Ecclesbury

I'm not sure I completely understand what you are asking but because SIMS timetable and academic management is all tied up with effective dates I don't think you will have any problems doing what you are trying to do. A class or even a block can exist in the database between 2 specific dates and students can be put into this class only between certain date. Equally, students can be members of class between specific dates so that you can record a history of class changes. If the model you need has been uploaded to be effective from January 1st then just open the curriculuum assingment by scheme (or student) and make sure you set the effective date range to be January 1st plus. Any student you then tag will remain in their current classes until January 1st and then automatically transfer into your new classes in the new year. Hopefully I haven't got the wrong end of the stick. I presume you have just uploaded a maintenance dataset for a later date? You're not talking about temporal locks are you?

@Scotbynature I think everyone's different, but I did personally find the initial course useful mainly because it gave me the kick start to learn it, and gave quite a good basis to start learning from. I didn't actually learn form a 'book' as such, I found the best way to learn was to think of real applications that I could use in my job and then basically just started playing around trying to figure out how to do it and googled the hell out of it! Sometimes it's just hard knowing where to start. The course gave me that place to start and gave a foundation I could build on.

This wasn't a qualification but by far the most useful technical training I have done so far was a one day course in Excel VBA. I spent a long time playing around teaching myself after the course, but if you could find decent courses/qualifications in VBA I think that would be useful. For one thing, if you use SIMS, a knowledge of VBA programming opens up the wonderful pandora's box of custom excel templates for reports.

If you're looking for something a bit tamer than an MSc I did the SSAT's National Data Manager Award here This is more about reflecting on what you already do in your job, but I found it a very useful exercise and it actually gave rise to some improvements in what I do. In terms of weight it's not really a very heavy hitting qualification, but it is at least concrete recognition of the work we do.

Anyone else signing up to be an early adopter for the teacher app? I'm quite excited about getting my hands on it. Will it be the thing that finally gets me back in the good books with the PE department or will it be another Discover-esque anti climax?

"i.e. the middle might move, and the gaps between students might be different, but the order will always be the same!" Just engaged my brain and realised that's not necessarily true but I still think the approach is valid.

Funnily enough I've just finished some work to produce this for our school. I've been calling it the "War Room" board but only because I'd heard the phrase used a lot of the past few years. WE've actually introduced Progress 8 onto ours. It is useful in this case not because it is an accurate prediction of what the students actual P8 score will be, but because using the current methodology is good for looking at the relative position of each child in the year group (i.e. the middle might move, and the gaps between students might be different, but the order will always be the same) So I have produced small photos sheets (6 per A4 Page) which have the students photo, attendance, a coloured box indiciating if they are on the SEN CoP, whether they are HAP, MAP or LAP and their Progress 8 score. There is also a table with all of their current predicted grades. Pupil Premium students are printed on blue paper, everyone else on white (PP is a big focus for us this year) On the War Room wall the "x axis" is Progress 8, so the lowest P8 scores on the left, the highest on the right. The "y axis" is split into bands for the various 5 Acem groups others have described. So in essence the closer to the bottom left of the board the more cause for concern.

Apologies for my naivety but what do you mean by mixing old and new versions of word? Do you mean don't use old file formats with new versions of word? Or to be more specific don't use .doc templates if you have Word 2007 or higher installed on your machine? So, reading between the lines is the suggested approach to save all individual report templates in .docx format if you use Word 2007 or higher? Sorry for going on, I would love to resolve this issue for good!

Isn't the standard individual report template saved in comparability mode, so essentially a pre 2003 binary file? Although we use Word 2010 I have always just cloned individual reports and so every report template is the same version that is has always been in (.doc). Does this mean that I can actually save an individual report template in .docx format? Phil when we say we shouldn't mix versions...what is the recommended approach then? Should all individual report templates be .doc or .docx? If using .doc does it even matter which version of Word is actually installed? Although the problems we had became worse when we upgraded to Word 2010 we didn't change our template files to .docx.

In case anyone cares the Main Class Teacher is assigned in Nova. Initially it is the first teacher that is added to class (either through the classes window or the block window) regardless of how many lessons they teach for that class. You can change it in the classes window. Double click the class in question and you can change the Main Teacher drop down. That won't solve your problem (I also use a separate aspect to get round this) but may be useful in other circumstances.

If it helps this issue hit us the hardest when we moved to Office 2010 (from 2003) What LosOjos says above works for us, but it is very frustrating and can be hit and miss at times (especially with big templates.) I basically just keep trying different combinations of saves/verify template open/re-open until something sticks! LosOjos' specific combo above is definitely the one I have the most success with but it isn't fool proof. Be patient!

You took the words right out of my mouth. I read back through the posts and realised that the answer you were really looking for was "nobody knows!" Out of interest, who are you reporting this Progress 8 figure to and for what purpose? It's an intriguing problem...what to do with the information we currently have.

Is this for the purpose of calculating predicted Attainment 8 scores by any chance? Until now I would never have had a need to round a decimalised level so the issue has never come up. The only time I have seen decimalised levels rounded to 1dp are on the attainment8 prediction look up tables. In this case I don't think it is clear on exactly how the DfE intend to round the decimalised level, but I would see no problem with rounding properly. If a students has a decimalised level of 3.958 I see see no reason why you wouldn't use the 4.0 level prediction rather than the 3.9. At this stage of the game I don't think it really matters since no judgments are being made on these measures and they are no indication of future performance. As long as you are internally consistent it won't make a difference, it might just skew the middle. Unless of course you are using predicted attainment 8 scores to generate individual targets which I think is a pretty bad idea. To try to be clear I am not saying that the decimalised level for 23.75 points is 4.0. I'm saying it is 3.958. The rounding is just necessary for the particular job in hand.

