July 2023 News Blog Post

Year End procedure notes for Primary Schools that use SIMS Dinner Money 7 module can be accessed here: – SIMS Dinner Money 7 Year End Guide 2023.

Please ensure you familiarise yourself with the notes before undertaking the tasks.

Any problems please call the Helpdesk on 03456436802 or email helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk.

Is your SIMS running slowly?

This may be a good housekeeping task for the holidays, when nobody is logged on to avoid disruption.  If you are unsure, please call for guidance:

SQL Server performance issues can be caused by several things.  Here’s a list of things we’d recommend checking/trying out to resolve the issues:

• CPU Usage (Overall % and what % is SQL using)
• Memory Usage (Overall % and what % is SQL using)
• Disk Space (Is the drive where SQL operates or the OS Drive nearly full ? It can have a huge impact on SQL performance id disk space is low)
• What are the size of the LDF (Database Log Files) If these have swollen in size it can cause performance issues. They can be located in the SQL program files installation area, inside the DATA folder.
• What is the uptime on the SQL Server ? Has it been rebooted recently (SQL Can sometimes take up a lot of memory when storing queries/procedures and doesn’t always free it up when finished)
• If the server is constantly running at nearly maxed out resources, it may need more resources allocating by the way of CPU/RAM.
• Is this server used for anything other than SQL ? If so, is the performance taking a hit in general or just in SIMS.
• Run Database Diagnostic and Validate Memberships – SIMS .net | Tools | System Diagnostics | Database Diagnostic and SIMS .net | Tools | Validate Memberships. (We recommend validate memberships is done regularly to tie up any membership mismatches in the database, this takes a while to run and can slow SIMS down please run at the back of a day and leave going on an evening).
• Check the specifications of the affected Workstation / Server and ensure that it meets the minimum SIMS.net software requirements.
• Check for any conflicting, corrupt, or high memory using Anti-Virus software on the system, as this may have detrimental effects on SIMS.net.
• Check whether you are using an express version of SQL and the size of your SIMS database. Express versions of SQL have a database size limit – we recommend Secondaries or schools with a large SIMS database approaching 10GB have a full SQL licence/install, as errors can be caused when the SIMS database grows in size (due to data being stored for several years for example) and then hits the SQL Express database size limit.
• Please ensure that the SIMS/FMS/Discover/Solus Databases are set to run in SQL 2012 compatibility mode, this is changed within the database options inside SSMS – Let us know if you require assistance with this. (Steps on how to do this below)
• Please ensure that the SIMS/FMS/Discover/Solus Databases are set to simple recovery mode in SSMS, this stops SQL logging unnecessary transactions to the log files and only logs important info, meaning the log files swell up a lot less regularly. This is changed within the database options inside SSMS – Let us know if you require assistance with this. (Steps on how to do this below)
• Check if LDF growth has been restricted (Steps on how to do this below)
• Checking 3^rd party connectors to rule out them causing performance issues. (Steps on how to do this below)
• Please check you are on the latest Service Pack/windows updates installed that are available for your installed version of SQL

Checking if LDF file growth has been restricted

Check if the LDF file growth has been restricted. Where SIMS functionality requires the log file to grow (e.g. end of year procedures are being carried out, data is being added to the application), timeout and performance issues can arise if the log file is set to a restricted size and won’t allow the data to be added to SIMS.

1. Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and expand ‘Databases’. Right click on the SIMS database and select ‘Properties’, a new window will appear. Select ‘Files’ and this will display the two database files: the database and the log.
2. For the sims_LOG, go to the Autogrowth/Maxsize column and click the dial button (if you cannot see the button you will need to expand this window). Clicking the button will produce another window. Ensure ‘Enable Autogrowth’ is ticked. For the File Growth we recommend this is set to ‘In Percent – 10’. Then, select ‘Unlimited’ for the Maximum File Size.
3. Click OK to close the window as well as the other. The log file will no longer have a restricted growth and should improve the performance of SIMS.

