tombry

no probs dude, always glad to be able to help. I never use the teacher/student view, as I find it an unnecessary screen between things - I'd much rather browse students and pull the one I want, at least save myself a click later when I want to go to their behavior or something else.

ok, first off, I'm behind the ball here, as when I started I was put on behaviour, and then at the start of this year got AM dropped in my lap (I knew it was coming, but not nearly the mess it was in). So I'm trying to pull together data for all of our departments over the past 4 years - which is not uniform at all because of various people working on it, various systems, naming, etc. I decided to pull it all into Excel, and run from it from there. now, the first issue I'm having is I made these lovely pivot charts and all the tables are on one page - I change the filters, all my charts change, and I can print that out all nice (to PDF) and email each HOD their dept data. I now need to use that to provide a more timely PDF to SLT showing projections based on our most current TAs. Ideally I could set up a word document, populate my main two tables (GCSE/VI Form) and all my charts in the word doc would auto-update. Yet for the life of me I can't figure this out - whenever I change my charts in the Excel file, they all change in the word doc - including the edits I make to resize the charts to be more representative. I don't really want to copy my main sheet 17 times and change the data 17 times - I'm probably being really dumb, but it's driving me nuts. secondly, we obviously track 3 levels of progress in English and Maths, but are trying to figure out a way to track it for all departments. I've suggested that I use the TAs from Year 9 Autumn (first assessments) and compare that to the Estimated GCSEs, and finally to the GCSE Result at end of Year 11. SLT doesn't want that, as the TA from Year 9 might not be right, and isn't representative of the students' KS2 APS. I just don't see how we can extrapolate 3 levels of progress in subjects that aren't English and Maths from the KS2 APS - anyone got anything there? I realize I ask quite a few questions, but I am completely new to schools, and how they try to use the data they have just seems backwards to me at times.

I have a reward for our tutor groups, and I have told staff not to use it. I have two members of staff that do use it, and sent around an email to all staff saying that only I am allowed to use that reward, and that all others given will be removed for not following it. I very quickly got two emails apologizing, stating that they didn't realize that part of the achievement. I really don't understand why you would need more than that to get staff not to use something - the only thing I limit are the options available on the registers, and that's mostly because the list would be too long otherwise. as for the original question, I set a bunch of bullying categories last year, and linked a bunch of BIs to bullying as well as something else, and it took me forever to find the 2 or 3 places I had to find to get it right. in the end though, it is reported so little in my school, that I don't think it will ever be used.

oh man, there is no limit - I had a student last year that was fully booked up with after school detentions for the whole of the last half-term. my only real thought is that it stems from the detentions not being created? I'm trying to teach our staff to create the BI and then link the detention to it after the fact - otherwise they end up giving the behavior point, and then giving another when they put the student in detention and choose the same category. I'm slowly cleaning that up though. really wish I could prevent staff from putting students in detention without going from the BI honestly.

I seem to be the only person in my school that doesn't have fits with individual reports and 2010. but I do seem to remember making the changes @Jamo suggested, as well as doing as @vikpaw suggest in saving it twice. I have found that reports others design I have to redo some tags, so I'll see if there is a way I can get the changes pushed to everyone, as trying to walk even half our staff through that might be asking much.

This is all very excellent news - I will put it on my list for Monday now - thanks to all for your responses.

Rammie, I'm lucky enough that the people who I feel generate documents that should be in PDF format have bought into my line of thinking. the SENCO doesn't attach anything to our SEN page, so when I trained the admin lady who does, I told her they had to be PDF. worked.

@vikpaw, yeah, I am well aware with how much you can edit PDF's, but it's not generally as easy as changing a word document - and from the people at my school I get the clear impression that they wouldn't even begin to know how to. the other option to force the PDFs to PDF/A standard.

that's what I told the SENCO to do, just design it how she wants it, and I'll fix it up.

So my SENCO is trying to generate PEN Portraits for some of our SEN students, and she's asked if there is a report for SIMS that does it. Anyone have one?

yeah when I was fixing our courses in course manager yesterday it was taking ages to go from course to course. we are having network problems atm, so I assumed it was part of that.

as an aside to this conversation, I'm pushing my school to using PDFs for documents that are uploaded by users, as they are generally smaller, and not editable - most things that people are uploading I want to remain static, and therefore the PDF format works wonderfully. If you don't have a full version of Acrobat, or Office 2010 with PDF abilities, it would be a waste of time I suppose, but I completely push the use of PDF for archival purposes. perhaps it's my history of working in a lawfirm.

man the learning aims is my absolute bugaboo at the moment - all of our courses have 5 or 6 qualifications attached to them, and our course manager is a mess, I managed to clear about 200 errors today, but the rest of it is going to give me fits. really hate that I wasn't told about all the assessment/course mangement/exams stuff until it was absolutely wanted, consuming my life at the moment. won't be doing it next year dammit, I'll have this stuff clean by January I hope. sorry, venting.

