Damian

Truancy Call works well for us and links nicely with SIMS - updating codes and inserting comments that come in from parents by text. I'm not aware that it can be used to send out messages generated within SIMS.

TimH, that sounds great - please could we have a copy?

We used Profiles for reporting last year. Generally staff were happy enough with it given that no-one likes change, and our previous (pull data out of SIMS, stick it in Access, generate Word documents, write reports, upload to access then generate report) system was excellent from a user's point of view (though not from a back-room point of view). What staff didn't like about profiles was the lack of remote access (you can't stick it on a USB stick and take it home) and the fact that assessment info for the same report had to be recorded in an AM7 marksheet. This is better now that "tabbed browsing" has been introduced. Our biggest sticking point was remote access. Several staff were very unhappy with having to cut and paste from a word document into profiles (disadvantage of moving away from a well established system that staff found easy), some claiming it took a very long time (I just don't get this - though some were struggling on with touch pads rather than using a proper mouse). So we got involved with a pilot of SLG and tried using that. Because of hosting issues this was very problematic with some staff finding that they could not access SLG fully in the evening before a deadline, but there were also some odd glitches like the profiles edited on SLG coming into SIMS with the wrong font - this was not easy to sort out. Our impressions from the pilot were that SLG did not give a very attractive or intuitive interface - good enough for staff to use, but not what we would hope for from a good online reporting solution. It may be that SLG can be moulded into a much more appealing system, but we just didn't get that far in this pilot. We'll probably stick with profiles for this year, but we might be back to cut & paste. We're also looking at PARS + Connect + Insight, but we have a lot of stuff set up in SIMS - particularly AM7 that I don't want to have to set up afresh in PARS.

Have seen a demo of IRIS recently and found it very interesting: Pretty standard process of logging events but with a huge amount of flexibility built in (one small example, instead of labelling each user as, say, a Maths Teacher or a Pastoral Manager, you can adjust your role depending on the context of the event). The great power of it was the way it allows live analysis of the information in the database, so you can see how leadership decisions and other factors affect behaviour etc. over time. They are working on extensions to the system to enable registering etc. but as it stands it's a behaviour and praise logging, reporting and analysis system. One of my colleagues has a child in a school that uses it and he gets regular info about even small infringements of school rules which he finds very useful. The only downer is that it's another separate system, but the developers are very interested in interoperability. I thought PARS, ePortal etc were good behaviour management systems until I saw IRIS. Also, it's cheap with just an annual charge related to NOR, no upfront license fee so you can try it for a year and then ditch it with no great cost implications.

We want to achieve the same thing, and I've been looking at Pearson e1 as it seems to allow teachers to do this. I'd like a system that uses a page the teacher will already have opened to take the register, log behaviour/ praise etc. Seems like a significant gap for Serco. I did ask them about this at BETT and they said ePortal doesn't do it, but you could do it through their VLE. I need it simple if I'm going to expect teachers to add it to the long list of other things they are also required to do every lesson (electronic register, log behaviour, praise, specify learning objects, etc,etc, ... oh and teach...)

We're also interested in the possibility of moving to e1 - though some of this reports sound dire. If it does what it says on the tin it should be at least as good as Serco's offering (and our impression is that the report writer is better), but it sounds like it doesn't. Be very interested to hear if anyone has made a successful go of it. Damian