Ecclesbury

We finally did it and upgrade to SOLUS 3. However there were some technical hitches which meant that I had to go home before having a chance to properly grill the engineer on all the various bugs and what not so I'm feeling like I don't really know what I'm doing yet! So apologies if anything I ask seems stupid. Quick question, how do I deploy a new connect.ini to client machines? At the moment I go into SOLUS3 on the server, click System Settings then Workstation settings but then everything is inactive except a couple of check boxes and the connection type dropdown. I also have an error message on the left saying 'An error occured when preparing the display. Object already exists.' I know for a fact that the engineer successfully deployed the new connect.ini to at least one machine but I didn't see him do it. Any advise?

Thanks all, I had a feeling K2S would be the answer, but didn't realise quite the level of detail you could get there! At KS4 we use the JESSON framework which assigns group level floor targets rather than individual floor targets This gives teaching staff greater flexibility in setting their own targets. It has it's flaws, like any system, but it suits me (less work for me!) At KS3 we used to use FFT...so I have no idea what we'll be doing next year! (I only discovered we had cancelled our FFT subscription when I suddenly couldn't log in!) Typical. My guess is that we will do something based around 2 levels progress. However, I'm a little dubious about setting straight +2 level targets since the national and local picture shows that in many (most?) subjects this leads to unrealistic targets. In my experience if floor targets are unrealistic they become pointless since teaching staff have no faith in them and tend to ignore them. I'd be interested on others thoughts...I know this has been discussed to death. I'd be most interested to hear from those schools who set +2 level targets...what do you progress figures look like year on year? For example...we are a pretty high performing school and in English our 2 Level progress from KS2 - KS3 was 67% last year...an all time high! You see why I'm dubious about setting a floor target of 100% 2 levels progress?

Afternoon all. I have always (probably foolishly) used FFTLive as my source of all KS2 data, including decimalised scores and data for students who join us mid-year. However, SLT have pulled the rug from under my feet and cancelled their subscription to FFT! Before I go trawling the web can anyone advise on the best place to source KS2 data for our secondary students? Where does everyone else get it from? NCA Tools? Key to Success? To clarify I am after individual test and TA levels for English/Maths and Science including decimalised scores for our current KS3 cohorts (and if it updates at census time with any new students this would be ideal! Thanks all.

If you want to avoid creating new Aspects a Flinstones way of doing this would be to create a group of hidden Data Review Formula columns using IF THEN ELSE forumlas that said IF column = -2 THEN output 1 ELSE output 0. Your visible column would then just be a SUM of all these columns. This would be slightly tedious and messy if you had lots of columns and wanted a separate count for lots of different residuals but it would avoid having to create new aspects and would mean that you could keep your old Mark-Integer columns.

We use Parenteveningsystem and I can't speak highly enough about the product and the company (I don't work for them, I promise!) All the feedback we've had from parents has been extremely positive and they seem to find it very user friendly. Setup is also pretty simple and isn't a huge burden on my time. Probably my biggest positive with them though is that their customer service is top notch. They have responded to direct requests for changes to the system itself within days sometimes and any bugbears I had with the system initially have all been sorted quickly. Obviously I'm not saying to go with them on my say so, but I would definitely encourage you to get them in for a demo or for a free trial.

Can anyone confirm whether the lessons drop off the teacher's timetable when NCR is used? Example - a teacher is taken off timetable to do a whole day Mock Art exam, but still want to register the Year 12 class who are doing the Mock during their usual periods. They also want access to those registers to add behavior/achievement stuff during the day. This is a real life example. Another example - a teacher is set to imminently go on paternity leave so to make things easier for the cover supervisors the cover manager sets up cover in the event of him getting the phone call and having to dash off so the cover supervisors know what they are doing in the event of him having to go. In this case the teacher in question loses their timeline. Another real world example, that one. So basically, the logic may seem, on the surface, to work but there are reasons that this causes problems. I think what people are pointing out is that this new feature seems to have fixed an imaginary problem. I'm sure very few teachers cared if their lessons still appeared on their timeline even though they were being covered and even if they did it wouldn't cause any practical problems. However, the new feature has. I have been telling staff that they can still access their registers through the Take Register route, but this rarely goes down well.