Checking SQL Database compatibility and recovery mode

ESS recommend ensuring any databases relating to SIMS/FMS/Discover/Solus are all set to run in 2012 compatibility mode and simple recovery mode. This to both ensure the databases are functioning as efficiently as possible and also to stop unnecessary data from being logged and swelling the LDF files.

4. Open up SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio and log in with the SA credentials
5. Expand databases from the left-hand pane and right click on your database, then select properties.
6. Click on Options in the select a page section on the left, then ensure the following 2 options are set:
   1. Recovery Model: Simple
   2. Compatibility Level: SQL Server 2012 (110)
7. Once those option are selected, hit OK.

 Shrinking LDF Files through SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio)

Over time your SQL Database LDF files will swell, this is due to transactions happening within SIMS and them being logged to the LDF file. If the LDF files are over 1GB we recommend looking at shrinking them down ASAP, as they can start to cause performance issues with SQL. We also recommend this is done as a regular routine to maintain the performance of SQL.

Before shrinking the LDF files, please ensure steps have been followed above to set the LDF files to Simple Recovery Model.

8. Open up SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio and log in with the SA credentials
9. Expand databases from the left-hand pane and right click on your database you want to shrink the log file for.
10. Select Tasks | Shrink | Files
11. Change the File type to Log and then click OK.

 SIMS Database re-indexing patches

In addition, you can also run some re-indexing patches which can sometimes help performance by re-indexing the tables within the SQL Database.

Please let us know if you would like these to be authorised to your school, you can find them in solus should you wish to run them, by opening the deployment UI and hitting check for update.

(Patches 20647 and 22573) – These are patches we would recommend running at least once every term, to keep the databases indexed and running efficiently.

Just to note on the above, they need to be run when nobody is using SIMS and we would recommend running them with a 2-hour interval between them allowing them to run successfully. They also need to be run in the following order.

1. 20647
2. 22573

(This may be a different order to that previously advised. Following a conversation between one of our Techs and one of the guys at ESS, it came to light that ESS’s documentation regarding the running order of the reindexing patches is wrong, and the logical order to run the patches is actually 20647 and then 22573.  Running them in the order previously stated in ESS’s older documentation is counter intuitive).

Once these patches have been applied, please ensure the SQL Server service has been restarted through services.msc

Checking and ruling out 3^rd party connectors causing SQL performance issues

We have seen an increase in the number of 3^rd party connectors schools are purchasing and linking into SIMS, most 3^rd party connectors have an active sync with the SQL database and are frequently running intensive queries/reports in the background. This can cause performance issues with SQL and when multiplied by having a handful of these installed, the performance issues can become compounded.

They can sometimes have bad/corrupt config which also causes them to run more frequently/or at times they shouldn’t be, we recommend the steps below in ruling out any of them having an impact on performance issues:

12. Make a list of your 3^rd party connectors installed on the server and liaise with the office staff to see if there any installed on their machines.
13. Once you have a list, it would then be a process of elimination by disabling one-at-time and then testing performance to rule out that particular connector.
14. If you find disabling a specific connector has a positive impact on performance, we recommend then making note of this and speaking to the supplier/support of that particular vendor. Explain the issue to them and ask if they can carry out some troubleshooting and perhaps a fresh reinstall to rule out any bad config.

If you require any further assistance or have any questions/concerns on the information above, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and we can arrange a remote session.

We are pleased to inform you that the SIMS and FMS Summer Upgrades (version 7.212 / 6.212) will be available shortly but is not available yet. 

Please bear in mind that applying the SIMS Summer Release 2023 will remove the 2022/23 Census cycle.  With this in mind, it is important that schools don’t apply the SIMS Summer Release 2023 until they are sure that the DfE has accepted their School Census Summer 2023 return.

Copies of authorised returns for the 2022/23 cycle of School Censuses remain available via menu route Tools | Statutory Return Tools | Retrieve Authorised Census Return Files.

