Ecclesbury

Unless the DfE change their minds they are currently proposing that the Progress 8 will be the key measure. The current proposal is that the floor benchmark will be -0.5 (half a grade below expected no average). Baring in mind that with Progress & Attainment 8 measures the 3 ebacc subjects could be all science, or 3 languages for example your curriculum offer looks like it will be perfectly fine for these measures. However, I suspect this is pretty standard across many schools. Since the eBacc % will not be benchmarked and only really published out of interest I think (hope!) that most schools will not impose it on their curriculum. If it helps our options model is currently pretty much identical to yours with the only exception that our students have to take 1 language. The only measure your offer will not guarantee is the eBacc since students have the option of not doing a language and/or History & Geography.

Big thanks for that link gaz! Most of it was expected based on the last document, but that English Lang/Lit stuff was a real curve ball! Out of interest, is there a definitive way to pick up on the publication of these documents? I'm always worried that I've missed something. Do the DfE have a subscription list, or some kind of news feed?

To be honest, I usually base my decision on courses on how good the food was. My memory of Optimus was that they did very good food. I went on an Osiris course early this month (attendance for OfSted) which put an exceptional spread on. Roast minted lamb with all the trimmings and eton mess for dessert. Smashing. If I was in change I'd probably judge schools in the same way.

It's worth noting that the way that the Progress 8 is to be calculated hasn't actually been decided yet (they are considering including a subject level model which would take into account "easier" subjects) so currently we have no way to calculate/estimate this. Equally, just like the current Best8 model, you can never pre-calculate it since it uses the current national cohort data, it can only ever be estimated using the previous year's model. Obviously with Progress 8 this is even worse since we won't have any historic data to use in an estimate until 2017. However, the DfE are proposing to do to 2 things: provide schools with an unpublished calculation of their Progress 8 based on the 2014 data, and also allow schools to opt-in to starting the process a year early. My hope is that one of these 2 things will result in getting hold of some raw data to allow us to model the calculation in 2016 when it really matters. Final thing, another proposal is to actually use historic national data as the framework for the model. So, for example, the Progress 8 estimate would be calculated using the 2013 national data for the 2016 cohort data. I think this is unlikely to happen, but they are also proposing adopting this method in 2019 (so using the first cohort from 2016) It's all fun and games really.

@DataMan - That is indeed how the Progress & and Attainment 8 will be generated. Attainment 8 will be a simple average points score of those 8 subjects (or 10 really, including double weighted English & Maths) This will be expressed as a grade, e.g. B-, C+ etc. Progress 8 will be a value added measure, so each student will have an estimated Attainment 8 score calculated based on their KS2 attainment and the performance of similar students nationally. The Progress 8 measure will then be the difference between their Actual attainment 8 and this prediction. It will be expressed as an average number of grades above or below (e.g. -0.5 will be half a grade below prediction on average, which incidentally is what they are proposing as the floor standard.) That is as concrete as I know @mark80 - they have not finalised the actual method of calculating the estimated attainment 8, but have said that they will have a decision by Spring 2014 A couple of things to note: English Langauge will only be double weighted if the student also sits English Literature, even if they got a U on English Lit! English Literature can also be counted as one of the additional 3 subjects...but NOT as an ebacc subject The 3 ebacc subjects could be triple science.

Does anyone else use the 'Catagories' sections of assessment manager to tag all of their templates/grade sets/aspects? It can seem daunting at first to set them all up (although the Tools>Performance section helps hugely) but every since I spent the time tidying them all up I have found them incredibly useful. ...perhaps I should write a blog post about it!

Is anyone going on the Optimus conference in January? http://www.optimus-education.com/sites/optimus-education.com/files/brochures/edu_2014_solusb.pdf I've been on an optimus conference once before and found it very useful, but that was quite a few years ago. I'm most interested in the sessions about the government changes and getting a handle on all that. They also appear to have data workshops which are always useful. I haven't decided whether it is worth going yet, so would be interested to hear if anyone else is going.

I was just reading the blog of @NormalDistribution and wondered whether there are any other data manager types out there with a blog? Post your links here! I'm also considering starting a blog of my own, but am unsure that kind of thing that might be worth posting about. I always have variuos data managery things spinning around in my head and no one to waffle at, so maybe I should just use it as a place to off load my more persistant ramblings (think Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions) What kind of blog posts would data managers here be interested in here? Sharing techniques like @NormalDistrubtion's excellent excel tools? Sharing thoughts about government changes? Sharing MIS tips and tricks? General thoughts on the state of the world? First world problems? Anyone else thinking of starting a blog? As I'm probably making clear, I've never blogged before so it's all new to me!