@jinnantonnixx Those links are really useful, thanks for the tip. Time to go and ask management if I can add "accidental DBA" to my job description!

When you say not possible, do you mean not possible in the current version of SIMS, or not possible ever? I.e. is there some limiting factor that will mean such a feature will never appear on any future development plans?

That would be amazing! Instinct tells me that the answer is no, but I can't confirm that 100%

Spot on, thanks Mr Netman. I knew I should have waited until I could log in to Support Net! Much appreciated.

Does anyone else think that the exclamation mark at the end of that error message conveys a certain amount of exasperation on Nova's part? I feel like the computer is telling me off for being stupid!

Morning all, I should really post this one to Support Net first, but I can't seem to log on this morning so thought it was worth a punt here. Since applying the spring upgrade on Friday was can no longer upload our timetable because we get the following critical error: I haven't made any changes to the alternative curriculum groups mentioned and they have been successfully importing into SIMS since the start of the year. The error message is a bit baffling and contradictory. I can't see a reference to a "Curriculum Code" anywhere, but the prefix for the 2 groups are EAM and EAE. This would suggest that maybe the codes now have to be 2 characters long, so it is now only picking up the first 2 characters, hence the confilt. However, I can't amed the prefix of a group already created. I'd rather not have to re-create one of the groups with a different code. Also the last line refers to the 'subject' being consistent - but as described in the top line of the error, the subjects are completely different! Anyone seen this, or have any idea how I might avoid re-creating the groups?

I'm an idiot. Massive green cross button with the word 'Favourites' at the top of every student's profile! Now I see it , I'm sure that it's always been there.

Finally upgraded to the Spring Release (Dummy tip of the day - you can't upgrade your server with only 1.8 GBs of space on the server! Yikes!) One useful touch that I hadn't expected was that the new Pupil Premium indicator is included on the Bulk Update routine. Very handy. Quick question though, I notice on the favourites panel on the home page there are new tabs for Reports, Students and marksheets (I say new, I've never seen them before, so apologies if they've been there for ages.) The implication seems to be that you can set up favourite students (for example) which seems handy for certain people. Does anyone know whether this is the case and, if so, how to add favourite students...or marksheets. Cheers, Jonny.

p.s. in case you're wondering why Capita convert all numbers to text in the output, the following comment is included in the standard template code: ' GERAINT 11/8/06: Additional code to enable correct interpretation of dates. ' We define every column as being a TEXT type column - so we avoid any mis-interpretation Incidentally, if you wanted to amend the code directly you could do it under here, but I tend not to, as I don't fully understand why they have done it, so wouldn't want to break anything. I also never amend the actual standard template, just take a copy of it to create my new templates.

Hi Phil, This is actually built into the macro that runs when reports are exported to Excel. Have you done much Excel macro programming? The only way to do it (I think) is to amend the report template to either convert the text back to numbers [with something like 'For Each Cell in Range, Cell.Value = Val(Cell.Value)'], or amend the section of code in the standard template which converts the numbers to text. There is a great document that has been doing the rounds for years which explains how to create your own custom excel report templates, but it requires some VBA knowledge. Let me know if you want this, and I can dig around for it (if someone else doesn't beat me to it.)

Just thought I'd add one more thought about the award. By signing up you are added to an email discussion group of data managers, similar to this edugeek group, which has some very interesting discussion and some very knowledgable data managers. This is almost worth the fee on it's own! Some other people on this group have talked about the worth of the NDMA and the main feeling was that the biggest benefit of doing the award was that it made you 'stop and think' about the work that you do. I'm sure we all know how manic it gets in schools at times and I lose count of the amount of times I'll put a sticky plaster on a problem rather than taking the time to really explore the best way to do things.

Blimey pingleby, you must have some seriously aspirational targets! I work at a pretty high performing state school (84% ACEM last year) and we would get nowhere near those kind of targets. I think it's important for a school to factor in their own historic performance into their target setting procedure, particularly at KS3 where everything is a bit 'wooley.' Since the KS4 results are more rigorous, it is worth looking at those cohorts that achieved well and see what their position was at the end of KS3. This position can form the basis for cohort level targets. Similarly, if standards are slipping at KS4, have a look at the equivalent KS3 positions and adjust targets upwards. I'm a big fan of the JESSON style target setting which sets concrete group level targets, but leaves the individual student targets setting in the hands of the classroom teacher.

