taz

Has anyone found an AI platform that meets new DFE (Jan 2026) Standards for AI Product safety yet please? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/generative-ai-product-safety-standards/generative-ai-product-safety-standards

Thanks but we tried that too. I had two Aruba compatible SFPs and fibre - no joy. Possibly it's because I had SFP+ rather than S28, and while Aruba liked the SFP+ the S15+ would not recognise it. It wants S28s only. Will keep trying though - great tips coming here, thanks all.

Thanks so much for the tip - will definitely try these. I bought Aruba branded versions at 5 times the price so will be great if these work!

Thanks so much - we have the S15+, not S15. Seems to be an issue with the + version only - we used the same connectors in S15 with no issues. We got caught in a catch 22 - the modules that work for S15+ are not compatible with Aruba; the Aruba branded DACs and modules are not compatible with S15+ (doesn't even recognise them, possible driver issue). I believe the ports on the S15+ are S28, not SFP+, and won't work at anything less than 10g. We did get connectivity to a copper 1g switch port, when we tried to avoid using an SFP on the Aruba end, but it was unusable due to speed mismatch. Will close this out here (we went back to copper 1g each end) but if anyone solves it in the future, would be great to hear. Thanks all for your support - great community.

thanks so much @Netwacky87. Can I clarify if yours is S15 or S15+ please? Also, is this the version you had?

Has anyone been able to get connectivity between a Smoothwall S15+ box and an Aruba switch via DAC? OR able to do it using transcievers please? These are the transcievers we received from Smoothwall but they are incompatible with Aruba: Cisco SFP-10G-T-S Compatible 10GBASE-T SFP+ Transceiver Module - FS.com United Kingdom We then tried using the 10g transciever only on the Smoothwall and plugging the other end into a 1gb copper port on the Aruba switch. We got connectivity but we've gone from 500mb/s down to 2-3mb/s so the box is still unusable. Anyone managed to get 10g connectivity between S15+ and an Aruba switch please? We know there is a 1gb copper port on the S15+ BTW. However, Smoothwall have been unable to get it to accept traffic so we're stuck there as well. We're against the clock so our only option is getting the 10g connectivity running.

I thought so too but another 3 teachers have just told us the same - no way 5 different people made the same mistake in the exact same way. They also said they couldn't get into the registers - it says "locked". We can only see this from the backend manage attendance route. Will raise a ticket. Thanks for the feedback though

We've had 2 different teachers telling us they can't take Period 2 register this morning - says register locked. When they do go in the entire class is flood filled with "I" codes. Anyone seeing that? Different staff, different devices, different classes so we're sure it's not a device/user issue.

Just picking this thread up - what worked best - did you geoblock all countries and just open up the UK? Were there any side effects please?

For the last 2 weeks Classcharts has created half our classes as blank and the other half have duplicated students, e.g. a class of 32 students becomes 64 students. It's also sometimes duplicating seating plans - teacher A in room 1 sets a seating plan; teacher B in room 1 logs in and the plan is now applied to their class! As you can imagine that has caused chaos at start of term - we can't do homework, seating plans or let our new joiner parents onto the system. Nothing significant in terms of support, just a holding message. Anyone else having this issue? Thinking to cancel the contract - CC support has largely disappeared since buyout by TES - the real techs who knew the product are all gone, it's all just triage and message taking.

There was a known issue with Microsoft graph corrupting permissions with SDS created Teams this year. It's affected things like Class Notebook for example - you just get "something happened..please retry" error when trying to create them. Microsoft say they deployed a fix last week for future SDS-created Teams but we have to manually fix the existing ones. This is the script we used - I took the one from the KB article to fix a list of IDs at a time, but the engineer gave me a second option below for csv imports. Provisioning classes at scale using PowerShell and Microsoft Graph - Microsoft Support #You will need to connect to Graph with the following -Scopes Sites.FullControl.All #Chose which type of import, either search all Teams HiddenMembership Teams (all class Teams are Hiddenmembership by default) that are not archived, or comment out the first line with # and remove the comment from the second and define the path with the CSV. Please make sure the column with the groupIDs has the header names GroupIDs or you will need to change the property in the foreach loop $Groups = Get-Team -Archived:$false -Visibility HiddenMembership -ErrorAction stop #$Groups = Import-Csv -Path "C:\users\" $step = 0 Write-Host "Working on $($Groups.Count) Classes" foreach ($group in $groups) { $step = $step + 1 $Site = Get-MgGroupSite -GroupId $group.GroupId -SiteId "root" $SiteId = $Site.Id Write-Host "Processing permissions on $step of $($Groups.Count) Classes" # These are the AppIds for common Microsoft EDU Apps $AppIds = @{ "8f348934-64be-4bb2-bc16-c54c96789f43"="EDU Assignments"; "22d27567-b3f0-4dc2-9ec2-46ed368ba538"="Reading Assignments"; "2d4d3d8e-2be3-4bef-9f87-7875a61c29de"="OneNote"; "c9a559d2-7aab-4f13-a6ed-e7e9c52aec87"="Microsoft Forms"; "13291f5a-59ac-4c59-b0fa-d1632e8f3292"="EDU OneNote"; } # Apply the permissions to the group site $AppIds.Keys | %{ $AppId = $_ $Name = $AppIds[$_] $Body = @" { "roles": ["fullcontrol"], "grantedToIdentities": [{ "application": { "id": "$AppId", "displayName": "$Name" } }] } "@ Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method POST -Uri "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/$SiteId/permissions" -Body $Body -ContentType "application/json" } } Write-Host "Processed $($Groups.Count) Classes"

