tombry

G4S? isn't that a facilities management/security company? what software are they going to be giving you? I think that would help your questions to be answered.

as someone that came from a lawfirm, I can attest that a proper DMS works wonderfully - and the user has no choice but to use it, as it ties to the computer, and everything you save needs to go through it. I'm slowly converting people in my school to using PDF and saving things to student records, but it is a very slow process. I do have accounting set up so that they deal almost entirely in PDF now though, so that's a good start.

every report my LA Support has provided us for this kind of thing is tied to an excel template, which then does all the calculations. since I prefer my excel sheets I've set my own very basic reports up that I paste in - but that's yearly/weekly stuff I run for our house competitions, not on individuals. here are two of my LA Support reports - completely unchanged - should be one for AP, one for BP. APBP.zip

Can I ask why? I use an encrypted container on my thumb drive to move my excel files to/from school daily, some of which are chock full of student data. I'd be well impressed if someone could get into my encrypted file.

if it's sims, I have a bunch made up - all are slightly tweaked from what the LA Support desk gave me. key thing with behaviour/achievement reports is to use Student Conduct Information, then add in that category the Points/Date/Type stuff - then set a filter against the date with "Prompt at runtime" it won't give you a total, and you'll have to convert the text numbers to actual numbers in excel to autosum it up, but that's about 2 seconds.

You are page breaking on surname - you probably have siblings in the same reg group. I'm lucky that my first reg group has a brother and sister in it, so I saw that right away - went through, and every one of my siblings that are in a reg group together share a page. there's how I changed it a bit, but otherwise it's the same thing you gave me Emergency Contact Details (test).zip

that would drive me up a wall. anyways, it's got to be something in your design, want to share the report, I can test it on my data

your emergency data is going to change that often? regardless, I wouldn't seriously go the excel route, that was a bit of sillyness

well I can't think your output method matters a bit - if you can get all 541 to export out in one format it should work in any other. You could get really ridiculous and make your CSV an excel file, then mail merge it to a word document - but I'd think an RTF report would be far more ideal.

is your report removing duplicates from your parent contacts? it's possible that your report is only capturing one sibling if so. I designed an OV8 report for our school, and was having a hell of a time with it until I realized I was eliminating some parents by not including duplicates. then I found my local authority support group had already designed one, and use that instead now.

we have marksheets that cover the whole year group, and all courses that are being taken. we task our HoDs with pulling data from the marksheets so that they are aware. I pull data out and populate a master spreadsheet that kicks out charts for SLT, as well as maintains our "Ofsted Ready" document. ML with data responsibilities types up a word document that goes over all the key stuff and emails that around to all staff. Currently I'm setting discover up so that teaching staff can quickly look at their departments and know where students are/have been during the various reporting periods - really nice things can be done when you include UDGs and such in discover - dragging my ever-6 group onto the attainment charts gives me an instant view of where they are at compared to the whole school, and saves me having to do it in AM. I'm actually spending more time recently trying to get HoDs and their staff to use the data that is in SIMS so that I can get rid of some of the spreadsheets - as personally I love Excel, but as soon as data goes in, it's out of date.

All, I'm currently in the process of setting up Discover in our school - we were part of the testing, yet nobody ever set anything up, so it's pretty bare. I'm starting with easy things like showing grade progressions across our reporting periods (3 points in the year, 3 years worth), and that's all working quite well - quite like how I can throw my UDGs on the chart and it updates to show their performance against the whole school. I'm now getting into the progress measures, but I have no clue what I'm doing. I'm looking for either a group of people here that use Discover to give me some guidance, or even another board with some guidance - as like I find with most SIMS guides, it gives you a basic understanding of what it is, but assumes you know what some things mean/how they work. For example - when creating a progress discover aspect it wants a beginning AM aspect and ending AM aspect - I've set this up using Y09 Initial TA as my start point, and Y11 Spring Estimated as the final, but that can't be right - because those are the two points I put into the chart area, and I end up with a chart showing all 0s at the bottom. I haven't had a play yet, but I suspect I need to somehow get my 13points in there somewhere, and I can't figure out where that is. Of course I could call my LA support, but they're just going to suggest they come out and spend half a day with me, and the school isn't going to pay for that, so I'm trying to solve it on my own first. So, does anyone here use Discover quite a bit and not mind giving me some guidance?

yeah, I have 12 year 13s that are taking a combination of AS and A2 courses - for them I generate a Y12 and a Y13 report, and then use Word to put them together. I'm changing to AS/A2 instead of Y12/Y13 next year to save myself and my reporting helper the headaches.