That's a fairly broad question, but if you have a current grade aspect and a target aspect with the same underlying grade set you can include a traffic light progress column as follows: Use a DIFFERENCE formula column to calculate the difference between the current and target Use a DIVISION formula to convert the difference to a number of grades/levels/sub levels (e.g. if you are using GCSE points scores you need to divide by 6) Use a NESTED IF THEN ELSE formula column to display a traffic lighted progress column (So IF 'Division Column' is Greater than 0 THEN show 'Division Column' and colour it green etc etc) There a few caveats and tweaks that you need to bare in mind in certain circumstances, but that should give you the basics (in fact, you can remove the division column if you only want to colour code above, at or below target.)

Excellent stuff, at least 3 things I see already that will be a big help! I can't wait to ditch my pupil premium UDF.

This is all very interesting stuff. I'm trying to put together a proposal for our senior management comparing a few parental portal solutions (with a heavy lean towards TASC) but I'm still waiting on a costing quote from TASC! I sent it on 6th Feb and haven't heard a peep. Delays like that worry me. Can anyone comment on their speed of response about general things like this? They were incredibly helpful and informative at BETT (surprise, surprise!)

I haven't heard this query for a while, but I know that last time I looked into it there is no way for a central user to delete reports set up by someone else (even a full admin account.) If this is for current staff the best way is to ask them to delete it! If it is for staff that has left then the only way that I know is to reset their password, log back in as that staff member and delete individually. Nightmare. I would love to be corrected on this, as I know it is something that people have been clamoring for for as long as I can remember. Did I dream that this was going to be fixed in a recent or upcoming update?

Very nice summary sheet that @NormalDistribution! Is it done in Excel? It's given me some great ideas. I particularly like the Key Points.

Hi all, I thought it might be useful to some to put together a collection of sources for national data, as I know I get requests for stuff like this all the time. Currently I'm only aware of the DfE research and stats portal here: Research and Statistics : Department for Education RAISE online will also provide some useful national KS4 data, particularly the raw transition matrices which can used to calculate 3 and 4 level progress figures. I'd be interested to hear of any other sources of national statistics. I'd be particularly interested to know if there is any way to find level progress informatino (such as transition matrices) for KS2 to KS3. I've got a feeling this might not exist anywhere, but it would be great to get my hands on it!

You know who I blame - OfSted. When they do their inspections everything has to be on paper! I heard stories of outstanding teacher being given 'satisfactory' purely because they didn't have a bit of paper with some grades on to give to the inspector, regardless of the fact that the teacher could bring the grades up on the computer in the same classroom as the inspector. At our last inspection I had to come to work on a Saturday, not to prepare any extra data, just to print the reams and reams of stuff that we already had. I also believe that they are the single biggest contributing factor to inefficient data systems and the data saturation that LosOjos is talking about. I am currently looking at how to effectively monitor progress at KS3. The biggest sticking point is that measuring genuine progress in foundation subjects (especially creative arts such as Drama, Music and Art) doesn't tally with what teachers and departments will be judged on by OfSted (i.e. Levels of progress from an average KS2 level.) So we end up having to produce 2 independant sets of analysis at different time. One to give the picture that OfSted will see, and the staff will be judged on, and another set which foundation staff can use to justify the ugly looknig OfSted data ("see, they are REALLY making progress in music") Throw in ever shifting goal posts and all the (changing) sub-groups that staff are expected to monitor, leads to this problem that either staff are bombarded with an obscene amount of data, or they can not put there hand on a specific bit of data when they need it (and come running to us for it!) I agree with those who have said that the key is organising the data in the most simple and efficient way possible (The MIS is crucial for this) and then spending more time/effort in training staff how to access the bits they need, when they need them, rather than just churning out summary tables as and when they are needed. One thing that our staff have responded well to, is when I produce excel summary sheets at key assessment points I include my own dynamic graphs. This way they get a nice visualisation of, say, how the sub groups compare for A*C. They then have a simple drop down box which automatically updates the graph. Just a small example of where a lot of data is provided to staff but in a way which is not overwhelming and can be interrogated easily. There's only one thing worse than too much data, and that's too much waffle about data! So apologies for this post!