Same - we are completely down. Can log in but not showing any data. Can't take registers, find contact details for children not at school - Bromcom is putting all our schools at risk from safeguarding perspective. This is our first year using it - very much regretting it now, after a week straight of outages.

When you set up Bromcom you set a generic email address in the settings, e.g. donotreply@.. When you send an email out that is the default. However, you can edit that default while writing the email (it's just a textbox) and put in a different address, e.g. absence@... Not everyone has that permission - you can block some from editing the "from" address. Changing the from address changes it only for that email, not every email going forward. We use Office 365 for our email. Donotreply is the email address we authorised for SMTP in Bromcom. If you want to send as if absence@ then you need to give donotreply@ delegate access to the absence inbox in O365 admin. That way, it allows donotreply to send using the absence@ inbox, and then parents reply direct to absence@ It does take a little planning but we identified 5 key inboxes that we use to communicate with our parents, e.g, absence, trips, and just gave donotreply delegate permissions on those inboxes for "send as". Works perfectly. Feel free to get in contact if you have any queries.

We use Salamander to pull timetables from Bromcom and populate Office 365 calendars. Then staff who want an extra booking just book via their O365 calendars (or they email the cover manager who does the booking for them). There are caveats - we have gone a bit backwards since moving to Bromcom but not unmanageably so: 1) Salamander cannot pull exam timetables any more from the MIS - this is a Bromcom limitation. We got around this by releasing the Bromcom student app so students can see their exam timetable as a tile. 2) room changes via cover are updated in O365 for the teachers and pupils calendars. However, there is double entry for the room's calendar in O365 - this is a Salamander limitation. E.g. if Class A moves from Room 1 to Room 2, Salamander can create an entry in both Room 1 and Room 2 calendars but they cannot remove the entry in Room 1. It looks like classes are booked across multiple rooms, and rooms are full when they aren't. We work around this by saying all changes go to our Cover Manager so at least one person sees all room requests and can manually edit them. That said, it isn't ideal as we've now created a new job for our poor cover manager. 3) room closures via Bromcom are not pulled through to O365. This is a Salamander limitation, currently on a dev list. 3) we have 1600+ calendars to sync. Salamander runs the scheduled sync between Bromcom and O365 calendars every 2 hours to avoid killing the system. This isn't an issue for us but if you have a lot of quick ad hoc changes this might be a problem. We looked at a lot of other systems but almost all of them did not integrate with Bromcom or Office 365. They operated as standalone, which then creates a job for room changes via cover, exams etc. to manage. It also moved us away from the "all events in one calendar" model. If the room closures and exam timetables can be brought through in a future dev by Salamander/Bromcom, then it would do everything we need.

Did anyone ever find a way to speak to the Parentpay/ESS contract team? We cannot find a contact for anyone and emails are getting a standard holding answer.

We aren't under an LA for our IT but thanks anyway

Hi Simon, We use smtp.office365.com. Tenant is office 365 A1, account has an Exchange Online licence.

We send an all school email via Bromcom. Bromcom email report says 2099 emails went out, which we expect. However the office 365 inbox that Bromcom drops the emails to, only shows 531 emails were sent (can see them in the Sent folder of the Office 365 account). This is a persistent issue since moving to Bromcom - parents are telling us repeatedly they are not receiving some emails, and we can see nearly 60% drop in readership of regular correspondence such as newsletters. We do not use the Bromcom Parent App so it's not a case they are going there. Anyone else experienced this or have any advice please? I have checked the O365 account - no errors or delivery failures. It processed what it received which was 531 emails, not 2099.

