Results Download Days
On results download days, Wednesday 17th and Wednesday 24th August, the School ICT Helpdesk will be open for calls between 08:00am and 17:00pm as usual and our Exams team will also be available to deal with any urgent issues, received via the Customer Portal, (my.schoolicts.co.uk), from 06:30am.
Funding and Monitoring
The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) has released the school-led tutoring year-end statement form, and all Schools, Academies and Independent Special Schools that have received funding will be expected to complete and return the statement detailing how much tuition has been delivered.
This is a mandatory return.
Where the funding has not been used fully (or at all) by Schools and Academies, ESFA will treat this as an overpayment. ESFA will offset this against future payments.
Where the Local Authority has passed funding on to an Independent Special School and the school has not utilised it fully or at all, ESFA will recover this from the Independent Special School and not the Local Authority.
The funding will be recovered via an invoice from ESFA to the Independent Special School. We will use the information provided in the year-end statement to calculate this.
Refer to the ‘Calculating overpayments’ section in the school-led tutoring guidance for further information, including detailed examples which set out how overpayment will be calculated in different scenarios.
The deadline to complete this form is 6:00pm on Friday the 16th of September 2022.
DfE advice on official leaving dates for Year 11 students, Summer 2022
The official school leaving date is the last Friday in June in the school year when a student reaches the age of 16. Where a Year 11 student has applied and been accepted into the school 6th form, they must remain on roll until the end of term. Code X can be used for the period after the last Friday in June to the end of term.
Calling The Helpdesk
We have introduced a new system to ensure all calls are dealt with as quickly as possible in the order that they are received. You will therefore notice that when you call as well as selecting the option for the Team you wish to talk to, you will now be presented with additional options which are as follow: –
- Thank you for holding, if at any time you would like to request a call back, please press 1
- To request a call back please press 1 or continue to hold
- Please leave your name and preferred contact number and a member of the team will get back to you
If you choose to leave a message, please ensure you also leave brief details as to the nature of your call so that we can direct it to the correct support.
Alternatively, you can now log tickets directly on the customer portal and we will call you back without the need for you to make a call. Just log into the School ICT Customer Portal https://my.schoolicts.co.uk/ and select ‘Log a ticket’. You can also view any tickets raised and the action taken via the portal.
If you have not yet received a log in for the Customer Portal, then please give the helpdesk a call and we can set this up for you.
Training Courses - Book before September to secure 2021 / 2022 Academic Year Prices!
Training courses for the academic year 2022/2023 are now live!
We have a comprehensive schedule of online ’live’ SIMS training courses along with our growing range of Distance Learning courses, which you study in your own time and have access to for a full year, to help you develop your working knowledge of SIMS and get the most out of your MIS (Management Information System).
Booking is now open please visit https://www.schoolicts.co.uk/online-training/
SIMS Information - Exams Results
You will require the Summer upgrade of SIMS, which is version 7.206, to enable you to download your results and you will also need to refresh your base data with the latest version from each of your Awarding Organisations. Please have a look on our Customer Portal https://my.schoolicts.co.uk/ where you will find updated guidance for managing results days.
Don’t forget – we run an online training course to help guide you through this area, the next course is on the 19th July, there are only a couple of places remaining so please book your place quickly if this would be useful for you: –
Managing Results Day
SIMS Technical Roadmap
ESS have updated their Technical Roadmap, please click the link below for the latest guidance document: –
SIMS Summer Release
The Summer 2022 upgrade of SIMS, FMS, and Discover is now available via SOLUS3. This upgrade contains several highly requested new features including:
- Gender field rename for students and staff
- Pronouns can be selected
- Additional reporting fields/reports
To see a list of the new features the release notes are available from our Customer Portal linked below:
https://schoolicts.halopsa.com/article?entity=articles&text=&id=376
Primary Schools
The Summer 2022 upgrade of SIMS, FMS, and Discover is now available upon request via SOLUS3. This upgrade contains several highly requested new features including:
- Gender field rename for students and staff
- Pronouns can be selected
- Additional reporting fields/reports
Some schools will apply this in-house or via a third-party IT provider, please make the relevant person aware this is now available upon request. If School ICT is responsible for your upgrade, we will be rolling this out by taking a phased approach over the coming weeks. If you would like the upgrade applying on a specific date or day of the week, please let us know ASAP by replying to this email or giving the helpdesk a call. If you are unsure about who does your upgrade, please contact our helpdesk for clarification. Some schools may wish to have the update applied during the summer break for example.
To minimise disruption, the upgrade will be run on your SIMS database via SOLUS3 overnight. Once the workstations are switched on the morning after the upgrade has been run you will see a SOLUS3 popup. You can click on the “Deploy Now” button and this will start the upgrade process immediately. If you do not do this, it will wait 2 minutes before continuing automatically. It is then a case of allowing the upgrade to run before opening SIMS/FMS, which should upgrade SIMS to 7.202 and FMS to 6.202. Once the upgrade is complete, if you get an ’incompatible database’ error when trying to access SIMS or FMS, please contact us so that we can investigate and resolve the issue to prevent this from happening in the future. For those schools that do their own upgrade we would recommend stopping any third-party app services that link to SIMS before running the upgrade as these we have found can cause issues.
