RootsSchImp

I feel your pain buddy, it's a nutpunch

I really hope someone has a better fix for this because I know firsthand how annoying it is. Last time it happened to me the only solution was to extract a new file from Progresso then manually redo the changes in scheduler. I got a colleague to help by having the unusuable scheduler file open on a different machine and we just went through all the differences. I know it's f%&$*ing annoying but I don't think there's any way round it. The issue is the stupid way Progresso keeps track of the timetable as a series of changes rather than a simple list of what periods are happening when. I haven't used Scheduler for a couple of years though, so if you've got time maybe hold out or try calling the helpdesk to see if a better solution has come along? Is it possible to export/import the list of events from autoschedule?

Bromcom and Arbor (and probably ISAMS too although I don't know) will give you a demo system to play around with if you ask for one. I used to work for Bromcom and their migrations (esp from SIMS) were always really good. One thing to watch out for is the contracts end dates for any 3rd party products you have - obvs the MIS companies want you to sign up for all their features from day one, but to avoid paying double you might be better off negotiating to delay paying for extra features until you're ready to use them.

Power BI is worth it - it's really cool. If you need to call in the SLT cavalry and want to explain what BI is this post has a sample dashboard which gives a flavour of what it can do - barely scratches the surface tho, the great thing is you can customise it to show you what you want. Subject - Class - Pupil Table

The way BI works is you make dashboards with a windows program called Power BI Desktop - free to download from here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/ Once you've built your dashboard you can publish it to a Power BI Free account - no payment details needed to register - sign up for free here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/landing/signin/ @DODICT is right that it's best to start free and you can even share dashboards published to free accounts in Bromcom by putting the microsoft account login details as 'shared account' in Analysis| Power BI Configuration in Bromcom. If you start using BI with lots of different users, or you want to use permissions in BI so different people have access to different data then you need Pro accounts which cost money - but to get started there's no need to spend anything. Check out my blog powerbiforschools.blogspot.com for tips on how to do ed related things in BI Good luck Ed

It's not that it's much more difficult, just that there isn't really any benefit from a timetabling pov. If you want to give kids and staff the variety of alternating weeks then that's a reason, but you have to want that more you mind more splits and worse distribution.

Wow lots to ponder! As a timetabler I'd say don't have a two week timetable unless you have a compelling reason to, because you increase the likelihood lessons would have to be split between multiple teachers and you have to worry about distribution through the cycle. Plus it's harder so you're working more to get a worse result.

I've been on the MIS side of a fair few procurements and I think the thing that Schools/MATs most often fail to consider but should is the trade off between the benefits of more complex functionality and the investment in skills needed to use that functionality. Power BI is a great example of this - it's fantastic, and you can use it to make Analysis tools that are so much better than Performance Analysis in SIMS, Bromcom's native Analysis module or anything else that I've seen that comes 'out of the box' in an MIS. But the cost of that is the skill required to build and maintain BI reports. BI isn't super difficult to learn but it's not entry level either - put it this way, if you're expecting your data manager/assistant head to just pick it up alongside all their other day to day responsibilities you're going to be waiting a long time before you have good BI dashboards. This is not to say it's not worth it - only that you should carefully about whether you're willing to commit the resources to make it work. A halfway house could be BI reports offered by the MIS provider (I used to make these for Bromcom) - be careful on that route though as it's very hard to design reports that work well with all schools' data - so you want to ask are 'will this work *for us*?' and 'can we customise it to fit our requirements?' Another example is in native reporting from the MIS. Progresso (and I think ISams) allow you to build reports using SQL in MS Report Builder - that means you can do fancier stuff than you can from Bromcom's reporting module (which is pretty basic) but a) do you want to? and b) is it worth the time and money to train someone/replace the person you've got who knows SQL with someone else at the same skill level? There's also no shame in saying you're going to accept a lower functionality MIS and simpler processes because you don't want to invest in more complex ones - that's far better in my opinion that paying for the dream of an all singing all dancing system but then not having the tech know how to make it work. Good luck with the search Ed

Hi pipz, Weird that the end dates aren't showing up, are you running it with effective date of today? On the question of whether it's expected I haven't seen any data but it wouldn't surprise me if high numbers became fsm 2008-2014 in the great recession who are now dropping out of the figures.

