RootsSchImp

In addition to all the great non-SIMS options already floated, I'd recommend taking a look at Firefly. Like iSams it was developed especially for the indy sector, I'm not 100% it will meet all your requirements for an MIS but you might find it's got a good feature/price mix for a small private school.

This is a bit hacky but you could do it without entering results by exporting a template with all the association combinations you want on it to xml, open up the xml in a text editor and it will tell you the ids of the various components - the webmerge association is the concatenation of those ids with $ in between. I think the order is Assessment type, term, year, subject

Having seen this equation from the MIS side I think there's a tendency on the school side to underestimate how difficult it is to build an MIS, because tend customers conceive of the MIS as: System that does exactly what I want it to. It's true that if you're building to one person or even one school's specification of that it would be reasonably straightforward (though I still think it would take more than 2 devs for six months). However, the challenge is building something that works for all types of users across the whole sector. One that satisfies the demand for flexible functionality from techy users like us, while keeping things simple enough for the person in reception who knows the square root of FA about computers. I wasn't a software dev at Bromcom, but I made BI templates and the difficulty jump between a dashboard that will work with one school's assessment structures to something that will work with *any* school's assessment structures is massive. Plus of course when you have a big user base like SIMS, the pressure to keep things people like is greater, so while there's no doubt Capita have done a poor job of developing SIMS 8, I think they failed at something hard not something easy.

If you go to Focus| Assessment | Aspect - does it let you unlock it? If it's the official KS2 ones then maybe you can only input results there via CTF. The alternative is creating new aspects and then adding them to the templates staff are using. SEN and PP aren't stored as assessments (usually) - if you want to show them on marksheets open the Assessment templates, click to add a new column and choose select column for additional student information. Doing this from memory and it's a few years since I've used SIMS so if you can you might want to wait to see if anyone else has a better solution

Hi Jeff - what MIS are you using? If it's SIMS then I think you want Routines, Data in, Import from spreadsheet. Last time I used SIMS you had to save the file as XML - but they've maybe fixed that? Anyway, once SIMS has accepted it it'll pop with a window showing the data and you can right click on column headings to tell it what columns identify the students and what aspect and result sets to store the data in.

One reason schools might be reluctant to go to market is EdTech companies who sue when they don't get their way

Welcome to edugeek @NotAGeek and thanks for these totally disinterested, genuine insights from your experience in the public sector - they've transformed how I think about a recent supplier's sour grapes money grab! I look forward to hearing more from you on this subject. Ed

I don't think your desired set up would work because the way VS is designed is - School A has a bromcom, School B has a Bromcom - kids from School A and School B mix in a third Bromcom (the virtual school) and have classes and assessments held there, while attendance and behaviour info is fed back to their home school system. Bromcom are pretty flexible though - so they might be able to come up with a way to make this work. Another question would be whether for the money they would charge it would be cheaper to put everyone on your roll, then hire someone to manually separate the census XMLs into two separate returns

I agree - one of the few upsides to Brexit is that it should make it easier to redesign the process in such a way that leaves in places basic controls to stop contracts being awarded with no competition while ditching the very onerous bid preparation required currently. Whether the present government are interested in making public procurement simpler and fairer is another matter though!

I understand Bromcom's frustration because putting together a tender bid takes hundreds of man hours of work, all of it based on the supposition that the suppliers will each put together these bids and then the buyer will come to an objective decision about which is best - but of course people aren't algorithms and they don't make decisions that way. They decide the one they want, probably without being consciously aware themselves why they reached the decision - the scoring of the bids is just an after the fact justification of a decision made by their hearts not a spreadsheet. A better process would be one that dispensed with the notion that buyers were making objective decisions about bids so scrapped the written portions of the bids all together - put the responsibility on the buyers to find out if the systems meet their requirements at the live demos that happen anyway. Make them formally collect quotes by all means but just accept that in the end they'll pick the one the one they want. It's not like suppliers have no control over the subjective factors that influence these decisions - the look and feel of your software, your reputation, your unique functionality - this is all within your sphere of influence. What confuses me about the decision to go to court is I know that Bromcom know these are ultimately subjective decisions because I used to work on their bid team. Best case they lose in court and waste a ton of money in legal fees, worst case they win, force UL to divert money meant for kids' education to them and so put themselves at a major disadvantage in the battle for the hearts and minds of the next and every future buyer. It's mad, but one of the drawbacks of small, family run firms is there are few checks on the owner's idiosyncrasies.

Hi @CarterUSM - have you tried Manage Data in the Assessment Module? I think you can search for and bulk delete assessment results there.