Out of interest how many people out there use subject difference residuals? It's not something we've ever done here but I'd be interested to hear how other schools use this data. With the changes to performance management for teachers I'm wondering whether these national residuals might be quite useful.

Apologies, lack of attention to detail on my part...not a good sign! So the decimalised level for 26.26 would be 4.3766666666... rounded to 4.4 to 1 decimal place.

I might be wrong here, but I think part of the reason for having points values for levels is that it makes splitting the levels into 3 easier and avoid all those smelly recurring decimals. When working with whole levels, sub levels decimalised levels, points etc etc I think it's worth going right back to beginning to see the logic of calculating each measure. Let's give it a try! - A student sits their KS2 maths tests and gets a raw mark out of 100. - The DfE release the whole level boundaries for the KS2 maths test. - Whole levels can easily be calculated by converting this mark into a level using these boundaries - Using the level boundaries we know exactly how many marks separate each level so we can split the level equally into that many chunks. Say there are 20 marks between a 4 and a 5 then each mark is worth 0.05 of that level. This is how we calculate the decimalised (or fine) level for each mark. - Since splitting a level into 3 leaves us with messy remainders, we multiply each decimalised level by 6 to give us the decimalised points value for each mark. - Since we've multiplied the levels by 6 we know that a level 4 is now 24 points, a level 5 is 30 points etc. So each sub level is separated by 2 (4C = 24+, 4B=26+, 4A=28+ etc) - We can now take the decimised points score and convert it to a sub level using the lookup table described above. Have I made any blunders with this? I had to try and figure this out when our school opted out of using FFT and my decimal levels safety blanket was rudely snatched away from me!

If I understand the question correctly, it is as simple as dividing the points score by 6 (and rounding to 1 decimal place if you wish) 26.6 would be level 4, sub level 4B, decimal level 4.4333333 (rounded to 4.4)

RE SOLUS GUI speed, the biggest issue I have is when re-deploying an update if I want to 'check all' or 'un-check all' clients it takes forever (rough guess about 10 seconds.) Anyone else have this? Is this something to do with our environment or a SOLUS issue?

p.s. I do realise that it would probably be near impossible to do what I'm suggesting with regards to edit marks since I'm guessing the group membership refreshes each time a new register week is opened.

Thanks tombry, that's as I expected to be honest. An extra thought on this, which strikes me as odd, is that if you set up a conduct summary home page panel for a discover group it calculates the number of behaviours/achievements only for the period that they were a member of that group. I can't quite work out the rationale for this...what group would you be setting up where this technique would make sense? Surely you would want to see the entire conduct summary for the current member of that group? Equally, when you are looking at attendance data through edit marks for a discover group you can only see the registers for the time when they were part of the group? So if I want to look at the <80% attendance dynamic group and track back through their registers to see any issues, I can't do it! Again, to me it seems that a situation where this would be useful is the exception rather than the rule? Enough venting I think. Dynamic groups are such a brilliant idea, and work really well for some things , that it is frustrating that I'm already coming up against road blocks with using them. I really want to start rolling stuff out to staff that use these dynamic groups but so far everything I've tried is not working. I'm trying my best to avoid standard SIMS reports.

Hi all, I've tried setting up a couple of dynamic groups in Discover but the start date of any student in this group can not be amended to be before the group was created. Is it possible to create dynamic groups retrospectively? Or alternitvely is it possible to amend students membership does of the group so that the start date is before the group was created? This is possible with supervisors but not students in the group (I can see why this is the case though!) Thanks.

On the "SIMS shortcuts" panel of your home page (left hand side...click the green arrows in the top left if it's not there!) you can add a favourites panel by click the arrow to the right of applications. Click the arrow to the right of the new panel and click 'Add Internal Shortcut' and follow the menu directions to the report you mention above. This will add it as a favourite link. Fire drill registers are an absolute can of worms! If you are planning to use this report I would have a plan in place for the inevitable printer malfunctions!

I access SIMS on another site in a similar way here. You can change connect.ini settings so that you can select from multiple databases when logging in. However, the biggest issue was with networked drives...since we map our S drive to the home schools SIMS server I couldn't use any features that needed to access the guest school server and/or DMS (such as reports, linked documents, exams, nova etc) In the end by far the easiest method was to set up a remote connection. The school I connect to actually has a dedicated server for this type of thing, but some staff also remote into desktop machines over there to achieve the same thing.

Thanks VIkpaw, I've actually had confirmation Capita that InTouch does support rich text, but they have uncovered my ignorance about the subject by asking me exactly what I mean by HTML emails (their actual question was 'do I mean the body of the email format, or the technical format of how the emails work') As ever this stems from a vague request from SLT. I'm guessing they want to send the school bulletins as self contained emails rather than as PDF attachments (Which is what they do currently) Any thoughts on that? Would InTouch or others support such a thing? Are there issues with accounting for different email providers?

Hello all, Apologies if this is a stupid question or if it has been answered before but hope it's a quick and easy answer. Can Intouch send HTML based emails? Are there any other products that will link to SIMS and send HTML based emails? Schoolcomms? Much obliged.