bobsmith

pretty sure you need to licence it (even if just for the legal side of things). Which MIS have you switched to?

basically - if you are out of contract don't expect to be able to do the upgrade. For us that means the next census is definitely being done through our new MIS.

Don't know if it helps - but I've got a specific user created in SIMS that the scheduled reports use to extract data for PowerBI. This user has full access rights within SIMS and has been running happily for months.

Once upon a time I was with you on this topic - but a database you can get striaght into isn't quite the advantage you may think it is. 1. you gotta be pretty sharp at SQL reporting to get anything 2. very easy to break stuff if you don't know exactly what you're doing 3. have you seen the schema for SIMS??? 4. You know SIMS (and everyone else) are REALLY unhappy if you mess around with the database (even read-only in SIMS Case) Now with what I've seen from bromcom and arbor - you can use modern reporting tools like powerbi to query via API and it looks pretty good so far. I'm getting our first test database (with our real data) on the 18th of March and I will be testing extensively to see what I can pull out into PowerBI.

From the legal point of view you just need registers for AM and PM sessions - so if the kids are organised in their forms for the day and you have form registers available in the AM and PM then it's easy. The fall back position would be paper registers for any session (AM/PM) where the form does not have a register scheduled. That's the simplest solution I can think of. Any solution that takes longer than the activity day itself is probably counterproductive.

Since we've just comitted to migrating to BromComm by the end of next month - can anyone from BromCom give us some techie talk about how you're expanding your infrastructure to deal with an influx of new schools?

Looked at it when it first came out, then cried and hid under my desk. Does it even fit your assessment strategy for KS3? That's the reason I didn't bother - the path we went down didn't lend itself to the PoS stuff.

short answer - nope

100% I'm now considering the move away because of this. I don't think I'd be doing my job if I didn't raise this rather than sleep-walking into a 3 year commitment to a product (particularly one which has been aggravating to use for the entire time i've used it). In terms of costs saved - during lockdown we had to spend a small fortune installing and licencing RDP servers to allow all of our staff to work remotely. We also have to ask our IT support company to run patches and upgrades out of hours. An integrated true cloud system would be an obvious consideration. In the immediate future the major issue for me is either negotiating a one year extension to give us breathing room to evaluate the competition and then make a decision and then do the move - OR - do all of that without an extension and possibly lose my sanity in doing so.

How long would you say it took you to do the migration and go live? From a DM point of view - how long till you reached the same level of competency with it as you had with SIMS? The new 3 year contract is making me want to push this move sooner rather than later.

I always start by getting my attendance team to reduce the missing registers to zero - if a kid has a missing mark then the register is flagged as incomplete anyway. This report does list teacher and room, a quick double click opens the register where you can spot the missing mark. It's a widget/Panel you can enable on your sims home screen if you have attendance officer permissions.

tick the active user box in system manager?

run a report to extract SEN history for ALL kids and see what you get out? Could it be just the one(or few) kid who has this issue?

i'd grab a backup and spin up a second sims server if you're in a position to do so. At the very least this should confirm if the history is available to you. If you find it on the backup it's probably worth contacting your support unit to see about doing a partial restore to fix it.

as it's actually missync running the report you don't need to specify anything. see above. edit - well you would see above if my picture didn't get removed when posted.....

Nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure...... Script the deletion of the sims folders if you don't want to go that extreme.

Turns out my clever scheduled task hasn't worked since we set it up! Thanks to coolhands for the fix, my IT guys missed the space in the parameters for the scheduled task.

SBS did it for us a little while back - it's not even particularly tricky - but if you have the cash to alleviate the worry of doing it in-house then a sims support unit is a good shout. https://www.schoolbusinessservices.co.uk/mis-support If you search for sims support on edugeek there was a thread at one point with a list of recommendations.

A quick google search found a good example retention policy from a real school: https://www.st-stephens.richmond.sch.uk/_site/data/files/gdpr/45E7BF0890B1FE30D1B46299F01C03CC.pdf looks like between 3 and 6 years for almost everything - actual SEN statements etc 35 years but those are frequently kept on paper anyway. As for querying the SQL database - If you're asking that question then I'd probably dismiss that route - if you don't know what you're doing with SQL it's pretty easy to lose it all!

it all exists in a SQL database that you can query without needing CMIS. However a better question is what does your data retention policy say? If it's been over 7 years since you migrated and when you did migrate you took everything relevant to current pupils then CMIS is only holding data on students who left more than 7 years ago - so they would be 25 years old if they left from year 13. Only SEN data and CP stuff would typically be required that far back. I'm sure our resident GDPR expert can correct anything I've got wrong above.

I've got Salamander here - can you elaborate on what you're putting in the udf so I can set this up and then pester them to copy what you did?

Between our IT support team and myself we've got the scheduled task setup now - once less thing to forget about.

We did the latest upgrade over Easter and users have been moaning about slow downs in SIMS, but performance has been so bad for so long I can't notice the difference. We're locally hosted and we don't have any hardware issues currently.

it's a lot like CTF - it's a standard format and provided you can export them then any MIS works with the government stuff.

The whole point of "Consistent Financial Reporting" is to make sure school finance data is reported in the same way. However it is not tied to any particular piece of software. At our school we've picked the finance packages we like, the LA has no say on it - provided we can provide CFR compliant data - which is very easy. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/consistent-financial-reporting-framework-cfr LA's often live in their own little bubble of reality - but they have no standing to compel this kind of stuff in general.