To see a list of the new features the release notes are available from our customer portals via these links:

School ICT customer portal:  https://my.schoolicts.co.uk/portal/kb?id=376

turn IT on customer portal:   https://portal.turniton.co.uk

Primary Schools

If School ICT are responsible for your upgrade, we will roll this out by taking a phased approach. If you would like the upgrade applying on a specific date or day of the week, watch for the email coming out and respond by replying to the email or giving the helpdesk a call.

For any newly supported customers joining our service, if you have not already done so, please ensure that your school has informed ESS by email that School ICT Services are undertaking support on your behalf (this process is included in the welcome pack we provide to new customers). This will ensure that we are able to deploy patches and upgrades to your establishment centrally through our online Capita management console. If you are unsure if you have done this, please call us and we can confirm this has been done on your behalf.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
 
Secondary Schools
 
Once authorised, the SIMS Summer Upgrade will be available on SOLUS3 for all Secondary Schools. We highly recommend this is applied ahead of the results download days to ensure this is as smooth as possible.

An email will be sent when the upgrade is available.  This will be sent to the designated central contact for your establishment. and may need sending on the technical department in school.  If you have no technical staff, please call the Service Desk for assistance.

Reporting

Once you have upgraded to the SIMS 2023 Summer Release, please remember to import the most up-to-date predefined reports. To import the reports, select Reports | Import, then navigate to and select PreDefined_Reports_v7212.RptDef (typically found in C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS.net). Once imported, the updated reports are available to all users with the appropriate permissions.

For schools who purchase turn IT on Patches and Upgrade Service

TIO will be rolling out the SIMS / FMS upgrade and to all schools from Early July.  If you have a consultant, we will try to schedule this to coincide with the time they are normally onsite, so that this will allow any issues to be dealt with quickly and efficiently. We will be in touch to schedule the upgrade.

We recommend that all Secondary Schools upgrade prior to the Exam Results Day as there are amendments made to the release since the last exam season to make it relevant for this year’s exams.

We require all users to be logged out of SIMS and FMS, (your internet, email and other software packages are still able to be accessed whilst the upgrade is running) and it will take approximately two hours (depending on database size). Laptops and PCs should be left switched on so that the upgrade can deploy to all necessary machines.

For schools who do not purchase turn IT on Patches and Upgrade Service

Please arrange for your SIMS / FMS to be upgraded to version 7.212 / 6.212 These will be made available on SOLUS once they have been released.

For ESS Hosted and SIMS Connected schools

The SIMS Summer upgrade is scheduled to be applied for all Hosted/Connected SIMS customers ESS are yet to release the date. – Users will be unable to access Hosted/Connected SIMS for the duration of this update.

If you have any further questions then please contact the helpdesk on 0345 222 6802 or by emailing the helpdesk on helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk for SICTS customers, or by calling 01865 597620 Option 2 or emailing mis.support@turniton.co.uk for turn IT on customers.

There is an Arbor Webinar on 21^st July at 11am which will cover this so please register and sign up if necessary as we don’t yet have a training course for this.  You can view the upcoming webinars via this link:

https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004772413-Upcoming-Webinars#payments-plus-0-3

And follow the Arbor link to sign up: –

You can also find help and exam results guidance too via this link:

https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/sections/360001895934-Examinations-results-and-analysis

Below we have added a collection of useful tips and links to Arbor helps centre Articles which we hope you will find helpful.

Logging in and access

Make sure all your staff have access to the system:

• If your password has expired over summer, you can reset this yourself by clicking the Forgot your password? link on your login page. If you are still experiencing issues, work through these troubleshooting tips with your office team.
• Staff being asked for a date of birth or being logged into the wrong account? Check for duplicate email addresses
• Make sure teachers can access their registers from their calendar so they can all take attendance. There are three steps to check if they are having trouble.
• If you want to give more staff access to registers. There are a few different ways to manage access: Giving permission for other staff or teaching assistants to take attendance registers
• My Classroom – You can use layouts from past years as these are linked to the room, but you will need to set up seating plans each year as there will be different students in your classes. You can see how to do this here.