I've thought about this a bit, and I think the key to having a place on SLT is to have an area of responsibility where you are making key strategic decisions. For a "data manager" the most obvious candidates for this would be decisions relating to curriculum/examinations, target setting and timetabling. These are all areas that are pretty fundamental to the school so this could easily sit on SLT if you had that level of responsibility. I'm sure a lot of us here advise SLT already on target setting methodology, but the SLT member takes the credit. I always see the data SLT role as taking over full responsibility for this. Timetabling is an obvious one since is already often deputy heads who have responsibility for this, but more and more I hear of data managers taking over timetabling. Curriculum is the tough one. A non-teacher could probably never really fully take over responsibility for curriculum decisions but there is certainly scope for combining with deputy heads to bring timetablnig/assessment/exams insight into the curriculum debate. As a slightly cynical example, detailed knowledge of performance table structures can have a significant impact on KS4 and KS5 curriculum. The final asset of this job that could push the case for SLT inclusion is as a trainer. That is training heads of department (and other members of SLT!) on effective data analysis. When OfSted come in they never ask the data manager questions, they ask those with the responsibility and will never accept "I just ask the data manager for that" as an answer...so there is often a real need for this type of coaching (again, I'm sure lots of us on here do this kind of thing already.) So in short, the job I really want to invent is something like Curriculum & Achievement Manager which would be a non-teaching SLT role. One can but dream.

p.s. this might seem convoluted, but the reason for converting to points is so that you don't have recurring decimal values as your lookup boundaries.

This can get confusing, but I find the best way to convert decimal levels to sub levels is to convert the levels to points. So simply multiply your decimal level by 6 to get a decimalised points score and then use the following look up to convert to a sub level: 6C - 36 5A - 34 5B - 32 5C - 30 4A - 28 4B - 26 4C - 24 3A - 22 3B - 20 3C - 18

We upgraded our SIMS server over the summer. Not 100% sure of the spec, but it's server 2008, 64bit,12GB of RAM. Not sure about processors. I've just done your speed test and it took about 11 seconds. We have 190 students in Year 11.

This is an absolute mine field isn't it? It's probably worth mentioning at this point that I heard recently that the DfE will no longer be producing the transition matrices for KS4 and KS5. So my nifty calculations based on national conversion rates are now useless. Excellent. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the future lies in bringing everything "in house" as it were. The pattern seems to be an ever dwindling amount of national data for comparison. So for me, the most robust...but also most risky...method is to put faith in the schools own departments to accurately monitor progress. This would start with effective baseline testing in ALL subjects at the start of Year 7, and the targets generated from a combination of these baseline tests and historic attainment data. All progress through KS3 would then be internal. Any comparison to national data (in order to show that students are going to end up with "outstanding outcomes") would be extrapolated from historic KS4 data (the only data that seems unlikely to disappear from the national picture.) So, for example, as a school last year's GCSE cohort achieved 85% 5A*-C (inc E&M.) We know this was outstanding. If we track back this year group's attainment through the previous years we can "assume" that this attainment will eventually lead to outstanding KS4 attainment. Doing the same thing for the past 3 years will start to produce a picture of what outstanding attainment/progress will look like in future years (taking into account fluctuating prior attainment and factoring in appropriate challenge.) This could generate group level targets and classroom teachers would be left to use their professional judgement to issue individual targets. I genuinely believe this is the best way to go about things, but it is very risky and has to put a lot of faith in the schools teaching staff. The senior leadership would also have to be VERY confident in the plan to convince OfSted. On the other hand, I'm warming to the idea of biscuits in stead of levels. Or maybe I'm just warming to the idea of biscuits.

The biggest stumbling block when it comes to giving supply teachers SIMS access is the practical one, not the technical one. From a tehcnical point of view it would be great to have each supply teacher have their own SIMS logins and you would get all the great benefits that Phil describes. From a practical standpoint this means every morning, when the cover manager frantically phones round the agencies and gets sent a new supply teacher at the last minute, they would have set them up correctly on SIMS, phone the IT team and/or SIMS manager and ask them to drop everything and issue login details for this new supply teacher all while juggling the usual morning cover madness. Even if all of this works, they then have to spend the first 10 minutes of a lesson, when they should be covering something else, trying to explain to the new supply teacher how to turn the computer on. Issuing generic logins is also easy enough to set up despite it's various security risks! But even then you have the added complication of having to not only explain to the new teachers how to turn the computer on, but also the more complicated way of accessing the registers that they need. In practice 50% of these would probably just do a paper register anyway. Final practical issue - if you set up a precedent where supply teachers will have IT access, more and more teachers will set up Cover lessons which require IT access. When the inevitable happens and a supply teacher has no IT access the lesson becomes impossible and student's learning is affected. All this and more has led me to the opinion that the best way to do things is to assume that all supply teachers don't have any IT access. If you have a situation where a longer term, or regular supply, can have extra access then great, but don't make it the rule.

Yes, yes I am. sa is a SQL server login, not a SIMS.net user. I figuered out the sa password for the monitor server so didn't have to reset it and changed the credentials on SOLUS3, re-deployed the whole update and bob's your uncle...upgraded Monitor. Big thanks for your help Rawns and others. Still don't know why the agents are stopping.

