tombry

Thanks gents - I'll add this to my always increasing list.

Oh this is going to hurt! We issue staff/student timetables from the old routine as it will actually put our two-week timetable on one sheet of paper as opposed to two - any layout tips to get it to fit through the new (not new) method?

simple solution would be to print to PDF/Tiff

Is it Mrs Admin Additional?

when you right click, and add the behaviour, it gives you the option to mark it as resolved or unresolved - so just train your staff to mark it as resolved. we have reports we run on unresolved, that HoDs and STs are to chase up - this has generally worked to get staff to make sure they are marking appropriately, as they don't want their HoD constantly telling them that they don't need to follow up on things.

oh man, I wish the school I work at went with @LosOjos idea there - so many old, broken things in our SIMS

whenever I run a report and get that error I just RDP to the sims server and run it there instead

if you are just making cosmetic edits and do not need the field codes when you re-open the template, you can de-select the option for them to be included, and then it will keep your custom paper size. our admin ladies have a hell of a time remembering to change it to A4 all the time (defaults to american letter size)

I know, but it makes no sense to me that if I make them leave before their leaving date, their aims are marked as completed, yet after they are marked as withdrawn - just seems backwards to what it should be. and I don't want to talk about the Autumn Census, I have a feeling that's going to be a very very busy time for me with the way our courses are set up.

So our support desk gives us guidance documents for various tasks, and going through my census one reminded me of this, which still confuses me, and I don't think I've ever received an answer as to why (well, besides, "Because that's how it works"). So, can anyone explain this: Note: we recommend that all Leavers from Year 12 and Year 13 are recorded via Leavers Routine, accessed via the menu route Routines | Student Leavers. The system interprets a leaving date in a different way, depending on when the date is actually entered into the system. This advice will also be included in the End of Year Notes to ensure that Year 13 students have their leaving dates entered in ADVANCE of them actually leaving as this will ensure their learning aims are marked as completed for the Autumn 2014 School Census. It is VERY IMPORTANT for the Post-16 Data collection that the implications of this are fully understood.  Entering a leaving date in advance of the pupil actually leaving will mark all that pupils Post-16 Learning Aims as COMPLETED.  Entering a leaving date on the date of leaving or after the event will mark that student as WITHDRAWN from all their Post-16 Learning Aims.

I use the PP indicator, and under notes just put what it is for. as we only have two LACs and no Service Children, pretty easy for us to know they are all FSM6. but really, just tracking PP and FSM seperately should be enough

I use it quite a bit, and have built some pretty decent trend graphs with it for SLT, I've shown others how to use it, but I don't think anyone but myself and my compadre data man use it regularly. my AIO uses it for the dynamic groups, and my Head of Sixth uses it to track her students though.

I'd love to know why anyone would strongly disagree with this one? +2 from me - so much junk in our reports from people 'having a play'

I still went with letter grades, as the first group with the 1-8 point totals will still be getting letter grades, just the values are different - so all I had to do was add my estimate/target columns to my new sheet and copypasta the marks across. If you want to give them the numbers, then I suppose Ecclesbury's solution is the way to go - but I'd export to Excel, replace the letters with numbers, and then save that as an XML file and re-import it right back in as opposed to fiddling around with a marksheet

oh man @CAM drives me nuts when hiding/unhiding loads of template columns. I tend to work in Zoom view more often now as it eliminates some of that, although on my massive analysis sheets doesn't matter, I'll get bit by one of them. While we're listing things - how about when you go to edit what columns are included in a formula, and if you untick one, without unhighlighting all, they all get unticked? that's a fun one too.

like everyone else, this has always happened to me - I've actually trained my teachers that use templates to always hit the quicklink at the top for marksheets to avoid it, but I still get bit on it from time-to-time.

As long as I install the server and client on my SIMS server, and update the client on my machine it stays working for me - are you updating discover as soon as you update SIMS?

For RDP - if you use Microsoft's RDP client on Ipad, you can use cursor mode, which makes moving around a lot easier. Pros - Not only do you get SIMS access, but if you set the RDP up their school computer, they have access to all of their stuff (my deputy head rarely uses her laptop now for most of her tasks in school) Cons - no access from outside the school, as there is no VPN client (for us) that runs on the ipad.

I have two shortcuts - one with out the multiinstance switch - I launch from the one without the switch, and then launch the one with the switch - try that

Are your predicted grades and forecast grades being held in the same result set? If not, just lock the result set that your predicted grades are in.

you'll have to set your limits through the admin utility - but it will only do your achievement/behaviour seperately - not a net score. I have excel tables/pivot tables set up to give me net scores, but it's a long winded pain in the... and I only use that for form tutors to know their forms on a weekly basis. if you're behaviour team is looking for something quick, just design a standard report, based on student, include whatever student info you want, add the student conduct information, add the total conduct points (so that staff can see a number), and then filter that sub report by students who have a total conduct point less than 0.

been a while since I've used the RTF reports, but I'm pretty sure there is a field tag for "Next Record", have to put that in.

We handle it in both ways. When I was hired the school had only been using the behavior system for a term - and it was already a mess. They had teachers issuing detentions, and whatever staff member was in charge of the detention handling the escalations, which led to students getting escalated when they shouldn't have been, as well as being let out of detentions they shouldn't have been. First thing the assistant head put me on was cleaning this up, so I started by making it so that any changes to a student's detention had to go through me, and all escalations were now handled by me. This got rid of the student's ability to play teachers off each other (as a non-teacher I was able to follow up with teachers straight away), and after a half-term all the students knew to come see me when they wanted a detention changed or argued. To carry on from this I started pulling Ach/Beh/Det reports and noticed that some teachers had more than twice as many BI (incidents, not points) as Dets, a bit more digging and I found that they were assigning BP off the register, then opening up whatever detention they wanted a student in and putting them straight in, essentially doubling up on the students, also noticed that this was the cause of my issue knowing who had assigned the BP, as when adding from the detention screen, it doesn't count on the teacher's initials (not the way I pull it anyways, and breaks my detention register, as it doesn't show who assigned the detention) - so all those detentions they were giving weren't going to the teacher's name, but the BIs were - this took another term to get teachers straight on, but still rears it head today (2 years on), as some just refuse to do things the "right" way. Today our system is a smooth running machine - teachers give students detentions, I escalate them, and outside of the few instances where teachers are in a hurry, I don't have many being put in straight from the detention register. As for what happens when a student is booked up, as I handle all escalations I just keep moving forward to their next available date, last year in January I had a Y11 student that had detention every day until exam leave, and would have carried on from there, but he wasn't in school. As for the effectiveness of detention - I think lunch detention has less value than after school, but for some students it won't matter no matter how many you give them. I will say that my detention attendance is phenomenal though from when I started - we had three kinds of dets when I started, Lunch, After School, SLT, and total attendance was about 56% my first year, now we have Lunch, Senior Tutor, and SLT, and all three hover around 80% attendance, and our after school learning period (it's not a detention, but is) is at 90%

We don't use fine grades, but I would think that along with sublevels going away, you'd have a hard time using fine grades in a 1 point system, and it would totally break the easy way of seeing VA that I think the A8/P8 scores are supposed to show.

If I had the time to mess around and play with the complex excel reports, perhaps. I have yet to create one though - I got fed up with trying to figure it out, and just run bare reports that I paste into my excel files. I'm hoping to convince my head to send me on the two day AssMan course that Capita give, as I feel that will help me.