Need to change your timetable

As you welcome students back, you might need to make some changes to your timetable over the next few weeks. Here are Arbor’s top articles:

• Staggered starts – If you have students who don’t start right away take a look at this article: Staggered Start Dates
• Editing your timetable – If you need to make changes to your timetable, we recommend making edits in Arbor from the Timetable Slots page as this is usually much quicker than importing a new timetable. To make edits to your timetables, such as editing rooms and staff, or deleting unneeded slots, take a look at this article: Editing timetable slots and lesson times
• Timetable periods can be used to help align your attendance marks into set groups. If you want to use this feature again, you will need to set them up by following the instructions in this article.
• Adding new lessons – To add new timetable slots just go to School > Programmes > Courses and click the lesson, and follow these instructions: How to set up Course, Class, Registration and Lesson registers
• Adding more rooms – If you need to move students to new rooms to keep them distanced, you can see how to set up a new room in this article, and move classes into a new room in this article.

Student enrolments and registers

Here’s how to make sure all your students are in the right registers:

• Add new students – If new students join you who were not added as part of the Applicants process, you can see how to add them then enrol them into registers: Adding a new student
• Enrolling in bulk – If you have lots of students you need to add to registers, see your options here: Enrol students into lesson registers in bulk
• Moving students to the right classes – Check your students are enrolled in the right registers and move them if needed: Moving students between classes or registration forms
• No registers If you were expecting to have registers today but don’t, you won’t be able to take attendance, follow these instructions: Why don’t we have registers today?
• Students missing from your registers. You’ll need to check their enrolment using this article.
• Don’t have any meal registers or students in your meal registers? Check out this article to help resolve this.
• Duplicate students or enrolled applicants who are no longer joining may need to be removed. See this article to find out what you’ll need to do.

Assessments

Copying over Assessments

If you used Arbor Assessments last year, you’ll need to copy over your setup to next year. Take a look here for how to copy over your assessments.

Data Collection Policies are linked to the Assessment policy. Because you need to select the assessments to create or copy over each year, you also need to define your Data Collection Policies each year if you use them at your school. You can see how to add Data Collections here.

If you’ve copied over your assessments but teachers can’t access them or the boxes are greyed out, follow these instructions: Why can’t the teacher mark the assessment?

We’re new to Arbor Assessments –

If you didn’t use assessments last year, you can set them up for next year to start learning from your data with simple, visual analysis screens.

• Primaries – See Arbor’s ready-to-go assessment approaches for reading, writing and maths assessments. Use Arbor’s handy quiz to pick the approach that’s right for you, and save time on setup with Arbor’s step-by-step guidance.
• Secondaries – take a look at Arbor’s Introduction to Arbor Assessments for a feel of what Arbor offer, then use our easy-to-follow setup templates for English Literature and Language, and Double/Triple Science here, or more basic setups here.

If you’re looking to manage your assessments in a bespoke way, our expert consultants can work with you to help you tailor Arbor to suit your approach – contact our helpdesk for further details.

Behaviour

If you’ll be using Behaviour in Arbor from September, you’ll need to copy over your setup to next year. Using behaviour for the first time? Take a look here for how to:

• set up your behaviour policies for the first time if this is your first year using Arbor
• schedule your detention and internal exclusion sessions if you used behaviour in Arbor last year

If you can’t select detention or internal exclusion sessions to add students to, this means they haven’t been scheduled for next year – you’ll need to set them up following these instructions:

• I can’t add students to a detention session
• I can’t add students to an internal exclusion session

 Communications

Make sure the right people can send email, SMS and in-app messages to the right people:

• Make sure you’ve completed the New School Year setup process to be able to choose the group in the To field for classes, registration forms, year groups, houses or custom groups.
• Sending communications -To send different communications, as themselves, the school or others, staff will need to be a Permitted Sender of the communication type they want to send. They will also need to have the right permissions. Check these settings here.
• Wrong signature at the bottom of emails sent – This is set from the staff contract, so check contract names on staff profiles to ensure the right job title appears in your searches and in communication signatures: Wrong job title or role in search and email
• In-app messages – Have guardians download the Arbor App and enable push notifications, or log in to Parent Portal to be able to receive in-app messages

Parent Portal and Arbor App

If you use the Parent Portal and Arbor App, guardians may have trouble logging in for the first time. Please advise parents not to contact Arbor directly, as Arbor won’t be able to make changes to their data.

