RootsSchImp

Hi @Glyder, If you have a column on a marksheet that has an aspect for storing if pupils are ARE/Above then if you right click on the column heading and select 'show grade distribution' it will give you % above/are etc. If you filter the marksheet for PP/Non PP it will give you those figures for the filtered groups. Obviously, doing it this way you have to go through each subject individually. A faster alternative is to use aspect analysis, to list all the ARE/Above aspects as rows, ARE/Above as a column pattern (this should make sense when you go through the aspect analysis wizard). You would then need to filter the analysis showing all subjects for PP/Non PP. Hope this helps Ed

My pro tip would be rather than approach the exercise as 'how can we replicate exactly what we do in SIMS in a new MIS?' to ask 'How can a new MIS improve our school's efficiency, allow us to work smarter and reduce our spend on third party software'. Areas I would look at (where I think SIMS is weak) are general workflow (if x happens, y needs to be notified, z outcome should happen etc) and parental engagement. I don't know if you use Learning Gateway but when I last saw it it was expensive and a bit rubbish. I think better school-home data sharing should come as standard on an MIS. Good luck with the search.

I made a sample video of four secondary MISs about a year ago. Bromcom and Progresso said 'good idea here's a demo to play with' while integris gave me an online demo of them using the system. It *looked* ok but if I was going to switch I'd definitely want to use it myself. Since then I've done contract work for Bromcom (though I'm not on commission and have no stake in whether you choose them) and I've been impressed w their handling of migration and customer support. No substitute for observing how systems work in actual schools tho-if you're going to switch, convince the higher ups they need to give you time to visit other schs to see their MIS working in real life.

I've spoken to Capita about this so just to fill out the thread. Capita say PA assessments refer to 'Performance Analysis' so analyses, patterns etc. I have NUKED Perf Analysis, deleted all grids, patterns, lines, the lot and the PA assessments flag is still there preventing me from deleting the aspects. My guess is that because Assessment and Analysis used to be separate modules, that Assessment maintains a record '# times used in PA' and that subsequent changes to Analysis have meant it no longer accurately maintains this record. For the sake of a clean system (which is why I'm deleting all these aspects in the first place) it's not worth pursuing this with Capita and getting patched so I'm leaving it here. But if hopefully if you find yourself in the same sitch you won't spend the hours I did wracking your brain for submenus to check.

In my experience support materials (from multiple providers) focus heavily on the obvious and rarely help if the program is behaving unexpectedly and you're not sure why. My advice would be to refer to them when you're first starting out with a module/system, but later on skip them and go straight for remote support. The other day I contacted SIMS via twitter and they got back to me within the hour so hat's off. (their response was to tell I can't do what I wanted to do - delete Capita PoS aspects but at least they told me that fast).

Hi Glyder, Have you checked that the aspects assigned to the grid are the correct ones? I often pull up a kid's record and use the assessment link to the check the aspect/resultset combinations the kids actually have, which is sometimes different to the one I think they have. Good luck getting it sorted Ed

That's a really good question. I deleted all my discover aspects yesterday, and discover is a separate category of reasons why aspects can't be deleted, which is unticked. However, in Discover I can still access graphs of deleted discover aspects (and those deleted discover aspects pulled info out of the regular aspects I can't delete)

Good suggestion, but no there's nothing, no results, nothing ticked, the only thing preventing the deletion is the mysterious 'PA Assessments'

Hi, I'm trying to bulk delete a load of aspects but I have a set which can't be deleted because they are used in 'PA Assessments'. Does anyone know what this refers to? I assumed PA was Performance Analysis but I've deleted everything from there (analyses, patterns, lines) and I still can't take them out. Cheers Ed

Hi Sandra, Periods exist independent of what goes in them, so you basically have to make p6 for everyone. Obviously you then have to take steps to make sure you don't put any other years lessons there. You can do this by right clicking on the period in the cycle screen, giving it a period type of 1 then right clicking on the y12 block in model and giving that the same period type. That's a bit of faff tho, so i would recommend finishing the timetable except the after school lessons, then adding the extra period and scheduling the left over classes. Don't forget you need to export the timetable cycle before you can export the timetable if you've added periods. Good luck Ed

Have a look around for someone to come to you, for the money you'd pay capita you could probably get someone to come to your desk and work with you on your own data.

Hi, one solution is to create an extra period, so you have period 4 at 12:20 then period 4a at 13h. Then make all period 4 lessons into 2 singles 4a and 4 and tell lesson monitor to disregard 4a. However, be very careful if you make the change mid year as it could wipe all your period lesson attendance data

If you're using SIMS then changing the filter from 'year 10' to 'Curriculum Year 10' should work.

Yep that's right - you do it on the timetable that's below the curriculum assignments, not the regular student timetable.

