Ecclesbury

To be honest I don't know t answer about moving back a year after the spring census. One thing to be aware of though (if you're not already) is the 'Add-Back' rule. If you move a student back a year they will count in your performance figures for the next year even if they move schools. I assume this is to stop schools from cynically holding a student back in the hope (or knowledge) that they will be leaving. If you haven't seen it already it is worth having a good read of the checking instructions and troubleshooting documents here

I'm speculating a bit here, but performance figures do not stand alone as a school judgement. Whether schools agree with it or not the government feel that English Literature is a subject that all students should study. If schools enter students for English Lit without teaching the subject then yes they will boost their headline measure, but when OfSted come knocking they are presumably going to ask why there is no English Literature actually being taught. As an extreme hypothetical example, imagine that there was a loophole that meant all students could get an automatic A* in Maths without having to actually study the subject. Should a school go ahead and exploit the loophole? The eduspeak phrase that I'm fighting vainly to avoid is 'moral accountability' Then again I'm perhaps giving OfSted too much credit for their level of scrutiny!

Are we talking about Individual Report in assessment manager? If so this is a problem I have become very familiar with. It's like a slightly annoying member of my family now. If not, maybe the same logic applies as it concerns word tables. Capita have a long list of things you can try to fix it. The only one that has worked consistently for me is to turn off the 'allow row to break across the page' so that no row is breaking across the page when the tags are visible. Or if it doesn't matter to you just don't allow any row of the table to break across the page. If I'm completely missing the point I'll just go back to sleep.

Excellent stuff, thanks Phil. The MOS in question was using iOS so I will tell him the good news!

Apologies if this is an inappropriate place to post this but might be a good place for the first bit of feedback I've had or, better still, it might prompt a correction or advice on how to get round it. Seemingly if a teacher has a double lesson they have to enter both registers individually using the App whereas SIMS.net would have auto completed the second lesson. I am pretty sure that we have the doubles in question set up correctly in Nova, but I this is second hand feedback so I might have been misinformed. A minor issue in the grand scheme of things but one which does bug the staff in question.

In my (weak) defence the first thing I checked was the 'Progress8 Measure Guidance' link which was just a link to the most recent technical document (Aug) which still includes the 2014 lookup table so I assumed that it hadn't been released.

you mean that massive link that says 'Attainment 8 Estimates' that was right in front of my eyes? Talk about making them hard to find..tsk. Nothing to see here, everyone get back on with your day! :-)

Hi all, Has anyone seen any release from the DfE with a new predicted Attainment8 lookup table for the 2015 cohort? We can actually figure out the lookups using the tables checking exercise data for those KS2 decimal levels in our cohort. I am missing values for 1.5, 2, 2.9-3.4, 3.6-3.8 and 4.3-4.4. Does anyone else think that it would be worthwhile trying to pool out collective cohorts to try and fill in these blanks if this data isn't available elsewhere? There is one obvious pitfall in that amendments made during the checking exercise and exam remarks/appeals etc could change the calculations. However I suspect that these changes would be minor, and if we're going to use this to track current cohorts the numbers are best guesses anyway...this way they would be potentially better guesses than the 2014 data. Any thoughts? I'm happy to share my complete lookup table as it is if anyone would be interested?

I've not had a response from the DfE yet about this, but I did get to spend a few more minutes looking at it. It seems that the predicted outcome is affected by the actual outcome. So 2 student with the same APS and the same A2 grade will have the same predicted score (and hence the same VA.) However, two students with the same APS but different A2 results will have very different predictions. I'll be completely honest, in the last week of a very long term...and a teething baby at home...I don't have the energy to wrap my brain around this. I feel like the answer is within my grasp though. Can anyone suggest why a value added model would adjust predictions based on actual outcomes. A ghost of a memory at the back of my mind makes me think they did a similar, but smaller scale, thing with the Progress 8 shadow data.

Hi all, Has anyone had a chance yet to scrutinise the new Level 3 VA shadow data? I have had a quick glance and am now a bit perplexed! I've scanned the technical documents and as far as I understand it students with the same KS4 APS should have the same predicted score in a given subject. Equally, as APS rises, so should the predicted score. On the students level data that we have been sent it looks like the predicted scores bare little relation to the APS scores provided. Just taking Biology A2 as an example we've got students with higher APS but a predicted score that is 27 points lower. We've got students with identical APS scores but predicted scores that are 10 points apart. I've already emailed them to ask where I'm going wrong, but I'm sure there's someone out there that can shed some light on my error. Thanks.

Still no word on this, although I have contacted my LA to see if they know anything. I wonder whether they have removed it to stop schools from tinkering around with Progress 8. They might be changing their minds about how APS is calculated and/or whether the level 6 info is going to be included in the this calculation when looking at Progress 8 and KS2 - KS4 progress etc.

Forgive my ignorance (I'm thinking out loud here) but how do we submit details of graded music exams? Is it directly through the tables checking site?

I've also just spotted this and had a little stomach lurch as this was always my fallback! Is it just me or are the Level 6 test scores also no longer there? I have a few new Year 8s that I want to get Ks2 results for and I'm getting an imcomplete picture. Does anyone have any further info on this or is it worth contacting the DfE to see what's up?

