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Dear all, pretty sure I know the answer but suggestions are always welcome... We have an off-timetable (DofE day) coming up what is the best way to deal with just one year group off timetable and still have registers (the class registers would be all incorrect as they would be in form groups)? So far I have: Marked the classrooms as activity day in SiMs cover, and suspended (but not freed staff) using suspension rules. Is there a way to get SiMs to handle registers for form groups during the lesson times or do I just need to print off a paper register and make sure someone enters it at the end of the day? I have even toyed with adding a temporary class on Nova-T but I think that would be too much work. Thanks for any feedback! PS: is there a way to add a temporary class of any sort to cover? Like exam classes etc?

Does anyone know how to get the reports to output an accurate minutes late, or even what the minutes late output is based on. Either attendance minutes late or lesson minutes late never show an accurate value for the whole year but I don’t know how to get that any other way? Please note I’m looking for actual minutes late not number of sessions late or anything like that and ideally I would like it as a summary or aggregate total across the date range selected. Thanks!

Thanks that was exactly what I was looking for - just couldn't find it on the support docs. Does anyone know if anyone has had any experience moving back to SiMs.net (V7) from SiMs Primary? The schools really wants to be able to do things like timetable and have different lessons with different pupils etc but SiMs Primary doesn't seem to allow that at all..?

Hi All, Working with a school, as a favour, who have fallen for the trap of buying into SiMs Primary. Obviously it is a poorly finished product to start with but also capita seems to no longer be answering any phones or replying to emails. Anyone know of or got a copy of a proper detailed manual for how to use it - they are desperate to try and sort out new academic years' and alterations to make it more fit their school but this is simply falling on capita's deaf ears. Thanks!

What about a two week timetable where core subjects maintain the same slots but there are alternating options? Would that still be a nightmare to plan in your opinion? Just trying to make a proper informed decision about all this before I even approach management...

Hi, We are starting the process of deciding what is on our wish list for the next academic year in terms of school structure etc. and it would seem we have several questions. Background of school. School structure is we essentially run as 3 separate schools with a common sixth form. Main school (MS), super religious boys (B), and super religious girls (G). Lower school MS runs on an 8 period day (4 double slots, most lessons are doubles), with breaks every 2 periods. Lunch (between 4 and 5) is also split into first and second half of lunch. Sixth form MS runs on an up to 12 period day (8 normal + 2 lunch + 2 afterschool periods) they, however, have free periods. Lower school B runs on a 10 period day (8 normal + 2 afterschool) still in a 2/2/2/2/2 arrangement. Lower school G runs on a 10 period day (8 normal + 2 afterschool) but in a 2/3/1/2/2 arrangement with the first half of lunch defaulting to a teaching period (there are exceptions). On a Monday all hell breaks loose with the lunch period/s swapping positions and period 5 becoming like a citizenship period, shorter than the other days' P5. On a Wednesday there is an additional period between AM Reg and P1 we teach PSHE in (This time is normally assembly). SiMs in the past has just been used as a system to store the bare minimum - ideally I want to move to using it to handle everything... Timetable stuff. Does your school have a timetabled period for registration? (which lesson monitor then copies into the AM Reg?) Do you instead use lesson monitor to delegate when registration will take place (with no official period designated through Nova-T) and instead use the lesson monitor ability to override absence as late for Reg? How many lessons do you have in a day? of what length? How is your school organised, if you have a sixth form do they have different periods to others? Why? Are they just set up as a different Year or as a whole different school section on Nova-T? Do you timetable assemblies in Nova-T? Do you run a carousel of subjects? Do you have a multiple week timetable? Why? If you have extra curricula activities, such as music lessons or sporting events are they also timetabled as alternative provision lessons? Do you use automated timetabling through Nova-T?? Why? Pastoral Stuff Do you have a house based pastoral system or a head of years' system? or hybrid? why? If you run a house system, do you run your reward/sanction behaviour system tied to the houses? e.g. best house gets a reward. Any pastoral responsibilities that occur regularly (e.g. uniform duty, or patrol) are they timetabled? Misc Does your school use cover? How are teachers then notified of the cover? Does your school use exams organiser for internal exams that are not Mocks (e.g. Year 7 end of year tests) even though they are in several rooms at once? How would you organise teacher invigilation for that? How would you mark students on study leave? Is this handled somehow in Nova-T when the timetable is created? Is it done at the start of the year (or when the date of study leave is known)? Or is it left to form tutors to do it after the students are on study leave? Do you have a system whereby lessons might finish "early" but students are encouraged to do "afterschool" activities or enrichment to take you up to a normal finish time? Wow...sorry for the length, any comments are greatly appreciated!

