minimoo

Sorry!!! I've already emailed them asking if they plan to make a PDF version available for non-members (as stated) or if they just plan on doing the inline version. Will spend this evening comparing the retention guidelines to the original for any changes.

The updated "information management toolkit for schools" has been published it seems - https://irms.org.uk/page/SchoolsToolkit

Also, Netgenium do stuff in this space... although I think net-ctrl already knows that...

But not office 365 as a client on school devices? i.e. schools should use full office 2016/2019 in school. Staff/pupils can use o365 client for personal use

well, i'd expect it to show an estimated time to start up - e.g. from the logs on https://www.sqlshack.com/sql-server-database-recovery-process-internals-database-startup-command/ At the moment, you've got a SQL server that apparently failed to do it's last operation and now won't start up - which on one hand might just be a timeout on the apply academic year and now it struggling/taking a long time to roll up a transaction log before starting up - or a SQL server problem that is causing both operations to fail. In the first case, i'd expect it to have completed by now, in the 2nd case, i'd expect something in a log file. I'd probably get the most recent database backup file saved somewhere and let Capita/Sims/LA support have a look. When you said the last backup is 'only a month ago' - do you mean '30 days old' or more, it was from the 31st July? i.e, are there statutory registration marks for instance that would be permanently lost if you were to do a restore. In terms of the applying academic year failing there are a couple of KB articles relating to bugs that can cause the apply to fail - for instance, if you run capita's lesson observation module and someone has incorrectly used a future date in the next academic year. However in that scenario, i'd expect the apply academic year to have failed but SIMS to still have been accessible; and even Capita's workaround/solution I believe tells you to do some things in sims.net. Can you post some snippets from the logs from yesterday/today?

That's sounding rather excessive - what's the SQL server error.log files showing in terms of the status (of the 'recovery')?

The database being in recovery after a restart isn't necessary a problem (as it goes through that phase as part of it's startup) - https://blog.sqlauthority.com/2015/03/04/sql-server-database-stuck-in-in-recovery-mode-after-restart/

what was the error(s) it gave?

@Blue_Cookeh @Jamman960 - can you guys just clarify - as you seem to have contradicted each other - I thought that the apple id's via school manager couldn't be used to buy stuff? That's what Jamman960's said, but seems to be the opposite of your comment blue_cookeh?

the next question is whether you can get it to pick up the pxe server under uefi, and whether it works or you hit the same issue? But if the laptops are going out to staff, using tpm+bitlocker+uefi would seem to be a more sensible setup

This doesn't answer your question - but have you tried with UEFI on; and doing a uefi network boot - and using uefi all the way through?

Sorry, but I'm going to be pedantic here - you state someone could see 'yes to the website, but no to social media' - but what is a 'website' and 'social media' - http://www.facebook.com is "a website". At some level people are going to need something that is somewhat generic, if not it's going to get unworkable. You will end up with a form that starts to state: Do you consent to your child's photographs being on theschoolswebsite.sch.uk, Please confirm you are happy for the school to share the photo on a) facebook b) instragram c) twitter d) etc. The school may get asked to share your photo with a newspaper, are you happy for the school to share the photograph with the following news organisations: a) bbc, b) itv, c) sun newspaper, d) times newspaper. e) local independent . On occasions the school may be like to use the photograph on a site not listed above, in this case the school will contact you to ask. If you take @mrhall's comment and reference to page 23 of the DFE's toolkit, along with covering the above, and the case study text of: "permission to retain beyond their time in school (if required) should be sought" and " Photographs used in promotion/marketing type material should seek specific informed consent, and only be used in line with the consent provided" - does it not become easier to state in a policy: Whilst a child is at schoool, we will store a photograph for identity purposes (of the child) on our internal MIS system and canteen. This photograph will be removed at the point the child leaves the school. Occasionally we may wish to use photographs of children on our website, or other promotional material, in this instance we will send you a copy of the photograph and ask for your consent to use the photograph for this purpose for each use. In that way, there can never be any confusion, the school would always have evidence of consent for each use - the only downside might be that some parents may get multiple requests per year.

@bmaloney - can i also suggest considering something you could parse as text e.g. something like: Q.1 Question 1-------------- 1======== Q.2 Question 2-------------- 2======== In terms of PDF's, bear in mind that a number of schools might have stopped installer adobe reader for security reasons. The windows 10 Fall creators update 1709 added support for PDF forms I believe to windows 10 and it's native Edge browser, however with a number of schools likely to do windows 10 updates over the summer holidays, and fall creators coming out last october - you may find that there are some schools where the office staff won't have the software for edit a PDF form just yet. That would be likely to improve over the summer. However you will still hit the issue that people encourage staff not to open attachments / delete emails with attachments unless you know the sender.