I have staff set up with VPN usernames and then they can dial into their own laptops, or a series of computers I have set up, and use remote desktop. my SLT have ipads, but they only use those while in school, and I use the RDPLite client on them so they can access their desktops through them, not exactly small screen friendly, but able to take registers ok. PE department have 3 emerge licenses that someone set up prior to me being here - they all seem to like it, just can't afford to roll that out through the whole school - but personally I'd love to have it on my note2, would make my pastoral duties a bit easier at times, as I don't have a laptop, only my desktop. I have staff members on linux and mac osx at home, and I haven't had any issues with them connecting using RDP.

If they are individual reports from assessment manager you'll probably have to clear their targets from last year - especially if your individual reports (and your targets) never change. The individual reports will leave a row out if there is no data, but if you have some data from last year tied to a result set that is being used in your current Y12 reports, you'll get lines for the students re-sitting, or sitting other courses. As a data person I hate deleting data, so I'll be looking at changing the system in my school whereby we reuse reports from year to year, as I'd like to know that Joe Smith took Maths last year, was targetted a B, and wasn't estimated anything above a D for the whole year.

Right, so I've had a curriculum leader set up this new system for our higher achieving students, in order to push them to achieve even higher. they are set up in groups of four, and all four earn things at the same rate as their team - this is easily done for most things, but as we use our behaviour system extensively, I'm now being asked to make it so that if one of the students gets a point the other three are added to it (because apparently I'm magic). I was going to set up UDGs for all 8 of the teams, but when looking at adding achievements, you can't filter by UDG, which would make it at least somewhat easy. any of you have any suggestions?

I realize I'm bumping a completely old topic (that I made) but now I'm even more lost on this. I've gone through K2S, got all of our new pupils FSMs up-to-date, and yet when I filter on the marksheet it is still only showing me the students that are currently FSM - which isn't going to help me track progress/attainment of the ever-6 group. I can make UDGs, and will do, but it would be nice if the SIMS filter would filter on it - am I missing something?

I manage the behaviour system in our school. escalating detentions (when students don't attend but are in school) takes up about 40 minutes of my day, just about every day. there is no way to batch escalate students. sorry.

I do something similar, but go one step further and look at the curriculum by scheme for our Y12/13s, and then one scheme for our Y11s that happen to have private study on census day.

setting the proper result set was giving me fits when I first started importing data in...now it's one of the first things I check

one of the things I would love to see is to have some access to the pre-built lesson monitor reports to add in fields I'd like (or our attendance officer really) onto the reports.

I don't know if it is the same in 10, but in 8/9 you could go to Advanced, "Extend Features in Adobe Reader" - which allows them to save form data.

when I started in January I had to go take a class on reporting (wasn't very valuable). one of the things that came out of it though was that if you edited the templates with field codes available to choose from, it would reset the page size to letter, and you'd have to go back and change it to A4. nobody gave me an explanation as to why that was though. but I make sure that anytime I edit one of my templates I make sure to check the page size.

I realize this is of no help, but I was just handed documents on it from my SLT manager, and I'm finding myself wondering the same thing - is it a worthwhile endeavour or not? I'd hate to pay for it, and find it to be pretty worthless. I was a litigation support specialist previously, and took this thing that certified me as an EDD technician, but in the end nobody recognized the "award", and it was worthless.

well that's the plan, but I need to wrap my head around it a bit more before I do that, and that doesn't lend itself to getting the stuff out that SLT wants now. I think I solved it for now, wasn't easy, but it should buy me enough time to get AM cleaned up somewhat, and start with a new plan going forward.