pottd

I've worked with some primary schools and used assessment manager for reports to parents very successfully but I think a secondary school has too many 'variables' (i.e. teachers with variable amounts of IT awareness).

SIMS Discover will be great and will help drive school improvement. But next time I'd prefer it if the SIMS marketing dept didn't hype it for 12 months first! 'Managing user expectations' is a useful euphemism for 'don't get carried away with all the hype!'

I'm disappointed by the delay. Discover was originally slated for release in the Autumn term, so in my terms its 6 months late. Capita have been cranking up the excitement around discover for over 12 months now without even a beta test on general release. It was heavily demo'd at BETT just a week before this announcement. As an LA we've had to reduce some of our users expectations both of the release date and the number of machines that will actually be capable of running the software. Having said that, it still looks like a great product!

JohnCondon's right, Bromcom also showed a good product at BETT. There's good, strong competition for Capita in this area. More please!

Thanks for confirming the primary pricing. Capita are also suggesting links to assessment in a future release. Hopefully teachers will be able to register a pupil, then tap the pupil name to see a summary the pupil's current level in each subject. If some of the SIMS Discover stuff also makes it into the app, no self-respecting member of the senior leadership team will be without it ;-)

One of my tips for new users is that you don't need to create loads of aspects. In fact, it's a mistake to create too many. You can create a whole school system from just three aspects for each subject. For example: Maths Attainment Maths Target Maths Progress (where Maths Progress is a grade aspect that is a 'traffic light' column and can contain only +, = or -) Create a result set for each term of each year (eg Year 5 Autumn Term) and pair it up with the relevant aspect to create your template. Don't forget that KS and FSP results should be in your system already so don't create extra aspects for them. By all means download the Capita tracking marksheets, but remember that they're not easy to adapt if they don't fit your school - you might be better off learning all you can from them, then creating your own.