In terms of this (And thanks for the thanks) - does anyone have any improvements to that template, or see anything obvious missing ? I would send off an initial question on wednesday or thursday evening I contacted github regarding the username 'edugeek' that was dormant, and they've released that username - so whilst I do want to have a check with the admins from here first (and potentially transfer to someone more appropriate), I have got setup and have control of https://github.com/edugeek as an organisation; which could be useful for a collection point for some of the projects i've seen downlaodable on edugeek before, and for a location for a wiki ( assuming there's no plan to fix the current wiki which we couldnt' log onto)

I'm going to try and get a wiki setup with information i've found (from google) of what other schools have published publically - which might then be helpful.

I've spent 20 minutes drafting a possible template: If the below looks like it might be a good template, i'd look at getting a wiki sorted with a template that responses could be pasted into - for anyone to see / use / edit how they see fit, and then sent off a few emails.

Is it worth 'crowd sourcing' responses? I'm happy to help set up an open wiki (e.g. on github) of responses/links to the supplier - and even send off a template email to all of the suppliers on the list and upload any responses back into that wiki if someone wants to help draft the information email. Can do the leg work this weekend if it would be helpful.

"As the data belongs to your school and you are responsible for the transmission by what-ever-means" OK, i'd been resisting joining in on this thread - does it ? (belong to the school) A student chooses to do a Russian GCSE with AQA (that's there choice when picking options). As part of that they have to do an oral examination to achieve their grade. Some examinations are done by internal staff, but equally at some levels (e.g. A2) the exam board will send an external examiner in. Does the data "belong to the school" if it's between a student and the exam board and the school are just 'posting' it on the behalf of the exam board / student via the method that the exam board and student have approved? On that note, if we continue: In the scenario that the examination board send an external examiner in to perform an oral with a student, and the "school" is recording that - should the school be asking the examination board to provide consent that they are happy for their examiner to be recorded (and the examiner also provide consent that he is happy to be record for that purpose) For minority subjects e.g. Japanese etc, which very few students do, I know we have in the past acted as a centre for the oral component for the local schools (so the examination board can send one examiner and do all the local students) - should schools now 'decline' to offer that service as it's a risk to "process" the data of non-students

In terms of the s:\sims\setups path - I believe that's likely to be out of date if you are using solus3 However, apart from both solus3 and sims being "broken" - your still not being overly clear. Are you trying to do this over a VPN from home ? (that might explain why solus 3 couldn't connect - it could also explain the errors using sims if the network connection is slow/unreliable/drops) What exact error(s) are you actually getting within sims

This thread isn't the clearest - sims normally has a database on a server and a client application on multiple PC's. In general i'd expect a lot of people to be using solus 3 to get sims updates and push them out either via solus3 or some other method. So a) do you guys use solus b) what actually are 'all the errors'

@jenatddm - in case you've not seen it - the dfe published a document last week updating their guidance on biometric information - https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/692116/Protection_of_Biometric_Information.pdf In terms of 'consent', between grumbledock, our LA and a couple of other sources, lots of comments about NOT making 'consent' a solution for everything.

And surely - one solution to this is for schools to start publishing their current staff count / gender split of staff on their website - some of the the request would then contain information that was already publicly available, and those bits of the request would be done to the requestor to look up themselves. After all - surely the purpose of the FOI was to encourage public bodies to make information publically available for ALL - and schools making more data available would be a good outcome.

And in that context, an pre-filled form/template from a requestor isn't necessarily manageable as a request mechanism

Not sure if that was in response to me - but if the answer to a question is already published, I thought that was a reason you could refuse that part of a request (albeit I believe the advice i might have read was to direct the requestor as to where it is published)?

@elsiegee40 @bmaloney - however, surely the intention of the act wasn't for people to do 'bulk' requests (and I do understand why people would legitimately want to do multiple requests). My point by this comment is the following - one of the questions in this request was "2. number of pupils registered at the school" - if that information is already published by school (for example on their website or in the data on the DfE's website e.g. https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/105050?tab=absence-and-pupil-population "total number of pupils on roll". It would be reasonable to respond to that with a "section 21 exemption" as the information is already accessible by other mains. Whereas Q3/4/5 are likely not published so the school would need to respond. In that context - a webform may not allow schools to respond with that as an exemption (assuming i'm correct here). Equally, from the point of sending requests to all UK schools, we'd all agree that you need to automate processing of the responses. I'd also note that in this case, asking for question 2 is irrelevant as the answer to question 2 should be the sum of 3+4+5 - at least that was the original intention. The school I'm involved in has several FOI requests each year on a similar topic; all slightly different. The comment I made today is that maybe we should look at what FOI's we've had over the last few years and just publish some data - with the aim of stopping those yearly/similar repeat requests. As for various reasons I'd suspect we'll get asked for data each year (it's data that on it's own anonymalised you can't really show much with anyway), we'd potentially make things simpler by publishing the data in advance of any requests. So again, in that context, to what extent should someone using the FOI to make a request do their own homework to ensure that the public body has not already made the data being requested publically accessible?