Lol jokers have making changes to make the census work on there - that's putting 'get dressed' on your to do list

I'd echo what other posters have said (I used to work on tenders for Bromcom so I've seen lots of schools go through the migration process). I think the mistake lots of schools make is they imagine other systems are as complex to learn and manage as SIMS so they assume switching will be really difficult. In reality Bromcom, Arbor, Pupil Asset are all a doddle to learn and there's none of the constant patching and sql nurdling that you have with sims. So schools are consistently surprised by how easy it is to switch. I think OP is right that consistency of reporting is one of the big challenges and you will have to invest time replicating and/or improving what you do in this area - but what you save due to the convenience of a cloud system more than makes up for that IMO

Another option I used to use for bulk updates is to export the template XML, edit it in a text editor (I used Notepad++) then reimport. Obviously needs a fair bit of attention to detail as the code needs to be exactly right for it to reimport, but it's a good option for changing Column Headings and making read only columns read-write.

I agree with @timbo343 and @noelmm - sure, the old UI wasn't winning any webdesign prizes but if you clicked on the main menu and selected, say, Exams, you got on one page everything the system did relating to exams - it was so easy to learn. Now it's not only that things are hidden in menus and submenus - there's no consistency across the system either. It's like 5 different websites got drunk and f&*£3d each other and you're the chambermaid finding them in a heap on the hotel floor.

Hi Panos, There's a dedicated Withdrawal Groups feature which is less hassle then timetabling a separate group. If you go to Groups then select Withdrawal Groups you can create one per staff delivering the sessions then 'Add student timetables' (ie assign kids to the group for a specific period between a start and end date.

Write back for Attendance marks only is £250 per primary and £500 per secondary per annum - not sure if that meets the reasonableness requirement!

Definitely endorse the buy an MIS and build on top of it approach. There's also a lot of variation in API specs so check those out too. For example, Bromcom have very limited write back capability for which they charge an additional annual fee. With Arbor you can write back to any field (after they've approved your code obviously).

That's interesting - what would you like to develop that's currently lacking from the market?

What @DODICT has said here makes a lot of sense - they're definitely right that if every department focuses on maximising performance than the headlines will take care of themselves. I'd just pick up on one point because I think it's a common flaw in the way schools design tracking systems: "Prioritise those [students] with the worst progress". Progress 8 estimates are the average of lots of students' progress, some of those students made more, some less and the average is in the middle. This variation is normal and natural because KS2 isn't a perfect measure of potential at KS4, so it's not accurate to assume that two kids with the same fine level at KS2 should get the same outcomes at KS4. Therefore if you're looking to maximise your overall P8 score you're better off concentrating on kids who (without extra intervention) got to around zero or slightly positive progress rather than those who are already behind. There might be other good reasons for helping those kids of course, but purely from a P8 standpoint, 'good already' is more fertile territory than 'struggling'. For the same reason if you use P8 estimates (or FFT YUK!) as targets you should stop immediately as you're telling kids to stop trying as soon as they hit average.

These are excellent points, I've worked with schools that set up their own byzantine processes in order to 'save money' on software - then end up hiring more staff to handle the workload!

A lot of the recent losses have been academies who got hit with much higher prices for SIMS when they converted. Not saying they won't continue to bleed customers, but it's far harder to pry away the LA schools who're generally paying less and have more complicated contracts where the school pays for some things and the LA others. SIMS remains broken, but it's still got a lot of money coming in and might hang around for a surprising amount of time, so while £500m is on the high side I don't think it's out there crazy.

Hi @whittymags, The reason the report is doing that is the 'Interval' which is the period of time the report looks at. By default any data item you add that changes over time will have an interval of 'current' - so if you add Student items and the interval is 'current' it shows only kids who are on roll today. On the filters and intervals pages of the report if you change the interval to the date range you want to look at you should see leavers who were on roll in that period.

You can find lots of info on MIS providers from their G Cloud - govt digital market place submissions here https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/ If you're a secondary looking to move into the cloud as well as Bromcom it's worth checking out Arbor and ISams, which like Bromcom are at the fully featured but pricier end of the market. Or if costs are more of a constraint maybe consider Pupil Asset and RM Integris . Even if you don't have to follow an official procurement procedure, IMO it's worth defining your requirements and inviting bids from at least 3 suppliers.

You change the period structure on the cycle screen. I would save a copy before you start as messing with the structure after you've scheduled could end up with lessons getting unscheduled. You can create new periods by right clicking the period list on the cycle grid. My approach would be to create two new lunch/reg periods after period three, then delete the old lunch period. Once you've changed the cycle you need to go data, export timetable cycle before you can send through a TT in the new structure. Be very careful with dates when you do this because if you export next year's cycle into this year's TT it will cause you all sorts of problems. Good luck! Ed