RootsSchImp

If you making/editing a big assessment template in Bromcom it's worth bearing in mind that you have the option of exporting to XML via centralised import/export and editing it with a text editor (I use notepad+). This is especially handy for changing column headings as they are just free text and don't depend on any code. It's also possible to change columns and this is useful if you need to add lots of a similar formula. For example I recently had to make a template to split a combined science grade into its constituent parts so it was a 17 clause nested if then else, repeated twice for each of six terms. I did this by making a template with the formula in the first column, then the other eleven columns I wanted added for data entry. Looking at the XML for the template I then changed column type from 1 (data entry) to 4 (formula). The formula itself is a string that starts formula=... Copy that to a different notepad file (I use regular notepad for this bit) and use find and replace to adjust the five digit column reference numbers (which is what tells the formula what column to look at). Then paste the adjusted formula to the appropriate part of the code. As a time saver it's a gamble because if you make even a tiny mistake you won't be able to reimport the file. But once you get the hang of it it's a big time saver as opposed to going step by step via the front end.

Hi @quaiam, This should be possible, using subreports (the blue boxes below the regular student fields) First add the basic student details you want then the lesson marks subreport and add mark. A little book icon appears on the right to filter the subreport which you can use to filter to period one, date choose at run time. Then add the period subreport (which might be nested in the classes one). Add the room teacher information you want and filter to period two, date set at run time (when you run this report you're going to have to put the date in three times). Now move to filter the whole report. Set the filter to lesson marks exist (by choosing that subreport), where mark is missing or absent, period is one, and date is choose at run time. That should work. It's been a few years since I've made a Sims report so there might be a better way-like an option to choose 'today' as the date. Tho as Sims develops at the speed of a trilobite maybe not. Good luck Ed

This number being UPN? Which is fine, but what about admission number? That's my preferred UID anyway as every kid has one and it never changes. Provided of course that you can still get it on an assessment marksheet because the admission number column was blank there and I was having to rely instead on....UPNs which are there if you export "formatted" marksheets.

I was using SIMS for the first time in ages this week and I wanted to design a report with UPN or Admission Number on it but neither were available (the only unique id I could see in the Registration tree was ULN). Focus of my report was Student. I was on the clock so I found a workaround and didn't have time to investigate, but I'm curious if this was a permissions issue (although that would be weird as I had access to loads of more sensitive data). Are these fields still available for reports? Whereabouts in the tree are they? Cheers Ed

Hi @jmel27, Yes this is possible and yes it does require loads of columns. Use the data review using formula columns and the 'difference' formula to subtract each target from the actual. Then do nested if then else to look at those difference columns ( if less than -1 red etc). To do this in a reasonable time I recommend using the keyboard as much as possible. N takes to the next screen of the column making process. Tab your way through the buttons of nite, hit enter to open lists and start typing to get to the right column. If you're used to the mouse it can feel weird at first but once you get the hang of it it's much faster.

Hi Everyone, A colleague asked me if I could produce this absence report for groups in BI If anyone's interested my post on it is here: Absence Reporting Give me a shout if you have any queries/suggestions for improvement Ed

It shouldn't matter where the measures are. Is the relationship between the attendances table and student bidirectional? I think for this to work we need attendance to filter students, so if the arrows on your relationship only point one way that could be your problem. Double click the relationship and set the direction to 'both'. (see mine below)

Hi @mightymrp Yes, sorry I did that quickly and didn't notice. However, my original measure: PersistentAbs2 = countrows(PersiAbs)/CALCULATE(countrows(PersiAbs),ALLEXCEPT(students,Students[YearGroup])) is responding to my date slicer in the test file I've got. Are you sure that's not the case with you? Are there any other filters/slicers that might be interfering?

Simple remedy. ALLEXCEPT in the formula can be understood as 'all filters/row contexts will be ignored except...' so if you adjust the formula to: PersistentAbs2 = countrows(PersiAbs)/CALCULATE(countrows(PersiAbs),ALLEXCEPT(students,S tudents[YearGroup]),ALLEXCEPT(studentattendances,studentattendances[startDate])) Then it will respect the date slicer (assuming the slicer is on Start Date in the Student Attendances table.

