis in a test environment. I remember one secondary school had a 'meltdown' of their MIS server and tried to restore the SQL database from backup to discover that the plugin was not configured correctly and they had nothing. Luckily the DM had taken a backup (Facility) on her local machine a couple of weeks earlier that saved the day and probably a couple of people's jobs.

Not all academies share. We have one academy who we wouldn't be able to supply data to in a CTF format. We could send them their latest census file, but that won't go into Sims or any MIS I know of without a lot of tweaking to the xml structure. This has happened in our LA, and the secondary academy in question had to speak to the DfE about getting an extension to their Jan census as they recreated their DB. We also have primary schools who buy 3rd party internet/backup and we know aren't being backed up, but they are being told by their suppliers that the backups are being taken care of and are in 'the cloud'.

Press 1 for Sales - thats always the first phone that gets answered. If you are a parent or student and you need help using GO 4 Schools, please contact your child's school. If you are considering using GO 4 Schools in your school and would like some more information about GO 4 Schools please use the form below or call us on 01223 967 556.

RM Education is delighted to announce that its Assessment and Data division yesterday signed a five year agreement with the Department for Education to deliver the School Performance Data Programme (SPDP), which will collect and publish data on school and pupil performance. The agreement is worth a total of £15.6m across two contracts, awarded following a competitive tender. The SPDP will bring together data that is currently held in different places into a single data warehouse and create a one-stop-shop, with appropriate levels of access, for all data enquiries and information that the Department for Education publishes on school performance. Under the agreement, RM will be responsible for the secure collection and processing of data from awarding organisations and other stakeholders in a bespoke data warehouse; and for the analytical, portal and publishing services which will make the data available to the general public. RM has many years of experience processing and analysing high stakes, high volume education data, including delivering the NPD-AAT (National Pupil Database Achievement and Attainment Tables) for the Department for Education. We are delighted to have been entrusted with this new Programme which, by combining ease of access with a broad range of up-to-date statistics, will, we believe, offer unprecedented insights into education in England. - See more at: RM Education appointed to deliver Department for Education

"I can now inform you that the Department for Education (DfE) and RM Education Limited (RM) have decided to stop work on the School Performance Data Programme (SPDP) with immediate effect. It had become apparent that the programme was going to experience some delays to delivery and with a significant IT transformation programme taking place within the Department, and other changes across Government, including a proposed Crown Hosting Service, it is clear that it is not the right time to progress with this work. The Department remains committed to achieving the vision set out by the Data Transformation Programme. Iain Bell has joined the Department as Director of Data and Education Standards and will be taking over as SRO on Data Transformation and leading work over the coming months to assess the best approach for achieving the vision. Iain has offered to come and talk to your group to discuss his early thinking on the next steps and whether this meets your needs from Data Transformation; if you would like to take him up on this offer, please let me know. As Data Exchange was reliant on some deliverables from SPDP, we are working through the implications for Data Exchange. This will be considered as part of the wider Data Transformation work Iain is leading on. In the meantime, the DfE and RM have committed to working together to continue to deliver the school performance tables and associated services in partnership."

Hi and Welcome, Can I ask where the company is based? Cheers

They can also be informed via the Gateway app (free DL and message) if they have it installed

If everything else works fine in sims, then it's not the connect.ini (you can have more than one DB connection in single connect.ini) Looking at my sims.ini there is nothing specific to the exams module. Do you also share the same folder structure for basedata and results files, etc across the site? [setup] SIMSDirectory=d:\shared\sims SIMSSetupsDirectory=d:\shared\sims\Setups SIMSDotNetDirectory=C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net SIMSSQLAppsDirectory=D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.SIMS2012\MSSQL\Binn Folder=SIMS Applications NovaSatellite=C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SATS [LastChecked] SIMSInfrastructureSetup=1.617.1.0 [installationLogs] SIMSApplicationSetup.exe=C:\Users\P~1\AppData\Local\Temp\SIMSApplicationSetup.log SIMSSQLApplicationSetup.exe=C:\Users\P~1\AppData\Local\Temp\SIMSSQLApplicationSetup.log [NOVA-MC] CurrAcadYear=2014 PulsarLocation=C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net

You could Install sims twice on her PC, and have two mapped drives. The Sims shortcut(s) would then just point to the seperate folders on the C Drive. I've also seen Sims (pulsar) run from a shared folder rather than installed locally within a school.

This only has to be done once (per year), and it can be done by any member of staff, on any machine/server, with access to the C: drive. Logon your self to the PC and then let them log into SIMS and import the Wizards, KS1, KS2, EYFSP and Phonics (new version due end of the month)

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It was playing up at the end of last week. Lets hope they have a backup from the begining of the week.

Create a formual(s) that adds 10 points to every grade (the two apsects) and then run the max function from that.

SQL Express isn't recommended for a secondary phases regardless of the edition. You might have a shock when you come to licence the full version

"all available serial numbers have been used" From memory your Facility license key allows a certain number of concurrent users - its sounds as if have more users than the license code will allow.

There was a lot of negative feedback about it being bundled with the SLG at the update conferences - let hope people are true to their word and take a second their product portfolio and who they bundle their products. SLG has improved, but the marketplace is moving away from desktops to mobile devices with the majority of the market share still up for grabs.

Interesting thread with some illuminating comments. What is apparent is that nobody (with maybe one exception) really 'gets it' when it comes to selling MIS to LA's. I remember being invited to an RM conference in Abingdon just after the Becta report was published and they definitely didn't get it. Hiring a QC for the day to give delegates a 'telling off' for not tendering wasn't going to make them many friends - nice lunch though.

This can do strange things to your templates and results. Aspects can get swapped over inside of templates as well as results. This was one of the issues that LA's faced when Capita ended support for their old primary/secondary training DB's.

FFT A methodoloigy and how the DfE will calculate the subject level estimates should be fairly similar. The errors will creep in when you look at your own schools predictions of what students will achieve.

There is no official progress between KS2-KS3. KS3 is being phased out - no KS3 levels are being collected this year. My advice would be to attend a HOF/HOD meeting and show them how to access the tracking grids and apply filters for themselves. They can then cascade this down into their depts.