bobsmith

the problem with doing it through the teacher PC is you've just doubled your electricity costs and reduced their lifetime by doing that. Running it off a server has got to be cheaper over the year.

or you could use some vlookups to translate it to one line per parent. (not as neat but it would work)

I didn't think SIMS was licensed per client accessing it, but by students on roll amongst other things? Application publishing has been talked about a lot on here and seems to have improved massively - I'm seriously looking at it to remove the load from our creaking PCs and onto the shiny servers we have.

@PhilNeal, Do you mean if we assign KS aspects manually to the assessment key indicators, or is there something I'm missing on the student teacher view?

Did you remove the student from the class that is linked to the course? If not then adding an exception to the course will keep him out of trouble.

The other trick is to create groups of students that they need to look at, attach the staff members to the group, then attach a marksheet to them. Works well so far with my SEN department. The issue is the standard presentation of the assessments page is a horrible mess and information overload to boot! I like the idea of just knocking up some individual reports and storing them, it's not like the data will change. Just remember that with all the changes to KS2 different year groups will have different data items to report on.

There will be an expectation of the highest level of maths taught in year 7 for the year group - this would be pegged for us at a grade 8/9. A student who masters all of this work is the kind of student who is likely to continue to get a 8 or 9 in their GCSEs. "Likely" is the important word here as many things may happen to prevent this happening, but all being well it is likely it will happen. What we are not doing is using the actual final GCSE grading criteria throughout a students career as that would largely be a nonsense. It's adjusted to reflect what has been taught at this point in their education.

really handy guide to the whole process posted by SSAT: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6DavuRcuhHnaHVJcGt1ZzVtTnM&usp=sharing

Since some other MIS systems don't use applicants (I didn't use them for 10 years in CMIS) I don't think individual schools return any census info on them. Therefore, unless you want them for some reason, you can remove them.

I thought Capita recommended that you do use the original record?

When I moved schools in January one of the first jobs I did was comb through ALL their contacts (literally one by one) to merge all the duplicates. The very next job was to put a virtual gun to the heads of the admin staff to CHECK for an existing contact before ever creating a new one. In the long run it'll pay off.

two part question gets a two part answer. old applicants - delete em (unless there is a super amazing reason why you'd need to keep em). contacts linked to former students - SIMS doesn't do "datasets" like some other MIS, but this is often a good thing. you can remove the duplicates - but I'd leave the rest, you never know when you're gonna need a phone number.

You can just edit the xml, just remember not to bugger up the structure of the xml by taking the wrong tags out!

To make it even more fun - the way we had it working - which seems to make some sense, the original author has access to it, but in addition the CP team (whoever they may be) would have access to it. none of the default permissions groups seems to cater for this - unless I'm missing something?

In my last school we contracted my baby brother to code a secure mysql database, hosted internally and encrypted each way from sunday - fully hierarchical permissions structure so only the right people only ever had access to full details, with summary info available to authorised teaching staff. Also had read access to the CMIS database so it could pull through SEN info and other useful stuff. Sadly they went to SIMS last year and it wasn't worth forking out the £££ to partner up. Current school uses filing cabinets.....

you mean SIMS isn't distributed on 3.25 inch floppies anymore?

involving a game of paintball first perhaps? vent some of the frustrations of working in education!

@hschram A very similar plan here, but a different approach to the definition of the "current" grade. 9-1 used throughout, however it IS possible for a year 7 to get a high grade as work is assessed out of the maximum available performance at that point in time. e.g. by the end of year 7 it is possible to get a level 5 in French - so a student who aces everything and is an incredibly strong 5 could be awarded a 9 as a current grade. This way you can identify students who are not "on track" to get their target grade as early as year 7 - the caveat is that the accuracy of grades is lowest in year 7 and steadily improves as more content and skills are taught throughout the years. It removes a lot of the fiddly and often wildly wrong conversions from current grade to target. It also harks back to the time when some of us may have been awarded GCSE style grades at school in year 7 (or first year secondary as it was called back then ) - they provided a much easier benchmark for laypersons (i.e. parents). No system is perfect, but as long as your system is transparent enough for a non teacher to understand it'll do the job.

I don't know off the top of my head if you can manually create course levels, but you can just create a new course, assign a subject and pick a level that you aren't already using to represent the 90 credit diploma. If you aren't running a full Diploma for that subject you could just use that.

the levels are just for guidance for the person looking at course manager - it makes no odds what you use. the QAN is the important bit, and the 90 credit diplomas do show there. We run two of them so got some experience with this.

Have you had the patch to enable the CTF matching scales? It makes importing students so much easier in my experience. The other approach which is pretty easy is to edit the CTF in notepad to match SIMS (or edit the name in SIMS to match the CTF - whichever gives you the correct name at the end of the day).

Not quite as bad as that. go to template - delete ALL marksheets attached to it (select all - delete). Add marksheets by going to the course and bulk add all (relevant ones). Takes less than 30 seconds per template.

ok, click on the "result" not the blue box, you can then change the "caption" at the top of the screen.

When I last looked at Integris S2 (the secondary version, G2 is primary) it was pretty cheap in comparison to both Facility CMIS and SIMS. It looked quite cool, they've got something like discover called RM Analytics (I think) - but it's all web based. It did strike me that it was designed for primaries first, then upgraded to cope with secondaries - so I'm sure you'll find limitations. My biggest factor when deciding on MIS is the migration from your current MIS to a new one, it's such a faff, and you lose so much during a transfer that if it ain't horribly broke I wouldn't try to fix it.

I got rid of any applicants that weren't admitted by now, then you can delete them from unlinked contacts. The alternative is to hand delete them from the applicants records (and re-add the original parent - linked to student rather than applicant - if you want to keep the link)