I've come across a bug in Bromcom Analysis whereby if you set cohort filter to a date range in the past and select Pupil Premium it will include students who became eligible for the Pupil Premium after the date range ended. I think the issue is pervasive across the MIS because if you add the pupil premium flag to a custom report there's no interval to say when you want to see PP eligibility. It looks like as far as Bromcom is concerned if you become eligible for PP then you've always been eligible for it, like it's an eternal truth they've discovered inside you. I guess they figured that as you can get an accurate figure for today it doesn't matter but it's a strange oversight given how important Pupil Premium is as a pupil characteristic. I guess you can work around it by deducing eligibility from FSM and LAC rolls (which are date sensitive) but that would be a lot of hassle. Has anyone come up with a better way of dealing with this when doing analysis of past cohorts in Bromcom?

Hi @brotherwarren - welcome to edugeek! SIMS template formulas are instructions for marksheets - results only change for kids if someone opens a marksheet with them on, hits 'calculate' and then hits save. So in this case you're fine to edit the marksheet formula *as long as* no one opens a marksheet with last years kids on, calculates and saves it. To make sure this doesn't happen I recommend deleting those marksheets (deleting a marksheet doesn't delete the grades it shows). If teachers need to refer to last years marks then I would clone the template to make a read only version, delete the marks to grade formula column(s) and add back the aspect(s) as a column(s) for data review. Good luck Ed

Hi George, Here's a couple of ideas that might help. In a sims report if you add a subreport with no fields on it will give you a count - so if you make the focus of your report classes you can then have a subreport which counts the students of the class (you'll need to filter it to show only current class members). I think you'll need a different report (with a focus on marksheet maybe) to give you a count of assessment results (of a particular aspect and resultset) of each class. You then need a bit of Excel nous (which it sounds like you have) to compare number of students to number of results. If you have your sims reports output to CSVs you could link them to a third spreadsheet with power query and look at the differences there.

It's been a while since I used Assessment Manager but I think as well as the count problem @FishCustard raises there's also no square root formula. My advice would be to build a spreadsheet or power bi dashboard using the exported marksheet as a data source. It's a bit clunky but that's what you get for using Sims.

Hi Sefton, Distinguishing between no attendance and 0% is why I have ISNUMBER in the measure (0 returns true, blank returns false). Adding 0 to everybody will stop this from working though - did you do that to avoid a divide by 0 error? If so try %att = DIVIDE([n_present],([n_auth_abs]+[n_unauth_abs]+[n_present])) As that automatically disregards 0 denominators.

Sorry - that was my over hasty typing. ISNUMBER takes one argument, so your formula is missing a close brackets after the first Attendance[%att] should read PA = SUMX(VALUES(Attendance[External Id]),IF(AND(ISNUMBER(Attendance[%att]),Attendance[%att]<.9),1,0)/SUMX(VALUES(Attendance[External Id],IF(ISNUMBER(Attendance[%att]),1,0)

Hi @sefton, I guess you have a measure for your attendance right? It's important to use measures as they respond to slicers/filters on the page whereas calculated columns don't. So say your attendance measure is something like: Attendance = SUMX(table,IF(OR(table[statistical Meaning] = "P",table[statistical Meaning] = "E"),1,0) / SUMX(table,IF(table[statistical Meaning] = "C",0,1) SUMX iterates through the table performing the expression for each row of the table (that is visible after applying the selected filters), does the IF expression and sums the result - so this gives you the sum of all marks that are P or E divided by the sum of all marks that aren't Cancelled (ie the possible marks). You can use another another SUMX to get PA like this: PA = SUMX(VALUES(StudentID),IF(AND(ISNUMBER([Attendance],[Attendance]<.9),1,0) / SUMX(VALUES(StudentID),IF(ISNUMBER([Attendance]),1,0) VALUES produces a table of all the values of a columns visible in the current filter context, so your numerator is each kid who has attendance below 90% and your denominator is kids who have at least one possible session in current filter context. Let me know how you get on with this Ed

