SouthCoastSaint

You can add a UDF to a register but as far as I can see it does involve each teacher going into their own attendance setup and ticking to display it in regsiter. Still looking for a global switch on option.

Sorry I many not have been clear, you can say yes or no to doc types which I have done, of which Individual report is one type. We have some new individual reports though that we wish to display to staff only and it seems you cannot drill down beyond Doc type.

Hi, Does anyone using EduLink have any fixes to display only certain Individual Reports to parents? In Insight, we could tick by name so had control over which ones were displayed, but I want to upload an internal document and there is no obvious way to stop this showing to parents. In wondered if anyone had managed a workaround? Thanks

They have a flat fee of £2000 for secondary and can offer you a free demo. I think you may well save more than that moving just from InTouch initially. We were Schoolcomms and Insight users. EduLink is far better than Insight for design and functionality in my opinion. It also offers seating plans, resource booking and forms (think googledocs) as additional features. I loved Parents Evening Booking System, we had been with them for years, but I must admit, bringing that function into the Parent Portal where parents see everything else was a hit with parents.

The way ours is set up we can't have incoming text messages. (The text company does allow you to buy an incoming number but these messages are sent to an email address with no reference to the parent sender). This is significantly different to what our attendance officers are used to in Schoolcomms where messages are shown centrally with the parent and child shown against them. As far as I am aware this would be the same even if we bought our texts from another company. The parents that use the app can reply to app messages. It's a shame as text replies are useful for less engaged parents who don't tend to use parent portals but will see and reply to a text.

Parents can request a password reset now, they introduced it a while back. If I recall it doesn't work when parents share an email address. Also, there is a log to sims button in the messages screen to log attendance (and other) messages. It puts the message in the communication log but in a very clunky way (we were using Schoolcomms and have it until June, our attendance officer has reverted to using it until then). Also you can't reply to Text messages which for certain parents the best way to get a first response reply when chased. Our school is 1800 on roll and a sync takes all day. This is very frustrating if you have uploaded an ind rep to email home as it doesn't appear for hours. These are niggles for us but the benefits so far easily outweigh these.

Click on each of the columns with the formula f in the header, view the folrmulas and get familiar with what columns are being used in each one - you will find it eventually!

Hmm. Texts are much cheaper in EduLink (via ClickSend), but it's more the annual cost of keeping Schoolcomms on just for absence texts. Maybe we will look at other options, but seems a shame to continue with two systems.

I agree with all the positives above. For us, Parents Evening seems popular with parents (no extra login to the other site) and teachers (same reason) but as the admin I am much less in control with the set up and reporting. New features will be added over time I am sure. The other part more difficult for us is absence reporting. We moved from Schoolcomms - we were able to receive texts that could be seen by anyone logging in to the system. We can't have incoming texts at mo and replies to absence chase ups go to the sender. When you have two staff sharing the attendance role this is harder to work with. Also the communication log isn't updated in the same way. Attendance officers are persevering (and it's much cheaper than Schoolcomms) but for them it's not as easy. Everything else - really good!

Very proud of our usage stats with Edulink too.. even without taking the app usage out (free push messages), the texts are much cheaper using their recommended provider.

We have moved from Insight to EduLink too. In the last few months we had frequent issues (with registers, attendnance etc) and sadly trying to get a resolution was very difficult and seemed to consist of to-ing and fro-ing of ticket entries and screenshot requests as their default position seemed to be either blame Sims or us as users. Having been a fan when we moved from SLG to them years ago, I can say EduLink has been faster, much more stable - and offers more features too (seating plans for example).

Hi, This is an inbuilt Sims function. Configure homepage to allow Missing Register panel and you can send notifications that pop up in Sims and beep at the teacher. Of course, it doesn't necessarily make the teacher take the register. Some let lots sit there beeping at them every time they re-open Sims over the weeks...

we are just about to trial Edulink. Does anyone know if it will send a push notification to the app for detentions?

I have an aspect for this which means staff can view permissions by their class in their Additional Info marksheets, and it also means you could bulk upload.

I always make sure I click the refresh button on the actual missing reg box before sending messages, just so I know it's upto date at time of send.

Bob, Since we switched from SLG years ago we have not looked back.. very proud of our parental use of the portal (Insight). To put it into context though we have just 13 prime parents not on email out of 1720 children, so our school demographic may be quite different to yours.

We have been with them for years and the core business of first response attendance (pulls the Ns out of Sims) and sending texts and emails is really robust. Messages can also be written back to Sims. We also use Gateway (online/app reporting) with them which does have a few issues for us, and we are unable to use their online payments but again that's probably a school specific issue.

I have SC open on my desktop - but login is a matter of seconds. To send to whole school, I click To Parents Of, then the list appears of every class, group and individual child in Sims, I click Year 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 to select them (instantly move to the recipients box) and Ok. (I normally do updates as a scheduled task each night after school although you could do one on demand if you needed) which means that SC is as upto date with Sims as the last evening.

We use Schoolcomms and have 1700 students, about 2700 parents. A whole school email would take about 15 seconds to leave your screen, although obviously parents receiving them takes a little longer. If I send timetables or inividual reports to all, that would take processing time but I would say less than 10 minutes. Sending year by year not an ideal workaround as you say, parents with three children in school then get 3 emails which is irritating for them.

According to the press release they will remain two separate entities but I am unsure what ParentPay offers in the attendance/messaging area, I assume sooner or later there will be some re-organisation. Having been with SC for years, the business has changed beyond recognition as it has grown.

In light of the email this morning about Schoolcomms being acquired by ParentPay, not sure how I'm feeling. A glance at ParentPay's twitter feed doesn't fill me with confidence; announcements about issues and outages. Are there any happy users of ParentPay on here to make me feel better?

It may be free but I'm sure IT had to put effort into getting it up and running - it certainly wasn't a switch on and it works job although that was a while ago now. Normal laptops in our school can't cope with it, the graphics cards are not good enough. I am the only person to have it on my machine. Also, I now have turned off the scheduled overnight imports as they carry on eating up memory throughout the day until Sims grinds to a halt. I only used it for dynamic groups and without updates every night these are not useful.

I must say, I had a moan on here (and supportnet) about the use of UPNs which we do as the Admission Number was not matching properly when importing from CSV... and it was picked up by Capita. I have now received a patch which does seem to have solved the problem and is being included in the next release. It's not often this happens, so it's worth mentioning I think

It shouldn't need a change request - it's flawed functionality. What if you have 3 John Smiths at school, all parents. No way of knowing if you are picking the correct one!

Is Annexe D here what you need? https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/555090/Progress_8_school_performance_measure.pdf