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 can 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
We have authorised the SIMS Summer Upgrade via 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. We have attached the release notes which include several new highly requested features including:
- Gender field rename for students and staff
- Pronouns can be selected
- Additional reporting fields/reports
You are receiving this email as the designated central contact for your establishment. This email is aimed at the technical department in school and we would therefore be grateful if you would please forward this email on as required. If you have no technical staff, please call the Service Desk for assistance.
The software authorised:-
SIMS (Summer 2022) Full Release (7.206)
FMS (Summer 2022) Full Release (6.206)
SIMS Discover (2022 Summer)
The above list is available dependent upon the modules utilised by the school.
If you cannot see the releases then please call the helpdesk. For any new supported customers joining our service please ensure that your school has informed ESS that School ICT Services is undertaking support on your behalf (this process is included in the welcome pack we provide to new customers). This will ensure that we can deploy patches and upgrades to your establishment centrally through our online ESS management console. If you are unsure if you have done this, please give us a call and we can confirm for you.
As usual, before performing any upgrade, please ensure that you have a successful backup of your SIMS system. We have found we receive several calls with an issue where SIMS does not update or open on the SIMS server following an upgrade. Please ensure that if you have any third-party apps that link to SIMS these services are stopped before running the upgrade to ensure that SIMS updates on the SIMS server.
The most successful upgrade deployments occur when all relevant workstations are left switched on but logged out of SIMS. Ensuring that all users have logged out of SIMS before the upgrade takes place will help to reduce residual problems. If upgrading overnight, please be aware that workstations that are switched off may fail. If this occurs, please download the upgrade again and re-deploy.
If School ICT is undertaking the upgrade on behalf of the school, please call or email our helpdesk to arrange a convenient date and time, giving as much notice as possible to ensure we can meet any specific requirements. We usually advise for this to be scheduled when your IT support are onsite.
New features in this release:-
Personal Pronouns – New Functionality has been provided in SIMS, enabling the setup and maintenance of personal pronouns. This functionality is accessible (via Tools | Setups | Pronoun Setup) and can be accessed by School Administrators and System Managers. Personal pronouns can be chosen by pupil/students, applicants, contacts, staff members, and agents and applied to their SIMS record. Once applied to an individual in SIMS, a suffix of their specified personal pronoun is displayed in bold text at the top of their record.
Several enhancements have been made to various areas in SIMS to incorporate this new functionality. For clarity and consistency, these enhancements have been prefixed in the Release Notes with Personal Pronouns to highlight the impacted areas.
Personal pronouns are not collected in any statutory returns at present, there is no requirement to report this information to the DfE.
Reporting
Once you have upgraded to the SIMS 2022 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_v7206.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.
Enhancements to the Reporting Dictionary
Provision of Sex and Pronoun(s) Fields
Reports | Design Report
When designing reports based on pupil/students, applicants, staff, contacts, and agents, the Pronoun(s) field has been added to the Basic Details node. A Sex field has also been provided.
Add Closure and Assignment Cover Notes
Reports | Design Report
When creating a School-based report and incorporating the Room Cover node, you can now include Closure Cover Notes and Assignment Cover Notes to the report output.
Staff or room cover replacement options
When creating a Staff based report and incorporating the Staff Cover node, you can now additionally view the details of replacement options for a conflicting staff member in the report output.
When creating a School-based report and incorporating the Room Cover node, you can now additionally view the details of replacement options for a conflicting room in the report output.
Reporting on Assessment Result Owner
Reports | Design Report
When creating a student-based report which includes the Assessment results node, it is now possible to incorporate the name of the staff member who originally recorded the assessment results by including the Result Owner field.
Ability to Specify Accessibility on Custom reports
Reports | Run Report
After highlighting an existing report in any of the folders displayed in the Open panel, you can now right-click and select Set As to change the visibility of the report from Private to Public and vice versa.
Emergency Alert report
Reports | Design Report
When designing a Communication-based report, additional Emergency alerts fields have been provided:
- Sender
- Date
- Time
- Receiver
- Class
- Room
- Message
- Read Status
SIMS Online and Distance Learning Courses
It is time to start preparing for the current academic year end and for the new year to start!
It is essential that the new academic year is created with the correct pastoral structure and that the pastoral promotion routines have been run before the old year ends.
Please see the free resources available to download from our customer portal my.schoolicts.co.uk or sign up to one of our training courses. We highly recommend attending training if you have never completed the end of year before as this is a detailed process with many steps.
We also offer consultancy support, to either work with you or to complete the process on your behalf to save valuable time in school. Please drop us an email if you are interested helpdesk@Schoolicts.co.uk
Distance Learning is available: -
Homepage | School ICT (schoolicts.co.uk)
Consultant led online training is available: -
Arbor Information - Exam Results
Arbor are running an Exam Results webinar on Thursday 21st July at 3.15pm, you can sign up using the link below and the recording will be available on their Help Centre the following day, (usually 24 hours after the webinar), under the ‘Past Webinar Recordings’ section if you are unable to attend. (There will also be a recording available on the 12th July from the webinar on the 11th July which you can watch if you are unable to sign up to the webinar on the 21st July).
