SouthCoastSaint

I have a wishlist item too - I would like to be able to filter the list of individual students so that if I have to pick certain Year 8s for example, I can filter so that I am only going through 350 instead of 1750.

Vik, I think the classes import if you tell it to in your import settings (although it was years ago we did ours). Def all classes should show, plus UDGs and Discover groups too.

One thing I find frustrating are the subject ticks when you are in Admin. I used to think I was doing something wrong when every subject I clicked on had the same 5 or 6 subjects ticked - eg Art ticked for all subjects. I was previously told this is a bug and the subjects screen has changed a fair bit with the new update. However I still had ticks where they shouldn't. Have duly removed them, will wait to see if they return. Our wish list is to display LOPs for all subjects, not just Maths and Englush. Transition Matrices are coming and will encourage greater staff use I think.

Like Zag, we are letting Students choose their Options via Insight. It's a slightly odd thing that third party software makes really great use of this part of Sims and yet (as far as I know) Sims own online product doesn't offer this.

Another Insight vote for me. As mentioned before, we also didn't manage an upgrade without Capita logging in and giving lengthy help each time - process takes 30 seconds with Insight. In addition, the upgrades are frequent as they incorporate customer requests/fix bugs as they go along. I asked for a change to exam timetable content and within 90 mins an upgrade was released to incorporate my request. From a parents point of view - from the login process (SLG was always somewhat unstable) to the way the pages display, there is no comparison between the hard to navigate SLG and the extremely user friendly Insight. Want to display something? Toggle the item to Yes and it shows on the parent's page. Easily switch to the parent's view to check that their pages look as you wish them to. I would be perfectly happy to stick with an integrated Capita product if it did the job, but sadly I think they really missed a trick using Sharepoint and not building their own platform from scratch.

If you click to restart your computer (and then cancel once you have found the doc) just sometimes you can get a message to save that missing document which has disappeared but somehow running in the background. Quite often works for me.

Thanks both for info. Is there an Insight report to show you which students have not made their choices? Also, we do ask for parental signature on our forms - and I see in Options Offer you can specify this. How does that work in Insight? I assume the choices are made on the children's page and not the parents?

We are looking to use Options Offer this year specifically so we can use Insight to allow students to select options. Our timetabler always designs the Options form and decides in advance which pool each subject is going to be offered in - so we have 4 pools, and Art for example will only be offered in A and C. Is this normal practice, or do other schools give a more open choice and let Sims work out the best combinations? If this IS the best way of doing things, I assume Options Offer will cope with this? I would love to hear from anyone using Options Offer with Insight to pre-warn of any pitfalls before we open it to Students. Thanks

Whoops, sorry my bad. I meant formatted, (which I never normally use). Now I can see UPNs I may use them more. But still - UPNs def should be a selectable field.

My tip from capita forums this week was export marksheet unformatted, unhide first column and lo and behold the UPNs appear. (Have no idea why they can't be added as additional field, but glad to know this after all this time anyway)!

Of course! I knew that and couldn't see the wood for the trees today. Many thanks. Still have an issue where one of our 3cs has been classified as Mid PA, but that's another story.

Not quite the same question - but we are having problems reconciling the Prior Attainment Bands used on Raise with the ones we had assigned for current Year 12s. We have now been advised that high 3s can fall into the Medium category, similarly high 4s can be High... (We have also been told that current Year 11 will be the last year to use Science in the APS calculation). The problem we are finding is that we can't match the decimal KS2 numbers with anything we can find to ensure that our current students are banded correctly.

We have two boys here (actaully just left now, hooray) who have exactly the same name. One of the mums contacted us quite soon after they started (they had also been together in Primary) and asked that we put Cameron James as his preferred forename (James being his middle name), so now no confusion at all. What a reasonable parent!

Ok, I see now. Although we can already use the tick box we have to click on each column. Oh well, still good I suppose.

In the Summer release notes - do you think this is a typo and they mean data review columns can be made read only? I hope so, the other two enhancements are good too. Assessment We have removed the tilde ~ from duplicate Template Column Heading Names. Export Marksheets – Numbers now export as numbers instead of text for Marks Aspects. Template – The Data entry columns can be made Read Only with the tick box.

Thanks for your input Vik. I have since spoken to Capita who advised me that where our model at the moment shows split classes eg 8Ma1(3) (3) I need to change it to read 8Ma1 (6). I have created a testspl file, and printed off the maths timetable. I changed the model to show one class of 6 periods. I was advised to then go to the classes screen and build in the 2nd teacher. My problem is - expected to select that extra teacher and they would slot in to the teacherless slot. This doesn't happen - it will either let me schedule ALL teacher A or ALL teacher B. I am determind to crack this, as the duplicate class names has a knock on effect for subject evening software, individual reports not showing main teacher and silly irritating things like a whole course marksheet showing a random mix of two class codes for split classes.

What am I missing on the widget configuration? I can't see an option to select subject in the conduct summary.

What does the status O mean in your register out of interest?

I am hoping that a T4 then T6 timetabler on here may be prepared to help me solve a problem... Our timetabler creates our timetable in the old T4 way (from what I can gather). Because of the way he sets up split classes, we can't specify a main teacher - meaning assessment reports display the wrong supervisor and we get multiple class labels in marksheets. Before the 2013 TT goes live, I would like to change this timetable to deal with split classes in the correct way. I have tried to follow the solution search from Capita, but although I can drag the 2nd teacher in, nothing seems to change in the model. In fact, I admit, I am not even sure what the model should look like if it's done properly. Would be very grateful if someone could talk me through what I need to do. I am sure once I have done it a couple of times, I can get on and make all the changes. Thanks in advance.

We too use the KS2 + 4 levels for KS4 targets, but interested to know if anyone using KS2 + 2 levels has a condensed KS3. Our end of KS3 is end of Year 8 and two whole levels seems to make the KS3 line too steep and the KS4 line a little shallow. On top of all this, with KS levels going, I have no idea what the school will come up with as an alternative.

Attendance Officer was given a new PC. Since then she cannot access her attendance letters on it, the list is blank. She can log in to any other computer and see them so it doesn't seem to be a permissions problem. I have tried logging in to her PC and when I do so, I also can't see them. We know we had this problem in the past but thought it was cured by the microsoft hotfix that cured lots of Office problems. We have applied this with no change. Anyone have any ideas?

Another vote for Insight here. Was just so easy to set up from an admin point of view (no comparison with SLG which needed Capita help for most upgrades; Insight upgrades take about 3 mins!). It's VERY user friendly for parents too. We use Frog as a VLE but parents have complimented Insight as being so much more straightforward for them to use. I would like to trial a teacher setting homework on Frog vs Insight. I have a feeling Insight would win.

As all secondaries using lesson monitor seem to encounter the same problem with missing registers to a greater or lesser degree, how about an automatic Homepage panel listing all your own missing registers that stay there until the regs are taken? Or how about colouring the timeline/diary slots in the past to red if the register isn't taken? The missing registers panel is really useful as a central tool for us admins but would be great for teachers to see just how inefficient some of them are!

We figured it was the timeline. Added ALL staff to the Reg Tutor group and locked down the homepage with timeline removed. This appears to have made no difference (but I guess that's a separate issue!). IT on the phone to Capita who are sorting it now.

We have applied 18180 and now (with the exception of me?!) everyone is getting the error cannot find Table 8 - logs on then displays the error box. Has anyone else seen and sorted this issue?