Seb1780

Wow, I had to re-read what I'd written and thought this was something from a few weeks ago, turns out it's from 2013 - at least I'm consistent Can you have SIMS without AM? I don't know and I've never thought about it. We still have Assessment Manager and have recently started putting data from Go4Schools back into SIMS to provide data to another system (MINTclass). Of course, this process in manual so it is only done after each report cycle. We will not yet move to Go4Schools for Behaviour Management because there is nothing for managing Report cards and Detentions; we don't want a split system so we will hold off until these things are in place. The intention is to ditch SIMS BM when we move (and we will move Attendance at the same time so Lesson Monitor will go too). I had a long chat with Jonathan, the MD behind Go4Schools, at BETT; they have development plans in place but they are a bit hit and miss as to the usefulness for us (schools in general I mean) and sometimes appear to be what the developers think will be fun (e.g. the recent "postcard" development).

Following on from discussions in another thread http://www.edugeek.net/groups/data-managers/521-when-does-fft-update-new-year/ I've still got unanswered questions. I know for this year the government has not reported an "overall" English KS2 result because they have replaced it with separate Reading and Writing results, as stated here https://www.raiseonline.org/contact/faqData.aspx?faqId=39 . The overall KS2 APS remains calculated by taking the average of Maths and English APS where the English APS is itself an average of the Reading and Writing APS, also stated here https://www.raiseonline.org/contact/faqData.aspx?faqId=39 . FFT, however, *appears* to be reporting the Reading Test Result level as the English level. The subsequent overall KS2 APS values *appear* to be calculated by averaging reading and writing and then averaging this and the Maths Test Result which is what I would expect. As a consequence we have children falling into the "wrong" prior attainment bands and "wrong" expected progress at KS4. I am not entirely comfortable that the FFT forecast grades will be modeled in the same way as previous years too. Thinking ahead (which is where I might be doing myself a disfavor) how are we expected to show levels of progress in English at KS4 if there is no overall English result for KS2? Does anyone have any additional knowledge of what FFT are doing / plan to do. Ditto, does anyone have any idea what we're supposed to do w.r.t. levels of progress at KS4?

@mark80 - I've just been through the first couple of dozen pupils on FFT Live (not Aspire) and I agree with you, the English KS2 result showing is just their Reading test result and does not appear to be taking into account the TA Writing assessment.

AFAIK spag/gaps/whatever does not contribute to the English KS2 score - this should be the average of the Reading Test score and the Writing TA result. My biggest concern are a couple of examples where the pupil has level 2 TA's and N or B SAT results and these are coming out as 3c - it just doesn't make any sense. I've got the LA on the case, so that's alright then

Of course it counts - you're collating raw data, verifying it, analyzing it then producing summary reports for senior management. You also provide a key link between the school, the parents and the wider community. Advanced Excel skills are always in demand! I interviewed for an assistant here and put in the ad that Excel skills needed to be excellent and they would be tested. I set a test involving date formatting, lookups and pivot tables - only one person came close to completing the test.

I came into education as a Data Manager from a background of scientific and IT jobs. The skills I had outside education were transferable into education so I see no reason why that should not be applicable the other way too. I do far more than "gather the grades and make spreadsheets"; our SLT do not analysis the data, I do, then report my findings. I look at trends over time; I focus on specific groups; I look at the impact changes to the rules make; I go to BETT and write a report on what's happening and where we should be going. This is "business analysis" - looking at what's going on and *understanding* how that affects your business/school. I don't do SQL, everything is done in SIMS or as a csv to Excel. I marvel at some of the things people talk about on here; how they have used their expertise to create automatic systems that populate home-made applications with data from MIS's. I sometimes wish I could do that, if only so I could resolve one or two niggling issues. But I don't *need* to do that to do my job because there are people out there who make or sell such solutions. What I need to do is identify the issues, provide data to support the case and identify the solutions. A little IT knowledge helps in this respect but I'm no expert on current technology (Netware anyone?). My role, which started only 2.5 years ago, is a lot different to the role the previous incumbent did. His forte was producing good looking reports to send home to the parents, we still do that but now I spend as much time looking through the data those reports generate and providing SLT with their own version of the report. I can see this aspect of a Data Managers role becoming more important in the future. I'm guessing your role could be similar, I expect we do a lot of the same tasks and I expect we face a lot of the same issues. TL;DR - Your skills are transferable, you do "business analysis", data is increasingly recognized as important.