*update* Firstly, thanks to everyone who gave advice, much appreciated. We did manage to go live 2 days later than planned. Since then, all has gone well. If I had read this post when choosing an MIS this would have put me off. So I just wanted to be fair - the day I wrote this was the most stressful day of the project and the point at which we were unfortunately the most let down. However, there were factors in the background: - as some have mentioned, Bromcom support is just a no go zone. Get yourself third party and you will be fine. Be aware there is a weird DMZ between them however - third party cannot help until you go live; after you go live Bromcom will not help you. So if you have an issue that sits in that middle zone of the actual go live, you are stuck no matter what reassurances Bromcom give you beforehand. Your third party can only ask Bromcom for help but that is up to Bromcom to give it - they have no leverage in that. - our Bromcom Project Manager largely did not follow up on issues raised and disappeared completely 1 week before go live. Our case was not picked up by anyone else and we only made it because others managed to call in a favour. Not sure how it was missed that a site was going live. - we never got an answer on what went wrong with our registers. In our case I methodically undid every change we made to go live, until on the second morning, we could take registers. I don't know if that is a coincidence or if something was fixed at Bromcom end. I suspect the key change was around automated rebuilding of the timetable after a change is made (if you are in the same boat, just DM and I will provide more info) but that is just a guess. - Darren from Bromcom did reach out and offer to support if we DM (which we didn't as we were live at that point) but it did show they are listening in the forums, which is appreciated So all in all, these were exceptional circumstances - at the root was a poor onboarding experience with one individual who was unfortunately a key one, and a process failure in picking up cases if a PM is absent. Being fair again, I know others had great experiences and felt very supported by their PM so I believe we were the exception rather than the rule. We met some very helpful people too, e.g. our Bromcom sales manager (Lizzie) went above and beyond to help us raise the alarm; onboarding engineer (John) helped with technical questions, Lydia and Steph managed to get our live site back to us with seconds to spare. If you are thinking about moving to Bromcom, I would still say go go go. I don't regret the decision - one bad experience does not make for an overall bad product. I'm also very happy for anyone to reach out if you would like to ask about our setup or what prompted our choices.

My advice, and that of our support company, in the end was to mark everyone as present for all lessons in Bromcom. Then run a report in SIMS and edit just the outliers. However, we have high attendance rates so that made the decision easier. I tried the export/import route and it took so long to get it right. BC have a downloadable csv into which to put the data to import. Getting the format right is really hard as you will be transferring out of SIMS and into that csv, e.g. the date field in the csv is free text, so if you spell the month November rather than Nov for example, it will fail. If you have any closures in the range you are importing, it will fail, e.g. we had an INSET during our import range and after 24 hours of banging my head over it, discovered I had to redo the data, one set for before INSET, one set for after. I didn't even get to the point of trying to get it out of SIMS - the experience of creating test data in the csv format was enough to convince me. Once we agreed on the second path, our attendance team took one day out (they already knew how to see all absences, sickness, lates etc. on SIMS) and managed to catch us all up in one day (2 week gap, 1300 students). There were some oddities, e.g. sometimes the bulk attendance update tool would say it was updating but did not, but in those rare cases, the team edited the record manually via the manage attendance tool. Feel free to PM if you have any other questions. We are liking Bromcom, and so much of it is easy to use, but the attendance tool was just too freeform for such a drastic action as mass overwriting attendance. Our fear was that we would get it wrong in the csv and either not know (some errors lost in the data) or in our relative newness to the product, do too much and overwrite years of data.

We are now underway for a second launch tomorrow - wish us luck!

Our migration to Bromcom has failed - we are unable to save any attendance registers. We mark the screen but it is not saving to the database - absolute nightmare and failed launch. Bromcom say "few issues with registers for newly migrated schools known" but no fixes forthcoming. Has anyone else had this problem and if so, how did you fix it please? I advocated so strongly for Bromcom - am so disappointed they aren't more concerned.Our third party support have been excellent in chasing it up but nothing they can do unless Bromcom can resolve at their end.

Policy: We have AI as an option within our MIS but are opting not to turn it on. Our school policy is that we do not feed any AI product non-anonymised data on staff or students, particularly sensitive data. We gave interested departments AI but more in a "generate a generic lesson plan" or "summarise this document" capacity, via standalone chatgpt accounts (Team level, so not used for training AI models). We blocked copilot app for students via group policy and AI in general is blocked on our web filter for students (not blocked for staff). Efficiencies: Those who already loved the idea of AI are waxing lyrical about how much time it saves their planning; those who are not particularly invested in technology other than the basics, are largely unimpressed. It's not sparking a revolution just yet, more sparking widespread confirmation bias. I've looked at a few products that claim to reduce load by AI marking - so far, it's been more marketing than reality, the applications are just too under developed or UI too clunky (save time one place, lose it somewhere else). If you are asking about AI within MIS specifically, they are mostly in early days, used for letter writing or keyword searching. I haven't seen anything regarding data analysis but that would be quite a big leap to allow AI to make predictions or summarise data that might affect student outcomes: SIMS desktop has no AI that I know of Bromcom: https://docs.bromcom.com/knowledge-base/the-different-types-of-bromcom-ai/ Arbor: https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/23469719769501-Managing-Arbor-AI

How did you got the data out of SIMS initially please - did you create a bespoke report?

This is so helpful, thanks so much