• Logging in – If you need to send login details to guardians you can follow these instructions.
• Why can’t parents log in? – Follow these steps to get guardians logged in if they’re having trouble: Troubleshooting login issues for parents
• See what a guardian sees – troubleshoot issues and check your setup by Logging in as a guardian.
• Guardians may have issues if they have a profile set up for multiple children. See how this works here: Child at more than one school using Arbor
• Can’t access a child – Make sure the guardians are linked to all their children to be able to switch between them on the Parent Portal or Arbor App: Linking siblings to each other and linking a guardian to a child

API and 3rd party connections

If your data hasn’t updated in your 3rd party application, follow Arbor’s Top tips for managing your APIs

Please contact the 3rd party first if you are having issues. If you have checked with the third party but still need to contact us about your app, please do so via email. Include screenshots and as much information as possible.

Arbor now have a permissions checker. You’ll need the School: Permissions: View permission to access and use this page. If you don’t have permission, you’ll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

To check permissions go to Go to School > Users & Security > Access Control > Check permissions.

• Staff member – Select the staff member at your school, from a list of all staff on this Arbor site who have a currently active business role.
• Arbor page URL – You can use various formats to check, including the full URL, or excluding your school’s domain name (student-ui/browse).

Then click the Check permissions button.

If the user has access to the page, in the slide over you’ll see a message saying Access Available.

You’ll also see a list of the permissions needed to access this page, and whether the user has each permission.

More information can be found here

Statutory DfE Assessments

• You can now flip between different academic years on the DfE Assessment Analysis pages on the MAT MIS.
• To enable you to compare data with past years, Arbor have switched to using live data on school sites and from your schools on the MAT MIS, rather than Insight (as this dataset will soon no longer be available).
• Report on any DfE Assessment results from any academic year using the improved Custom Report Writer field.

Statutory Attendance for Schools and MATs

Arbor have added a new Statutory Attendance KPI to include only students aged 5-15 who are not enrolled as Guest pupils. Take a look at the guidance here for the MAT MIS, or here for guidance on your School MIS homepage KPIs.

Examinations

• When accessing exam information on student profiles, there’s a page for each section.
• When printing candidate labels your selections will be saved the next time you open the slide over.
• import times are now improved for results files.
• Arbor have also updated the integration settings to prevent API partners from retrieving embargoed exam results (unless given permission to do so, like 4Matrix).

New fields in the Custom Report Writer

• Report on your Formative Curriculum assessments using the new Curriculum Mark (by Statement) and (by Module) fields.
• Arbor have added a new SEN Notes field to the Student report. You can pull in all notes for a student in one cell, or add a filter just for specific date ranges or summary content. This feature is particularly useful for reducing double entry in multiple systems for IEP Reports.
• Arbor have also added an Actions Taken field to the Behavioural Incidents report, enabling you to see or filter on the follow-ups and outcomes of incidents.

Please see the link below for guidance on this.  Please be aware you cannot complete the Year End process until the last day of the summer term, and this must be after the PM register, however there are aspects of the Year End that you can start before the last day of the summer term.

There are 6 essential steps, which will need to be completed and a 7th step which is optional. The process is a linear function, and the elements should be carried out in the order indicated by the timeline and you can’t go back to a previous step once you have passed it. To start your Year End procedures, you can use the icon via Admin > Year End.

https://support.scholarpack.com/hc/en-gb/articles/6291694855965-Year-End-in-ScholarPack#please-read-0-0

Bromcom have published updated Exams Import and Results Day guidance and this can be viewed at the below link:

Exams Guidance

For customers setting up or amending their clubs and trips, please find some useful guidance via the links below:

• How to Create a Club or Trip
• How to Maintain a Club

Bitesize e-learning course (you’ll need to register to watch – but it’s free): Clubs and Trips