I'm not completely following what you are after, but if you trying to filter the Lesson Marks sub report for individual lessons you can do this using the ID field (in CES Third Party Fields.) This ID includes the start time of the period so you can muck about using an "ID Contains..." filter combined with a date filter. So for example, if I want to run a report which shows me the room that a students is in during lesson 2 today I would have the lesson marks sub report filtered for todays date and the ID field filtered as contains 9:45am. The best bet is to add the ID field to a full lesson marks report and have a look at its format and figure out how you can uniquely filter each lesson. I hope that makes some sense.

You can discount 4Matrix straight away as it is not web-based (although it is very good)

Has anyone else mentioned that you get a similar problem on the Pastoral Structure window? No where near as big an issue, but if you scroll around on the pastoral structure and click to expand a reg group, about half the time it opens a completely different reg group (after a little screen flicker which I assume is a re-draw.) Still, AM jumps are much worse...so focus on that Capita!

I think you're right, it seems to me that there are just a bucket load of little bugs that will cause the macros to fail each with a slightly different workaround and it is hard to spot which bug is causing the current issue, so you just have to try everything and keep adding to your repertoire of fixes (and then forgetting them by the time it happens again) I would hope that Capita are developing a new base template which is compatible with new versions of Word. In fact, are Capita even supporting Office 2003? I thought they only supported the latest 2 releases?

OK, interesting development. I noticed that the point in the template that the tags started to fail happened to be where result tags in the template were breaking across a page. Just for a lark I tried amending my table so that rows wouldn't break across the page and presto chango it worked! One of the most frustrating things about this problem though is how do we know if that was actually the problem. Perhaps just making a change kick started the macros and it was coincidence. I feel like one of Skinner's Pigeons.

Very sorry to dredge this one up again but I just can't get my head round it. @PhilNeal says that this problem is caused by mixing word versions but I can't see how that bit of information helps me? Does anyone know where the standard XML template lives? I assume somewhere on the local C drive. As far as I can tell this standard template is in the 'Word 2003 XML Document' format. If I create a new individual report and try to save the template in any other format (such as Word XML document or Macro Enabled Document) SIMS crashes when trying to generate the report. To be honest I don't really understand what happens with these individual report templates since saving the templates seems to create a temporary local copy...so where is the original template? S Drive? @PhilNeal just to be clear are you saying that if we are using Office 2010 then there is no way round this problem since we will always be mixing versions by definition since the standard template is in 2003 format? Or to put it another way, how do I change the standard template to be in a format compatabile with Office 2010? Thanks. P.s. I've currently got a template with this issue and NONE of the usual techniques work including all those posted on this thread and HughR's latest offering. It is immensely frustrating.

But if I'm reading @GREED 's post correctly, there would be no need to mention anything to Capita since they would have done everything they are obliged to do. And we're back to the same question, if you've paid Capita to install SIMS (and hence are probably not an expert at installing SIMS) is it fair to assume that they would have set appropriate permissions on the folder they have created? You and GREED appear to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that it is the network administrators responsibility to set these permissions so there would be nothing to complain to Capita about. I think we might have wandered off the point a bit since I'm talking completely theoretically now. Our S drive it locked down pretty tight...and Phil has already said that Capita technicians shouldn't be leaving the S drive completely unlocked.

I see what you mean. I've been trying to refrain from making the glib observation that Phil's first post states that engineers are "not installing SIMS correctly" implying that there is a "correct" way to do it. It seems to me that most posters are just asking what this correct way is.

Is there a distinction between system folders and folders created by the software itself? I can understand your argument in relation to C drives of local client machines, but does the same hold true for the S:SIMS\ folders that are created during installation? Didn't there used to be a SIMSPERM.bat file that gave users crazy access to users? Or was that just C drive permissions?

Even if you pay Capita to install it for you? Do you think Capita are obliged to at least tell you that they have left things unrestricted if that is what they are doing when they install? Or is that something that you should check yourself regardless? I'm not talking about sensible practice, I mean from a contractual point of view. I'm not insinuating anything, I'm genuinely curious. This is actually a really interesting discussion.

Hi Damien, Can't help you with number 3. I'm afraid...but it might be something to do with your browser not being rich text enabled? I have the same problem using Google Chrome on SupportNet. As for numbers 1 and 2 as long as the academic year is set up you can go ahead and upload the timetable if you want. You can upload the band structure only which means you can start tagging students into classes but no scheduling will be uploaded. For point 1. once you have uploaded the model you can add next years classes markbooks to the template (you just roll the effective dates forward when adding the class from the template window.) HOWEVER classes are only available when they are populated with at least 1 student. That all comes with a big warning though. If you upload the timetable and start tagging students into classes you may run into big problem if you start making changes to your model (even class names) because when you re-import you risk losing all of the tagging that has been done. It's worth considering the risk/reward ratio baring this in mind because you really don't want your data team knocking you door down when your new upload has wiped hours of work they have done!

Ah I see now. I wouldn't want to go out on a limb and say it will definitely be fine, but I'm fairly sure that this will be OK. The blocks you are deleting will still exist in the database from the start of term until the date that you upload the changes so there shouldn't be a problem. Just make sure you don't accidentally upload from an earlier date or you will definitely lose those classes! As this could have a significant impact I would either talk to your LA or Capita support first and get the green light from them, or at the very least take a backup out of hours and run a test to see if it works and restore the backup if it all goes wrong. Standard stuff so I'm sure you would anyway! One caveat I would definitely mention is if you are using Partnership XChange for any reason, be very careful about this. Changing the model is a lot more dangerous if you are using PX.