That's Donkey Kong - I had that!

The student explorer option *should* allow exporting of data from FFT, but it's not there yet! Also, some questionable KS2 data in there - some of the figures are two or three sub-levels away from my calculations.

We use the SIMS widgets to keep an eye on the total reward points by year group and every few weeks we run a report to Excel, take off previously issued points then merge to Word to send out "cheques" for the balance in multiples of 25 points. The children can then spend them in the library on anything from stationery to iTunes vouchers. It takes all of an hour per month to manage, the hardest part is knowing what the kids will want - we have a surplus of One Direction merchandise after a steep fall in their popularity.

We've seen that too and the fairly poor results that are produced when they do come out! I've raised it with them in the past. I spoke with them at BETT and they tell me there are plans for a PDF print system to be launched in "a few weeks". TBF, their support team a very good and have responded quickly to issues we have raised, so drop them a line.

I checked with our techies on the way out and whilst they don't have a fix (just the workaround mentioned above) that have narrowed it down to "sentient" sound cards that recognise when a socket is occupied. "Dumb" sound cards don't have the problem.

If you find one let us know as we are still plugging in each time we want to watch!

Ignore me - brain freeze :-(

Yes, I understand that, but the lazy sods could do with the exercise In the list of things our Attendance Officer has issues with, it's very much a minor one and was meant as an indicator of the lack of problems we get with Emerge. You know where the buttons are

I've just been checking the Performance Tables data and noticed that the 95% confidence limits are vastly different to those showing in unvalidated RAISE. If these new confidence intervals are correct I've got far too much green ink ordered :-( Has anyone else noticed this?

We've not had any real issues with Emerge - biggest headache is for the Attendance Officer as we use afternoon lessons to complete the PM session register so if a teacher has taken the register using Emerge in the middle of the playing field they need to remember to walk along the touchline to get it to upload. Apart from that issues were limited to training / usage issues. Emerge does not do detentions, but then again Emerge does write back ALL attendance and behavior data to SIMS and we use detentions there. Go4Schools will only write back session attendance data (for census purposes), all other functionality remains in Go4Schools so it needs to be complete if we are to rely on just one tool.

Correct Perhaps, we don't go into that level of control here but it may be possible to do this utilizing SIMS permissions.

We currently use Emerge from Groupcall which works on phones and tablets. However, the introduction of the SIMS Teacher App is making us thing again as it introduces more functionality and is likely to be cheaper for us (we already have SLG as part of our package). We use Go4Schools and it is a good solution but we feel their Attendance and Behavior modules are currently a little short of what we want, no detentions for example.

You cannot set the behavior and achievement types to apply only to certain sub-groups; we too have some that are relevant only to a certain year groups but they appear for all pupils. You can determine which types are linked to the register and which are not, but beware that those types that are linked get used almost exclusively. This could, of course, mean we have got it set up exactly right, but I suspect it really means the end users only know one way of assigning behavior and achievement!

We got an e-mail from County earlier this week:- January release There will be a major release onto Aspire and FFTLive next week. Both Aspire and FFTLive will be down for maintenance from 5pm on Thursday 29th January. The new release will be available for schools to use from 8.30am on Friday 30th January. The January release will include: • Roll forward of all pupils to current academic year in Aspire for target setting • Autumn census (Oct 2014): updated benchmark estimates for all current pupils including new Year 7 in Aspire (KS2 and KS4) and FFTLive (KS1, KS2, KS4 and KS5) • New Aspire pupil import tool: for schools to import new pupils for target setting (i.e. those who have started since October) • New Aspire export tool: for schools to export benchmark estimates and targets for pupils in KS2 and KS4 (FFTLive can be used to export estimates for KS1 and KS5)

I know a ModDog who looks similar!

The haul from Switchshop was impressive, but not as impressive as "the" badge :-)

Nice to meet some of the team behind Edugeek today, it's really nice just to have somewhere to sit down whilst working out where you're going next.

After much um-ing and ah-ing the school decided it's not necessary to send me this year. So I'm coming down tomorrow under my own steam. Save me a badge

You had me at free!