If want to remove kids from some lessons of a subject but not others you can do that in student curriculum assignment, using the 'relax' button to put them in both groups, then on the timetable below the orange class assignment bars, clicking on, and resolving the clashes.

I've worked with lots of SIMS schools and I also freelance for Bromcom. The big advantage of a cloud based system like Bromcom is that you can access it from anywhere, it's also easier to automate behaviour and reporting tasks and (unless Capita have made big improvements recently) the customer support is better than for SIMS. But you have to set that against the costs of money and hassle in switching. If your staff like SIMS and don't want to change then making them do so would almost certainly be more trouble than it's worth.

I think MAX can only work 'horizontally' looking at one student's result in lots of columns, rather than 'vertically' in one column for lots of students. What's your overall objective here @Twyne? Maybe there's another way?

Hi Andy, The most important lesson to learn about statistics and the one schools, in my experience often often overlook, is that they're a powerful way to predict the performance of groups and a useless way to predict the performance of individuals. Indeed, the usual way targets are set in schools: ks2 = x so target = y is worse than useless because the way that target is derived is: in a set of pupils with ks2 x in high performing schools the median grade was y, in other words lots of pupils did better and lots of pupils did worse. By making targets = y you focus attention on pupils attaining less than y, even though lots of pupils got less than y in good schools. You don't focus on pupils achieving y even though lots of pupils in good schools did better. In other words, many pupils below target aren't underachieving, but many pupils on target are. To quote Indiana Jones: your stick is too long, you're digging in the wrong place. So what's a better way? Teachers set targets. The objection I most commonly hear to this is 'our teacher expectations are too low'. People base their expectations on what's happened in the past, so if your school is looking to improve on past performance this will always be the case. As a school leader your challenge is convince your staff that because of changes your SLT is implementing, future performance will be higher. Teacher set targets are a way of testing if that message has been successfully delivered. You therefore shouldn't think of target setting as a single event, but rather part of a conversation with your staff about how well you are improving your school. An often overlooked, but vital, part of this equation is performance management of teachers. If teachers are judged (or think they will be judged) on the number of students who hit their targets then they have a strong incentive to make those targets low. This is therefore a self defeating form of PM. A system based on progress, where it's made abundantly clear that targets are inconsequential means an incentive to set higher targets as these may lead to greater progress. Good luck in the course, Ed

Two issues here. You have to put the lessons in the right place in Nova T. In SIMS only the subjects are appearing because these are the names of the groups for the block (with Sims assuming that all in the Gg group will do Ls and all in the tech group will do Sp) If you have a kid doing Gg and Sp you need to put them in the Gg and the Te group. Then in Student Curriculum, accessed via the student page you get orange bars and the timetable to resolve the clashes. If you've got lots of students to switch between groups it might be more efficient to create a separate block for Ls/Sp, leave options as six period classes in a seven period block, then timetable Ls/Sp on top of that block.

You are in the right place, you need to assign him to both groups, the relax button let's you do that. Then below the orange curriculum Memberships bars you have a timetable where you can resolve the clashes

Hi @jmshillito, It should be no problem to create this in Nova. On the Model screen if you create standard blocks by dragging the subject codes into the six blocks each with seven periods. You can then click on and edit those subjects which only have six. Finally, drag the learning support/sport periods onto the appropriate rows and give them 1 period each. The blocks should look exactly as they do in your example. Sims will assume that each row of each block represents a group of students, so for example in block 1 students either have Geography and LS or Tech and Sport. However, assuming you schedule Ls and Sp to happen concurrently you can use the awesomely named 'relax' button while putting students into classes to assign students to Geog and Sport or Tech and Ls. Hope this helps Ed

Wow, what an interesting problem! One thing to check is how cover treats staff who are timetabled to teach a class with no students in it (as this will I think be the case for staff taking lessons at the 'other' school). You're still going to have to keep two nova files in sync as Esteban points out. It seems to me like the logical endgame is one MIS for what is running as one school (even if lessons stay sing sex at ks3&4). I guess there are political issues about that though. Good luck!

No worries - well done for finding the workarounds. In general with heavy reports I find that previewing, then running from the preview sometimes works where a straight run report hangs - but that's something that only helps on the margins - there's only so far sims reporting can go!

Hi Di, So is the structure of the report something like Student, results sub report filtered to English, results subreport filtered for maths etc? It's a long time since I tried similar but I remember having the same problem - it's too much work for SIMS to work through all those subreport filters. What's the purpose of the report? My initial reaction is that exporting a marksheet to excel would be simpler. Or if you have any experience of MS Access running the report with one, unfiltered, results subreport then using a crosstab query might help. Ed

Is this functionality on the way @PhilNeal?