Hi @mightymrp, I think I know what you're after - I'm not sure my solution is the most elegant, so I encourage others to weigh in with improvements, but there's some good teaching elements to my approach. First up, we're going to create a new table, using DAX, via 'New Table' on the modelling tab. I called mine PersiAbs and it lists just the persistentabsent students. The formula is similar to that of the measure: PersiAbs = filter(students,and(calculate(StudentAttendances[Attendance%])<.9,isnumber(CALCULATE(StudentAttendances[Attendance%])))) Next you need to relate it to the Students table by dragging studentid onto studentid on the manage relationships page. Finally you create a new measure to use for the value of the clustered bar chart: PersistentAbs2 = countrows(PersiAbs)/CALCULATE(countrows(PersiAbs),ALLEXCEPT(students,Students[YearGroup])) This works because the numerator - countrows(persiabs) - respects the filtering of the chart, ie in each section of the chart it counts persistent absentees in the appropriate year who are/aren't eligible for PP Adding calculate to the denominator stops it respecting those sections. So if you had Calculate(countrows(persiabs)) it would divide by all persistent abs students in all years. We want it to respect the year filter, but not the PP filter - that's what ALLEXCEPT is doing. I prefer OData as it's a one step process - MIS to BI, without having to also set up and maintain ad hoc reports. If your reports are already built - maybe less of an advantage but it's still easier to maintain a BI file with one source rather than two.

Hi @themightymrp, The formulas in the post are for working out your school's persistent absence figures - so if you have the measure in a table of your students it will return either 100% or nothing (as then it works out the percentage of that student which is a persistent absentee). There's a couple of things to check if you're getting unexpected results in another way: 1, Manage Relationships - you need a relationship between the Students and StudentAttendances tables 2, Filters and slicers - can affect your results, even if you put them there for another purpose. If you post a bit more detail about what's happening, I should be able to tell you what's going on.

I read @mightymrp 's original post as asking 'is the output I can get out of BI worth the time investment required to learn it' and I think that's a really reasonable question. I also think @JoshAssembly made an excellent point about the potential for the maintenance of BI to snowball until you're basically in charge of a parallel, homemade MIS. That's the aspect that worries me most about building useful resources for schools in BI, for dashboards to be viable for school users there has to be a minimum of backend faff. I hope we can mitigate against the downside risks of that by continuing to engage on Edugeek so that new adopters can get help and support and by collaborating elsewhere as well. If people adopt, as far as is possible, common approaches and nomenclature in BI then it will be easier to share work and ideas and to pick up and run BI resources made by someone else. I've just set a blog that I'm going to use to publish advice on BI in education, if anyone else wants to guest post about what they're doing (or link to their own blog) please get in touch. I'm doing this in a personal capacity and all advice/resources will be free so I hope the mods won't mind me publishing the address: Welcome to PowerBIforSchools Cheers Ed

OK great - and likewise, I'd love to hear what you do with it. I double checked and you do need a pro licence to share content, but only one per school and for an educational/non profit org it's only $3 a month https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/power-bi so even in these tight times, probably doable. I also found the learning resources on Microsoft's site to be really good https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/guided-learning/ Have fun!

Hi @themightymrp, I'm working on BI for Bromcom at the moment and while I can't give you any marketing spiel, I hope the mods will be cool with me giving you some pointers here. Firstly, rather use reports you might want to pull data in via an OData feed https://cloudmis.bromcom.com/nucleus/odata (username your school ID and password your API key from the user menu in the top right of the MIS). OData lets you bring through a set of tables with Assessment, headline figures, etc in one go and it's a lot easier than creating and maintaining ad hoc reports. You might need to get support desk to activate the feed for you. Regarding costs/licensing you can configure the MIS such that everyone with permission to access the dashboards via Analysis| PowerBI Viewer does so via a shared account. You do this is in Analysis| Power BI Configuration. I believe you still need one power BI Pro licence but it can be a school account rather than an individual one. I *think* that upgrading an A3 Office licence to A5 will give you PBI and that it costs an extra £4 a month but best to check that with Bill. As for what you can do...it's pretty cool. Way better than any native Analysis tools I've used (in Bromcom or elsewhere). We don't have any free BI resources to share yet I'm afraid, but if you have any specific queries tag me into a post here and I'll be glad to help if I can. Have fun Ed

Arbor have a free results Analysis service (something like a raise online report from your tracking data). My guess is that 9000 is the number of schs who've used that plus MIS customers home and abroad.