We are setting up a new WiFi network at work (a school) that uses an ancient aruba controller (with aruba 105 APs) following the principles of eduroam listed here and the radius server is windows NPS again following the docs here. Initially I copied the existing config we have got for our current wifi to no avail. The current network still works fine but no one can remember the details (and it is not in keeping with the BYOD route we are going down). I have consistently been getting an error message of "authentication failed due to user credentials mismatch" (error 16 Event 6273) which most people have suggested through various forums means that the APs shared secret does not match - I have checked this more than once it does! Additionally I have checked the obvious account user/pass out and again it is correct. In order to try and diagnose the problem further I brought in some of my unifi gear from home and spun up a completely fresh DC/CA/NPS server in a test environment. Same error but this time I have also installed wireshark. If I "accept users without validating credentials" in the CRP then NPS returns a access-accept response, but the client still is unable to connect to the network (client reports dot1X timeout followed by operation was cancelled/server reports success) - this leads me to think it is something wrong client side? Then if I switch the CRP to authenticate on this server (client reports explicit eap failure recieved followed by network is not available/Server sends an string of access-request/challenge immediately before access-reject) presumably this means that it is waiting for correct verification from the client? CRP settings are: Conditions NAS port Type - Wireless Other or 802.11 Username - .+@schooldomain\.org\.uk$ Settings Authentication Provider - Local Computer Manipulation attribute rules - Replace "@schooldomain\.org\.uk$" with "@schooldomain.local" Target - User Name Override Auth - Disabled Network Policy settings are: Conditions NAS Port Type - Wireless User Groups - SchoolDomain\Eduroam Settings EAP Config - Configured (PEAP with secured password EAP-MS-CHAPv2) Ignore Dial-In Properties Grant Access Client is supplied an IP Tunnel Medium 802/Type VLAN/Tunnel-ID 66 Encryption Enabled So I have been battling with this for several weeks now and banging my head against a wall would be more productive... Anyone got any pointers?

Hi, We have a behaviour system that currently is based on number of a particular incident, for instance if they get 5 instances of being sent out of lesson the students are given a 1 day exclusion. Is there a way to create some sort of dynamic group/s that track students that have say 5, then 9, etc instances of them being sent out so it is easy to do the whole they just joined this group so they should be excluded for X time? I've been looking around discover but I can't seem to get a count of just 1 behaviour type, seems to always just give me students that have been sent out ever. thanks

Over summer we upgraded from windows 7 to 10. We had net support installed on the windows 7 machines and as far as we know we installed it the same way on the windows 10 machines - only issue is that no one knows how it was installed last time because the staff that were here have forgotten. One person thinks that there is a server-side component as well as the typical master/slave components installed on the client PCs but I have not once seen anything on any of the servers that suggests there is a server component and I cannot find reference to it anyway in the limited docs still around for our version. The symptoms appear to be that if you logon as a member of staff you can usually view some of the PCs set to be in the same room as the machine you are on, but not all of them - but they are all in the same OU on AD. We thought this was an issue with our version of net support so I tried installing veyon, this seems to have different symptoms on different PCs. Unlike net support I cannot do local discovery at all - even PCs that are on the same subnet. However unlike net support if I specify an IP/hostname to connect to it does so instantly. For this reason all of us are scratching our head: At first we thought it could be a VLAN issue with netsupport but the ability for veyon to connect disputes this. The DHCP and subnets have been completely changed to rule out any sort of routing issue. Although windows 7 does not display everything properly we even shoved veyon onto some old laptops and they seem to be able to connect fine. I'm sure it is something really simple but I have to admit I am running out of ideas.

As far as actual hardware I cannot rate Ubiquiti stuff highly enough, it's great performance gear at reasonable prices!

Yeah they emailed it out like a week after I posted this - I have never been so happy to check my school email...They just need to increase the frequency at which edulink and sims sync now

So more of an annoyance (that I know it is there) than dire issue, but does anyone know how to remove an academic year from sims. We have no students in a "Year 14" year, but it is still present in pastoral structure. I have tried editing pastoral structure and it does not seem to give me the option to remove the year group? any ideas?

Hi, Does anyone know if it is possible to message (using sims messages or email) on a certain behaviour event (say sent to exclusion creation) without us having SiMs InTouch? InTouch is something that we have been looking at getting but this year we simply can't afford it. We do, however, have Edulink One which offers similar functionality but not for behaviours created in SiMs. A new member of staff is convinced that we can do it, but they aren't sure if we need InTouch or not! Thanks!

Wouldn't you be better using the mail-merge function in SiMs reporting? that way you supply a template and it fills in the fields (and duplicates them) where necessary.

Can't you just use SiMs Behaviour? Then do Positive Points - Negative Points = whether or not they go to prom? there is a way to do it both through the menus and by designing a report. As for redeeming themselves just mark detentions as resolved and filter only the unresolved?

I absolutely agree with you even if it had to be scheduled like a cron job, but it processed everything since the last scheduled event, that way you could have things like behaviour summaries of the day/week emailed out or automatic detention lists emailed to people...

So if people create for example a behaviour incident in SiMs then Edulink's events do not get triggered

Hi, Using SiMs, Ruler (O365) and Edulink One does anyone know what would be best practice for allocating: Class Mailing Lists, Other MIS-related Mailing Lists, Parental Logins for Edulink (ideally never allowing certain (blocked) accounts creation from within SiMs, and, only allowing update from the nominated contact Additionally with edulink is there a way to setup in the admin console a link direct to the school only login page i.e. schoolID.edulinkone.com? We are (at the same time) in the process of moving to SiMs for behaviour management, migrating to Windows 10, and setting up Edulink One. Does anyone have any further advice and does anyone have experience setting up these products in their school? Thanks!

Unfortunately Edulink does not offer this service (at least not at the moment) it also can't deal with things published in SiMs which is saddening :-( hopefully they'll find a way to solve this...

Does anyone know if Edulink one can offer write-back to SiMs if a (e.g. a parent) replied to a message? That way we could completely remove the reliance on SiMs intouch? School has a trial of edulink but I haven't had time to install it yet.. Thanks!