tombry

that link worked today. I never know with the firewall we have the school - hell, can't even open a PDF from webmail through it.

our LA Support wanted £250 to do it, and I couldn't validate that charge - will definitely use @matt40k's tool though. matt, I can't get your link to work though.

@vikpaw Wouldn't you know it - after asking the other day I came up with a use for myself, and your script just saved me a ton of time. we don't put student email addy's in sims, but our head of sixth wants them to receive their reports, so I email them out - of course they aren't allowed to download XML files through their school email addy's, so used your script to batch print the lot as PDF. a life saver my man.

well that got me there, but I'd like to be able to use them on my grades tracking progress charts now...be nice to see whole school, PP, and non-PP at once

Phil, I'm testing this myself at the moment, but I don't see "Whole School" as an available graph. I can do it by gender breakdown, which would give me two dynamic groups, non-pp boys and non-pp girls, but that wouldn't completely cover it. am I missing something?

I had an issue with mine this week, and they had me run Database Diagnostics, which fixed my issue (was affecting my transfer of last year's data)

I can vouch for how awesome this is - we were part of the test group for using it and sending out my entire year 9 and year 10 reports last summer was fantastic. @CAM You create your reports just like you would normally, and upload them to linked documents. When you create the schoolcomms message you attach a report, choose it by template name (it will only give you reports that are attached to the students listed), you can then preview it, or just send it - it converts them to a PDF, and emails them out. If students do not have a report attached to them, then you are told it didn't send to those parents, and anyone that doesn't have an email address (I have 8 parents in years 9-10 that don't want emails) you get a list of who to send a paper copy to. what used to take me half a day dealing with now takes me less than an hour - and most of that time is making sure I have the individual report designed correctly. They also added the ability to write back messages sent through schoolcomms to the student record...but I'm sure they'll bring that up themselves in another week... ;p

I think if the senior team had a role that didn't involve being an educator, you could go for that, but without having a teaching background I'd think it would be awfully hard to get in there. mind you I've only worked in a school for 2 years now, so what do I know

we only allow it via the VPN and RDP, I've tried running SIMS on a teacher's laptop from my house and it doesn't work well enough (under our systems).

Why aren't you just printing them from SIMS?

@mark80 - that's basically what we went with - it came from looking at the progress matrix in RAISE Online, and working back from there - Ofsted seemed happy with it when they inspected us (if only they were happier with the rest of the school) so we feel somewhat ok using it with our students.

I work in a three tier system - so for the last two years we have tested our students on entry and compared those to their TAs from the lower 2 schools, and then using a very complicated formula (hah!) convert that to a baseline GCSE grade that we expect our students to achieve 2 (or 3 depending on your KS2 level) over - so if you came in as a level 5 student on your TAs, and we tested you to be a 5, we'd expect you to get a C, if you were an average student, or a B if you were a high attainer. Seems to work, our current Y10s are mostly working to on target, and gives us a decent spread of grades - the true test will be if it holds up next year when they take their exams.

Prior to my school changing the assessment schedule I set all this up in Discover - works wonderfully, and with the batch creation tool, can be done extremely fast - I think to set up an entire year group only took about 15 minutes. From there you use the various other discover groups to add to the whole school graph, and you can very quickly see how much certain groups are under (over) performing from the whole school average. during the christmas break I'm hoping to get it set up with our new assessment schedule

Tools - Lookups - Maintain - Conduct Communication Type

check cover - I know a few times we've had our cover person set cover for the wrong person, which causes the classes to show up on the cover teacher's timeline instead

FSM/CLAs are what we use the Pupil Premium indicator for - pretty sure that's why Capita included it. and that's a pre-set selection in Discover.

As someone that uses the HGfL, I think a lot of that stuff can only be downloaded if you are connected to the Grid. I know I've tried downloading things on there from home and failed, but had no problem in school.

you've got me at a loss there now - I know the instructions I receive say not to validate the connections, just put them in, but I can't see how that would be causing you the issue on your workstation. at least you can RDP to the server and make your graphs - not ideal, but a workaround for the moment while your support team figure out what's up with your workstation.

You're talking about a screen in the management utility though, which can't be launched from SIMS. I think my first thing would be to try using the discover utility on the sims server, if it's showing the same thing, I'd probably uninstall it and re-install it. as your transfers are working you obviously have the right sa user/password in Discover, but something isn't jiving

Now I'm confused - how are you launching the configuration utility from SIMS? I've always had to launch it from the start menu. I know early on in our use of Discover we would lose a lot of our settings every time we upgraded - I think @PhilNeal pointed out to me at one time it was because we were part of the trial, and had been upgrading from it (something, it was all set up prior to me being here). If you can get into the configuration utility, are your transfers working?

aren't KS2 intake levels on NCA Tools, not K2S? for Year 7 anyways.

Discover is finicky - need to make sure that you have the latest version running on the server (don't think there was an update with the summer 2 release), as well as the latest version running on your client. If you don't, it will not work. the first line of your log there says to upgrade Discover

So I was sent an email by the Head yesterday asking me to fill out this template for LPUK. each student needs a line per subject taken at AS/A2, with their result, showing a bunch of other data (SEN/FSM/EAL/5A*-C/EM/EBacc/GCSE APS) I'm pretty sure I can generate that through reports, but I'm not sure how to get their exam results to show using reports - the few times I've tried to pull it out, I can't be sure that the data is right, as it tends to pull goofy. Anyone come up with a way to generate this quickly? tom

excellent, should save me the headache of repeating that to every member of staff after every upgrade!

does SOLUS3 force the update to run though? I know we have to make sure to go through Start-Programs-Sims-Sims to get it to run right, if you use a shortcut from your start bar, or desktop you'll get incompatible database. I won't get SOLUS3 upgrade till next spring so I don't know how it handles the updates