Arbor Latest Updates and Information
Year 11 Leavers DfE Advice
Reminder: – The official school leaving date is the last Friday in June in the school year in which a student reaches the age of 16. Where a Year 11 student has applied and been accepted into the school 6th form, they must remain on roll until the end of term. Code X can be used for the period after the last Friday in June to the end of term.
Post 16 Schools preparation for Autumn Census
We would recommend that schools with a post-16 provision carry out housekeeping on student enrolment to programme instances for the current academic year. The best time to do this in our opinion is after exam results day.
Check:
The Programme Enrolment Default Values.
Check Planned Learning Hours
Check that there is a Linked Qualification Award
Check Enrolled Students – start date, end date and completion status
Check that a programme aim type has been set for students’ programme enrolment.
Housekeeping
Use the Data Quality Dashboard to start your year with clean quality data.
Check Current & Guardians
Check Current & Future Students
Check Current & Future Staff as well as the School Workforce Census
Resolve duplicate records.
Carrying out this housekeeping at the end of term or over the summer will save time in the Autumn term and cut down on errors and queries in the Autumn and Work Force Census returns.
Timetable
Before you import your timetable, it is important to check that staff have a unique identifier. This can be checked in Timetable settings|Staff – you can quickly order by unique identifiers to check for duplicates.
Please ensure you check the requirements for importing your timetable to Arbor Community. It is a different process when importing from Timetabler to importing a timetable from Edval.
New School Year Setup (Steps 6-8) for Secondaries – YouTube
Importing from TimeTabler.mp4 – Google Drive
Importing a timetable from Edval – Arbor Help Centre (arbor-education.com)
Post 16 Schools – Programmes of Study and Learning Aims
Reminder You must set up a new programme instance for each cohort of students, e.g., BTEC L3 Hospitality and Catering is a two-year qualification, so the instance is set up for a two-year period, 2022-2024, when the current year 12 students move into year 13, then a new programme instance would need to be created for the new year 12 students 2023-2025.
Please note adding a course to a programme instance does not automatically enrol students into the programme instance. Only students enrolled in the programme instance will feature in the calculations used for funding.
When students have finished their programme then they must be marked as Completed. This can be done via Bulk Complete.
Final Reminder - End of Year
Please follow the appropriate links for guidance in the following areas: –
Preparation guidance: – https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019450358-New-School-Year-Setup-Preparation-Checklist
Primary and Nursery guidance: – https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005455573-New-School-Year-Setup-Guide-for-Primaries-and-Primary-Specials
Webinar recordings for further guidance can be found via the following links: –
- Primary – Steps 1-5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo59_1WZ0iY
- Secondary steps 1-5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScGV1roWxTM
Further training is available for steps 6-8 please register using the link below: -
We also offer consultancy support to work with you to complete the process on your behalf to save valuable time in school. Please drop us an e-mail if you are interested: helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk
We have created and uploaded several Custom Reports for you to download to your Arbor site – you can find them by visiting this link: https://my.schoolicts.co.uk/portal/kb choose Arbor from the options on the left-hand side, then select Arbor Reporting to see the downloadable reports. Once you select a report you would like, you can then download this to your PC.
Please see this Help centre article on how to export and import reports within Arbor: https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003973577-Importing-a-Custom-Report-Writer-template-or-exporting-a-template-to-send-to-another-school
Or give the Helpdesk a call if you require any assistance on: 0345 222 6802 – Option 1.
You can find the Distance Learning Course for Arbor Standard Reporting here: https://learning.schoolicts.co.uk/courses
ScholarPack Year End Process
Please see the link below for guidance on this – NB Please be aware you cannot complete the Year End process until the last day of the summer term and 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 (1-6 listed below), which will need to be completed and a 7th step (number 7 listed below) which is optional. The process is a linear function, and the elements should be carried out in the order indicated by the timeline. You cannot 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/203281691-Year-End-Guide
We also offer consultancy support to work with you to complete the process on your behalf to save valuable time in school. Please drop us an email if you are interested helpdesk@Schoolicts.co.uk
Are you in need of staff for September?
School ICT Resourcing currently have some outstanding School Business Managers and Administrators looking for their next permanent role – could one of them fill your recruitment gap?
Working alongside School ICT, School ICT Resourcing place both permanent and temporary specialist support staff into schools.
Our candidates are available from a days placement through to a whole school year. All candidates have completed the safer school recruitment process, and have enhanced DBS clearance.
Due to retire? If yourself or any colleagues are retiring soon, but would consider working on a temporary or ad-hoc basis, please contact Helen who would love the opportunity to speak with you about the potential of adding you to our candidate list.
For further information please call: 0113 372 0039 or visit: www.schoolictresourcing.co.uk