My hunch is that it's telling you that the cycle in t6 has changed and hasn't yet been exported to Sims. You have to transfer the cycle before you can transfer the TT. But, be very careful about updating the cycle as it frequently causes problems in sims (or at least it used to). Also from a point of ease of scheduling I would have done the timetable first then added the non teaching periods after so they don't get in the way.

I've done work for Bromcom switching people from old to new and I'm a huge fan of the new assessment. Provided you use the same template design across multiple subjects you could set up a secondary school tracking system from flat in about half an hour. Tips for the migration: use it as an opportunity to archive old data - a clean well ordered system is worth so much more than comments from three years ago no one will ever want on a marksheet again. Get the mapping right - if you contact Bromcom they'll support you through the process for free. Take the time to understand how Assessment type exceptions work - used properly they let you have say 1-9 grades as Current grades, except for Business which uses BTEC grades for example, whihc makes for a much cleaner system.

Hi RPilkington, I haven't seen Behaviour Watch specifically, but I'm surprised anyone would look outside their MIS for behaviour management. Is there a solid reason for rejecting the MIS function? If yes, is there a solid reason for keeping the MIS? Ed

The other option would be to make the two option blocks into one linear block, split for all other classes 4/4. Eg. Dbl 8 Hi 4 Gg4 Fr4 Tx 4 etc I wouldn't do this if I were you because there's no way (that I know of) to tell Nova you want to keep the two halves of the block separate. Also, although your big class will only exist once in SIMS, all your other classes will have confusing names.

I don't think maintaining a fully operable MIS record for students 10, 20+ years after they leave is a reasonable expectation, I would export each cohort as a CTF and store those. That's going to cover 99% of future information requests. True, it doesn't cover @Banjo's SEN record scenario but if you're hedging against being sued there are probably dozens of bigger risk factors than failure to retain MIS SEN records (which may not be detailed enough to exonerate you even if you do keep them).

You can set up Bromcom reports as datasources (you have to pay extra for the right to do this but I don't think it's very much). Then you can use those datasources to make dashboards, analytics (cool stuff) in Microsoft BI (which again you have to pay for but it's cheap for schools). Then you can embed the BI dashboards into BRomcom so for the user it's just liek using a bit of the MIS. It's very new and I've only seen it in demo, but it's worth investigating cos potentially it's really great - there's no excuse for your SLT faffing around with Excel in this day and age. Ed

I just had a look and I couldn't see how to do this either - I think you'd have to separately filter each year, export their data to Excel and do it there. Analysis is pretty weak IMO - you can plug MS PowerBI into Bromcom though and that's excellent, so if I were you I'd do that instead. Ed

I don't think so. If you switch to a good provider they sort out the data transfer for you and if you switch to a good product you don't have to train your teachers beyond a short presentation, just your support staff. Plus if your using SIMS you can probably find an MIS that does the things you're buying third party apps to do. Sure there's risk and you need to plan the move carefully - it'll take you months not weeks from end to end, but it's not the huge deal people think it is.

I think ppl assume switching MIS will be much harder than it is when they've only ever dealt with Capita. It's a reverse-genius marketing strategy where your product is so terrible it stops people from buying a different one.

I think the most interesting aspect of an MIS is the extent to which processes can be automated (assuming SLT don't change them every five minutes) to reduce the need for admin staff. I think it's possible to run a large secondary with 3, office manager, data and exams and cover/attendance. Sims is way behind the curve here, Bromcom is way better. I haven't seen iSams tho-what's its scope for automating reports, behaviour consequences, detentions, alerts etc?