Thanks again Rawns, you really are saving my life! Now this sounds like a really stupid question, but how would I go about resetting the SA password? I'm looking at our standard SIMS database in system manager and I can't see a username sa anywhere, even though that is the username listed in SOLUS 3 for this user. I can't see it in System Manager 6 either? Am I being dense?

Hi Rawns, On our main SIMS server we have version numbers for everything except the SIMS DMS and SIMS File Server. We have 2 databases on this server and both are on version 3.61.901 However, on the PX monitor server the SIMS database version is currently blank. I have no file server Target on this server...should I? I'm wondering whether a complete un-intall and re-insall of the agent and target types on the PX server, and then attempt another full deployment of the summer release might be on the cards?

Apologies, this really does seem never ending at the moment! I tried deploying the summer 2 release directly from 'Manage Updates' this morning, but got the error message "Error SIMS 2013 Summer 2 (7.153.10) cannot be deployed as the version of SIMS database is less than the required version of 3.61.901.0. However, SOLUS still happily does some upgrading but I get another error message in the UI that says "Unable to create deployment plan because not all targets are at the required version." Running this upgraded the Monitor server workstation, but not the database. Any ideas?

Spot on, thanks Rawns! I suspected that might be the case. So presumably I can happily deploy the full upgrade without it impacting on users?

Thanks for you help everyone. I got to the bottom of the non-domain server issue. I was just not careful enough when manually installing the agent...a compbination of errors, but the final one was using the domain name of the server rather than the IP address in the batch file. Changing this sorted it out, which was nice. The issue with machines stopping the service is still a mystery. I have been been able to fix each machine by uninstalling the agent and re-doing the whole thing through SOLUS3, but this has meant I have spent the last 2 days solid running from machine to machine and fending off angry teachers. NOT ideal. I'll leave this one with Capita for now. I'm dreading the next upgrade though! Hopefully the final question on this from me: How would I go about updating our PX server database, given that it wasn't upgraded in the initial deployment? I have an agent installed on the server now, and targets for a SIMS SQL Server, SIMS Database and SIMS workstation. I can easily upgrade the SQL server version and the SIMS workstation by re-deploying the original upgrade. However, I don't seem to be able to update the Database version...there is no option to re-deploy this? Any ideas? Big thanks again.

Thanks for that Cache. We got that far already I'm afraid. The server in question is connected to the network, just not part of the main domain. We managed to install the Agent on it, but this did not make it automatically appear in the list of agent computers in SOLUS3. We could add the computer manually as a network computer by searching for it's IP address only and SOLUS3 resolved the name but despite this we can't get SOLUS3 to recognise the agent already installed or install the agent remotely. After adding the computer manually as above it is listed in the deployment environment but without an agent version, and checking the agent status give a "Could not find IP address" error.

You'll have to excuse me, I'm having a small melt down over here. You can ignore that rubbish about pinging the IP timing out...turns out I just can't type a number properly. Still not got to the bottom of this one. It seems to be possibly a permissions thing, since SOLUS is finding the machines OK, and they can be pinged from the server but the Agent services are stopping on the machines and they can't be re-started either by a domain user or a domain admin. Absolute nightmare. I have done nothing but this all day. I'm not even going to talk about the fact that I can't update SIMS on our door control server...which isn't part of the domain.

It's actually mainly desktop PCs that this is affecting, although some laptops as well. If it's not too much to ask could you give me a Dummies guide to how I might sort the DNS issue that you describe? It might give me something to go on. The extent of what I know has already been tried. i.e. I did an ipconfig /flushdns on the SIMS server! EDIT: Had a little play and pinged the name of one of the machines that is affected to find out the IP address. When I then tried to ping the IP address the request timed out. How would I resolve that? Apologies for turning this into a Compooters for Dummies - Lesson 1 thread.

This is what happens when a school's IT team is too small, so the management of the SIMS server is given to a data manager (me) with hardly any IT experience! I'm afraid I don't really know what you mean by "Check DNS" but I will get the Network Manager to check those things. Just for a bit more detail, I checked a machine affected and the SOLUS3 Agent serviced had stopped. When I tried to restart it wouldn't happen and just gave me an error message (which I didn't write down!) Uninstalling the agent from the machine, then removing from the DE in SOLUS3 and re-adding the computer fixed the problem for that machine. That is going to be a nightmare to do every time, so if anyone has any other thoughts for a more permenant fix that would be great.

I've joined the SOLUS3 bandwagon late, but that doesn't mean I get to miss out on the horrors it has in store. A quick query while I wait from Capita to get back to me. This morning I've suddenly had a handful of machines that tell me that the agent is offline when I know that it isn't and when I check the agent status I get the old "The agent actively refused it" message. A quick google tells me to run the EESUprgade.exe but this was 2 years ago and the link is now broken. Does anyone have any suggestions?