tombry

Yeah, the Ns don't matter so much. Now I'm stumped. sorry.

sorry, didn't mean "count" - it's a simple If Then statement, if tally column = 1, then Y, else N and I don't know why it works one way and not the other, neither did my LA support team

well, I think you could probably do it like I had to do my EBacc then. set a column to grade tally the KS2 aspect, tallying all grades, then set a column to count if that tally column = 1, make that Y/N then your if else statement is if your Y/N field = Y, use KS2, else Baseline make sense?

I know when I made my Eng Bacc aspects it was an absolute pain, as it seems that SIMS counts a blank as both >0 and <0 (or 1). what are you trying to get your marksheet to do?

Since the DfE is going to be looking at sixth form attendance, my new Head of Sixth would like to figure out how we can accurately track our sixth formers. I have told her we could turn on earliest marks, but from what I can tell that won't take care of afternoon registration. She'd also like to know that they are in school during their study periods, and apparently the school has done all sorts over the years, which their best solution seems to be a paper register that students sign when they come and go (of course most do not do this). I jokingly suggested RFID, and I think she took me seriously, but I know in looking into that for a lawfirm I used to work for, it wasn't practical, and was way cost prohibitive. So, how does your school track their sixth formers attendance?

yeah, sorry, I forgot how I set ours up, but I have them for senior tutors, sixth form, and reg groups, not subjects.

Phil is right, the home page widgets do this, but of course that's not going to work for a lot of people, as they want paper. @ieuanprice - if you add Conduct Information to your report, filter by Achievement, and subject, or behavior and subject, you can do this. I have reports for unresolved incidents, as well as a couple special departments that are set up with this kind of filter - only thing is it will only pull in achievement/behavior incidents that have been assigned from the register, or if a teacher has actually populated the subject from add behavior/add achievement screen. and if the behavior incident was generated by the teacher putting a student straight into detention you won't have any of the info. when I did my unresolved incidents report I built it for one house/subject, and then just duplicated it over and over changing the house/department - the first report took probably 10 minutes to design, the rest were done in about 1-2 minutes each.

@vikpaw, thanks for that, gonna save me and the other guy that change result sets a ton of time!

Fun. School - 470 Students, ~90 sixth form, rest 9-11 (three tier system) Time on Job - 17 months (coincidentally, same amount of time I've worked in a school, as well as worked in England) Title - Data Manager Job Duties - Data Manager, Tutor, Mentor, Behaviour Manager (good and bad), staff tech support for my things MIS - SIMS Analysis - AM7, Excel, Discover Targets - 3/4 levels of progress based on KS2 attainment, 1/2 levels for some of our very low ability students - band is based on KS2, targets are based on core subject tests they sit the first week/APS of those results. External Access - VPN/RDP for myself and some members of staff - still working to get teacher's laptops (RM) to connect through the VPN and access SIMS so that those that don't have a computer at home, or don't want to leave their laptop here, can have home access Other softwares I'm in charge of - SchoolComms, Parents Evening System, Cisco VPN setups, RDP setups Also have a mess of a setup, but I'm looking to clean up a great deal of what annoys me this summer holiday - mainly because the old data manager hadn't been on the job for about 2 years before I started, and the SLT that was doing all the data analysis is not a computer guy (he'd admit this), and tended to just bang away at things until he got it to look how he wanted, thus hundreds of grade sets, aspects, templates, etc. at least I can be happy that my detention attendance has risen from 48% last year to 69% this year.

I have my personal - @mednamot - currently I'm all about my Chicago Blackhawks chase for the cup...which unless you are American, might sound incredibly foreign to you! probably get a school one next year, as our Head is all about it, just trying to come up with what he'd have me post.

we use 3 levels targets for our low/middle attainers, and 4 levels for our high attainers - my biggest issue is giving students non-C targets, but not for me to determine, I just think I'd feel worthless if my targets were all Gs. we give all our incoming Y9s (three tier school system) tests in the second week of school which determines their targets - core are based off the core subject's result, while all the others are based of the APS of the core. and yes, this means a really intelligent student will have an A* target in Drama, Music, Art, and PE, even if there is no shot of them even getting a D. it leads to some Y9 reports looking like they're bleeding.

no, I know that, just want them colored instead

I don't think so - pretty sure they're just always red. I'd love to be able to highlight students in all the colors available really, as I think it would be helpful for teachers to recognize at a glance what special needs they might have in their class.

if you're just trying to show it on a register, put them on a department report - the department report still highlights the student, but will give a different code than the R - so you could make the code "A" for instance.

mostly right, except that you can definitely change columns from Read Only and back - it's how I make sure staff enter end of year comments in the right year column.

