bobsmith

I'd love to bury our SLG, unfortunately it was renewed for another 3 years without my involvement (IT team grr!!). Pretty sure nobody uses it, certainly nobody has published any reports to it and they are still printed and posted at huge expense. In what other system do you have to go through this process to change a username? Even my online banking allows me to do this myself!

It's pretty easy to delete them, but you'll have to dive in and out of different parts of SIMS to clear out pesky data. The trick is to amalgamate any data you need to keep onto the most populated record first. You can always go the delete staff screen and view the report - it won't delete until it's done an analysis of what data they have anyway.

In my limited testing so far, although you can force a widget onto staff IF you've assigned them to a "home page group", you can't configure the widget per person as you would need to do.

do a quick guide with pictures, email it out to them, voila, you've covered your backside. You can even offer an after school or lunchtime session where you can do it with them. But you can only lead a horse to water....

Themselves, it's the way of SIMS

Pretty sure this has been covered before, but isn't there an issue with it not creating a unique id if you deploy it this way?

This is the main purpose of SOLUS 3, you install the agent (which you can actually do through SOLUS 3 itself in the first place) then you can push SIMS/Discover to the client PC. Do you have access to the SOLUS management console?

When I first started in education we were using Truancy Call by the contact group, then we scrapped that for Keep Kids Safe which offered more whizz for the buck. At my new school they were using Clarion Call, but with a bit of persuading I got them onto the successor to Keep Kids Safe - RS Connect Ed. Can't praise it enough, great support from their team, solid SIMS integration and loads of features.

learn some basic SQL and dump SIMS itself. Alternatively extract all the data you're gonna need and dump the lot.

The level in course manager is a bit of a red herring, it's for internal use only - doesn't get reported to the DfE or anybody else. You really need the levels to internally seperate different versions of the same "subject", like BTEC business vs GCSE business, or A-level vs GCSE. So in a nutshell, edit them in course manager (i.e. create a new course, you can't actually change the old ones) but don't fret too much as nobody but you will actually care what they show.

It's not a BTEC, it uses A*-E grading for a start. We run IFS Certificate in Financial Studies (CeFS) QAN 600/8537/X and I just bunged it under GCEAS in coursemanager, those level statuses are for internal use only from my experience. These odd duck courses are always fun to deal with. The place to check the details of these courses is The Register of Regulated Qualifications: Home page, it's not as good as it once was, but it's still definitive. There's also some spreadsheets with course values available from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/school-performance-tables-about-the-data which give you performance points.

I'm looking at RAISE now and can't see a KS4 inspection dashboard for schools own data, can you elaborate on what you are doing and where you've found it?

I can't see how this would work, aren't A-Levels still being entered with the exam board near the end of the course? How can they issue a Certificated U grade to a student they know nothing about?

Hi gang please save me from doubting my own sanity! Other than JCQ who do this simple breakdown of grades/subject there isn't any official national data like 5A*-C inc English and Maths published yet is there?

if you've got a QAN for the course somewhere then you can add it via EDIT PI within SIMS itself.

This was easy for us, but we only run 2 true btecs and a couple of cambridge nationals. Go to the student examination record and look at the board and the code. BTECs use unique codes for each centre taking the course so my codes will be different from yours, and sometimes different across different years! My BTEC Science was BFW36A and BFW35A, but the school next door has a different set of codes for the same course! In the column selection for the marksheet template just use the CES Examinations filter to find the aspect just like for a GCSE. The other huge caveat is actually making sure the BTECs are in examinations organiser properly, you want CERTIFICATION codes in your basedata and then the results either imported or manually entered in a marksheet.

Well ours does crash sometimes, but not from the really simple things like taking registers. If the re-index patch is not responding sounds like an issue on your SQL server. I presume you've done the "turn it off and on again" trick which shockingly fixes most SIMS related issues?

Just to clarify, it's reducing the RAM available to SQL, not the VM itself right?

But if you look at his memory usage stats it's nowhere near capacity.

Update - works fine from 4G and my home wifi, but not the school wifi. Still ports or something to do with the proxy the wifi in school is set to use?

Yeah, gotta agree with the others, Section 4 is the pupil, Section 5 is every other bugger.

Hi gang So what I'm after is some guidance/anecdotes from people who have actually used the SIMS Teacher App in recent times. My NM has got it working well enough to be able to give me valid device authorisation codes and teacher authorisation codes. But when I log in I'm not getting any action out of the app, lot's of loading circles but not one iota of data. Tried it on Android phone (yep already know it's not officially supported) and Android tablet so far. Any ideas?

Tools > cover > Reasons for absence The internal unavailability flag ought to do the trick. Also taken from SIMS built in help icon: NOTE: If the Internal Unavailability check box is selected, then where a member of staff is absent for this reason, (e.g. in a meeting), the absence is counted in Cover only. This absence is not displayed or counted in Personnel records or in the Schools Workforce Census Return.

You can create internal absences that don't count against your official absence figures, this will free them up from lessons and cover for things like sports day, lesson obs etc. As vikpaw says, you can schedule non contact time formally in Nova - but this is best done for fixed regular things like PPA and QA meetings etc.

Subjects such as?