Right, so I have this lovely excel file that does departmental breakdowns for the past three years, with next years projections. I have a sheet with about 10 Pivot Tables on it, that all feed charts. I'm putting the charts into a word document with commentary below it, and I'd like to make it so that each department gets it's own section of the overall word document (giving it to SLT). I can embed the charts, but the problem is that whenever I change the charts for the other departments, all the charts in the word document change. I'd like to know if anyone knows of a way to create chart sheets based off the filter - or if they have a macro that does it, as my only solution at this point is to give each department their own data/chart sheet, which kind of bloats out the excel file, and to be quite frank, is more work than I really want to do. ideally I would only have to update the text in the word document, and the charts would update themselves as I updated the data in the back end tables. anything?

yeah I have that report to run tomorrow with the bursar. I started so easy managing behavior data, and now I'm finally getting into assessment, and it's an absolute mess. cleaning it up should be fun, but in the meantime cobbling together the information needed(wanted) is an amazing test of patience.

Thanks for the ultra quick reply! From what I understand we want to track to to be able to know how those students are performing, mostly because ofsted is quite keen on groups, and that's one of the groups they are concerned on. So am I right in thinking that any students data I get going forward will be retained, and therefore I'll be able to more accurately track those students, and beyond that, the school's history of working with those students?

So I'm being asked by SLT to create a UDG of the FSM Ever students - which is any student that has had FSM in the last 6 years. Is there a way to do this that I'm just being thick on? I can't seem to get a report to run that gives me a list, and beyond that, I'm not positive that I could put them into a UDG anyways. High School btw, well, 9-13.

So I plan on pulling in the national exam results (A*-A%, A*-C%, A*-CEM%, etc.) and I have it set up right, but for the life of me I cannot find national figures for the APS (both GCSE and AS/A level courses) - anyone have a good source for them? alternatively, anyone have an Excel formula to figure it out based on what percentage of grades were handed out? I got this dropped on me last week, as the man who normally does all this is unable to this year, so I'm treading water as best I can.

that's a school that doesn't mess around! I'm trying to get our comments more uniform as well - on top of that I'm trying to get staff to understand how helpful it would be if they actually added comments to all incidents, as "continual disruptive behavior" doesn't really tell me anything when the parent calls up wanting to know why Johnny has a detention.

our SLT just recently got ipads, and were going to go with Emerge - which is what our PE department uses on their iphones to take registers. I set them up with Remote Desktop, and so far they all seem happier with that. I'm waiting for them to use it for a couple more weeks and then hoping to get a full report back from them on how useful it is.

Count me in for these as well, I don't need your aspects though, as I'd try to make them work with the ones we have here, but your end product is pretty much exactly what I'd like to provide to my teachers, and look far better than any of the individual reports I have gone through. tieing the templates to XML is a fantastic idea too thanks for that tip.

yes yes, there is tons and tons in there - but it doesn't go over the more advanced things - like attaching excel templates with macros to reports, and when I ask for the instructions to do so, my support team tells me it's too complicated, but I can pay them to come sit with me and such - thankfully I found the document on here for getting excel macros and such into the template. I found the assessment manager document I think I wanted, but I'm still not sure it's going to tell me everything I want to know, especially when it comes to using the analysis portions of it. A great deal of it is still, "do this, do this, do this", but not very much of the, "we are doing this because of..." but again, I've only been using it for 6 months, perhaps I just need to be more patient.

after only six months with SIMS, I hate that there is no audit trail, I hate the limited documentation (both from Capita as well as the LA support services), and I hate the general response of, "well, we offer a class for that", which really just teaches you how to do whatever one specific thing they want to show you. been annoying me to no end this week as I start to gather things to look into over the summer holiday.

Yeah, I don't think the data will be used for making judgements, just as a general indicator of student progression through the school. It's giving me fits though, as there hasn't been a data manager running the school's SIMS in at least two years - and the guy that has been handling the marksheets has so many aspects created that are worthless, finding the ones that hold the data I want is an utter pain. Add to that doing each teacher in the school, and it's really annoying me.

So I'm going to have a play today - I looked at Progress Grid, which seems to measure some of it, but I'm guessing what I'm going to want to use is Aspect Analysis for the TA/Est GCSE marks. Thanks for the guidance, as it looks like it should simplify the huge task of trying to use the normal marksheets to do the work. I may come back with some more questions if you don't mind, but you've at least put me on the right track. Mike, Thanks for your little blurb too - I'll google up 4Matrix later and have a look at it, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around the tools available to me in SIMS, let alone bringing a third-party software package into the mix.