Latest Census Campaign Sent To All SIMS Schools

Dear Colleagues

Consolidated Database Patch 2 (27613) has now been released to all schools via SOLUS 3. However ESS have confirmed there will be a consolidated Database Patch 1 (not yet available) which will need applying when the Autumn release of SIMS is available.

What does the Consolidated Database Patch 2 do?
The Patch is not required for all schools but will be required if you are experiencing any of the following issues with your census validation:

Where a student has a missing reason for withdrawing from one or more of their learning aims, clicking on Calculate Programme of Study will fail with a ‘Subquery returned more than 1 value ..’ error message. This will also happen if Calculate Programme of Study is clicked when multiple students have been selected and one or more of them has one or more instances of missing reason for withdrawal. (England)

Solution: This patch will ensure that clicking on Calculate Programme of study will not fail when one of more pupils have one or more learning aim withdrawals with a missing reason for withdrawal.

Where a leaver has nothing to report in School Census Autumn 2022 except suspension data for the spring term, they should still be included in the census return file, but they are not. (England). This is triggering validation error TONT14C when uploading to COLLECT.

Solution: This patch ensures that leavers with nothing to report in School Census Autumn 2022 except suspension data for the spring term are included in the census return file.

Where a student who had repeated year 13 during academic year 2021/22 and left the school at the end of that academic year, some of the relevant learning aims data was not being included in the return file. This triggers DfE validation error 1887. (England)

Solution: This patch ensures that all relevant learning aims data is included for leavers who repeated year 13 and thereby avoids the triggering of validation error 1887 (and any related validation).

SIMS assumes that when a post-16 year is to be ‘repeated’, it has previously been ‘completed’. Although this is true in most cases, it is not true in all cases. In some cases, the student left the school when previously taught in the year, with both the programme of study and its learning aims set to ‘withdrawn’. In such cases, it is not necessary to ‘split’ the programme and its learning aims and the software’s attempt to do so can cause anomalies. (Post-16 England)

Solution: Where a post-16 year is ‘repeated’ and the programme and its learning aims are already separated from the programme and its learning aims from the original year, we no longer make any attempt to ‘split’ the programme and its learning aims, thereby avoiding several possible validation errors, including 1887, 2760 and 2761.

In addition to the issues dealt with by CDP2 for Summer release the following issues will be dealt in CDP1 for SIMS Autumn Release 2022

The Welsh Government has modified its list of providers for use with the Post-16 Return 2022. (Post-16 Wales)

This patch will modify our course providers lookups to reflect this change to the Welsh Governments CBDS (Common Basic Data Set). The Welsh Government has made a corresponding adjustment to its Post-16 Return 2022 validation and this will be provided via Fileset 2201.

The Welsh Government has modified its list of subjects for use with SWAC (School Workforce Annual Census) 2022 (Wales)

This patch will modify our SWAC subjects lookups to reflect this change to the Welsh Governments CBDS (Common Basic Data Set). The Welsh Government has made a corresponding adjustment to its SWAC 2022 validation, and this will be provided via Fileset 2201.

When schools with sixth forms in England click the ‘Populate from Exams’ button in Tools | Statutory Returns Tools | Update Prior Attainment the selected rows should be filled with prior attainment data based on both internal and external exam results. However, only internal exam results are taken into account. (Post-16 England)