Thanks to all - that MRBS I'll have a look at - we use the PES, didn't think they offered the Room Booking System as well, might have to go down that route. the OWA is a good idea, but we run a 2 week timetable that ends up getting messed about at half-terms.

So I was asked by our head of ICT if SIMS can handle tracking the booking of ICT rooms by other staff, specifically to make sure that they aren't deleting other's bookings from the excel book that currently tracks it (so professional). I told her I'd look into it, but from what I've looked at, beyond giving a list of free rooms, there isn't really a way to book them through SIMS. Anyone have a cheap solution to this?

I have this same issue - I want to test removing their rights to Edit detentions, but I suspect that will remove the ability for them to add students, so I've yet to test it. I'd also like to remove their ability to add students from the detention panel, as detentions given from that screen don't accurately track who assigned the detention in my reports - nevermind the two departments that regularly give BP from the register, and then put students straight into detention, doubling up their behaviour points.

I think your top link and the bottom link are for the same company when you get around to it. I set up a trial for our school for Y11 Parents Evening in November and it was glorious - worked perfectly, so perfectly we instantly bought the system (good price). I then set up a Year 9 tutor evening, and that went wonderfully as well. Then I made a bunch of mistakes setting up a Year 9 Subject evening (Year 10 at the same time), without realizing that all of our teaching groups had changed, which was a godawful mess to clean up (but quite easy really). PES now has a tool that pulls from SIMS and will update the online system, which has kept me much more sane. Few things to keep in mind: Appointments and their breaks have to be the same amount of time, so a 5 minute appointment with a 5 minute break, I understand why, the teachers don't all like it though (for the record we go with no breaks, and count on staff to block out time they are unavailable). Teachers will not like it at first, as it puts all the appoinment making power in the hands of parents - so Johnny might book an appointment at 5, and Jimmy at 8, and your teacher is stuck for 3 hours (not true, they can always call and rearrange with parents, but this was the number one complaint from staff). Parents will absolutely love it (unless they are computer illiterate and you don't have a safety net set up) - I have only had about 5 complaints regarding the system, 3 of which were because all the appointments were booked, 2 of which were because they didn't want to use a computer to set the appointments - at which point I sent them to our pastoral office ladies, who happily helped them book their appointments. On the setup, if you go with parent details as the sign in method, make sure you give parents those details - so many different ways that their names can be in SIMS, and for a few it took a bit to get that figured out - the first time I set it up I used the 8 digit code and mailmerged a letter home to parents, after rebuilding it I used their names, and that was a bit more tenuous. From a SLT viewpoint it's great, you can see who has/hasn't booked appointments, make sure that those parents are contacted, and get a much more accurate number of attendees (especially if you make your teachers fill out the register afterwards). All-in-all I highly recommend it to all the schools in the area who have younger siblings of our students and have had parents demanding to know why they don't use the system we use. and as @Ecclesbury up there states, the customer service is excellent.

I have some reports that no longer work, as it seems the server load is too high. I've got around it for the time being, but next half-term I'm going to have to find a solution.

@LosOjos has the right idea, if you can design the XLMT to attach to the report it will be dead simple for staff, my LA Support team made one, but I don't use it, as I put out weekly files that I make up in excel.

@vikpaw - I've used that previously to force staff to have a view that I think they should have (well, SLT too), but the one thing that annoys me is the goofy shortcuts that can be shown down the left. I managed to turn it off on my computer, but all of our staff have it showing, and none of them use it. I just can't remember where I turned mine off from - any help?

Tons of views, no replies...feeling sad. Anyways, I put this on hold for a bit, and now that I have the new configuration utility, I am happy I did...somewhat. I'm curious if anyone else uses Discover, and if so, if they'd be willing to share some assessment graphs with me - specifically levels of progress, as I think that's what I want to use it for mostly. I plan on spending my time over the summer getting all my stuff in Discover set up right, and will be more than willing to share my templates with others. thanks

you have to install both the client and the server software on the server - then go into the configuration utility (administration utility now), and manually transfer two years ago, last year, and this year. then I believe your transfer will automatically run at 01.05 every day.

I used a former member of staff's profile to see what his view would have been, then made mine look the same. I then used screencast-o-matic's free version to make a video showing staff how to do it. didn't get any complaints yesterday or today... although I did have one older member of staff tell me that it was quite a surprise yesterday morning when they opened SIMS, I replied that I had sent out no less than 6 emails over the last 6 weeks preparing staff for it, to which he told me that if an email has more than a sentence, he deletes it. that's inspiring.