Pathways is still a thing? I thought you could administer Behaviour from within the MIS now

Re timetable software I think it's often an underweighted aspect of MIS tenders because: 1. A good timetable has significant educational and staff well-being impact vs a bad one 2. The difference between a good and bad timetable is largely a function of how much time the timetabler can dedicate to improving their first schedule 3. The quality of the timetable software acts as a multiplier/drag on the limited time available. It's tempting to overlook timetable software cos it's only used by one person (usually), once a year. But its impacts are felt all year round so I'd recommend having a good look at any package your thinking of buying into.

Have you checked effective dates? Is it the case that you've removed the teacher from the form now, but they still have ownership of it in the date range being considered by the Individual Report?

Happy to BI of service If you want to show just one AP and have it selected by slicer you can do that by replacing [term]="ap1" in your measure with [term]=selected value([term],"ap1") Then if you have a slicer for [term] the measure will show the values for the selected term, with ap1 as the default if no term is selected. If you want to get fancy you can replace "ap1" with calculate (selectedvalue(term),resultdate=max(resultdate)) which should make the default the term with the latest result. If you make the clause a separate measure ('selectedterm') you can put that in the results measures (eg Term=[selectedterm] but also have it in a card to show staff which term's data is being displayed

HI @CyBeRkId2002 I feel your pain as (to the best of my knowledge) there isn't a great way to pivot some values in a matrix but not others. My preferred way round this (tho it involves a bit more legwork) is not to define a column value for the matrix, just a load of measures as values (each measure appearing once as a column in the matrix). This means you have to have separate measures for each of your assessment points. If you go for CALCULATE(SELECTEDVALUE(,"#ERR"),[assessmenttype] = "Current",[term]="AP1") that will give you your current grade. The advantaged of using selected value is that it only returns a result if a single value is specified by the row/filter context (in this case these will be the student and subject from the matrix rows and the AT and term from the formula. If a kid has more than one current grade for a subject and term it will return #ERR. You can use a similar measure to get target difference: CALCULATE(SELECTEDVALUE(),[assessmenttype] = "Current",[term]="AP1") - CALCULATE(SELECTEDVALUE(,"#ERR"),[assessmenttype] = "target",[term]="TTG") You'll want to add a check for missing targets/current grades though so add an if statement checking either measure for NULL values, return null (BLANK()) if yes, carry on with the calculation if no.: IF(OR(ISBLANK(CALCULATE(SELECTEDVALUE(),[assessmenttype] = "Current",[term]="AP1"),ISBLANK(CALCULATE(SELECTEDVALUE(,"#ERR"),[assessmenttype] = "target",[term]="TTG")), BLANK(), CALCULATE(SELECTEDVALUE(),[assessmenttype] = "Current",[term]="AP1") - CALCULATE(SELECTEDVALUE(,"#ERR"),[assessmenttype] = "target",[term]="TTG"))

Hi Panos - if you use a single instance of Bromcom than you'll need a single period structure. So if the difference between main and satellite is just finish times and periods start and finish at the same time you'll be fine, if however, main site P1 starts at 9am and satellite P1 starts at 9:15 you would need a period from 9 to 9:15 etc. This has the potential to make your timetables look pretty ugly as class info is repeated for every period and in this instance your lessons would be doubles or triples. Bromcom are usually happy to supply a demo system for prospective clients so my advice would be to ask and check it out for yourself. You can define period structures in Bromcom via Curriculum | Period Structures.

I think it accesses a local copy stored on the machine running SIMS - could be wrong about that tho, is @matt40k about, I bet he knows

Any reason why the choices being considered were just these two systems? Arbor and Bromcom offer a middle ground of greater functionality than SIMS without requiring knowledge of SQL/BI

You need to create a subject/subjects (overall, baseline etc) for anything that isn't subject based. Do that via the groups menu, then it will be available for classification of your assessment grades.