September 2024 MIS Newsletter Blog Post

Welcome Back and Happy New Academic Year!  

As we kick off a new academic year, we’ve taken a moment to reflect on the past year, especially the bustling summer term. Over the past few months, our amazing team has supported over 1,600 customers and tackled an incredible 13,742 support requests!

But that’s not all! Throughout the academic year, we also hosted 34 live webinars and delivered 124 training courses, sharing valuable insights and knowledge with our schools and Trusts.

Our team has been working hard over the summer break to prepare for the term ahead. We’ve held internal training sessions, refreshed our customer portal resources, and are on our Arbor Finance Accreditation Journey! This makes us the first Arbor Finance support partner for Leeds Schools️.

We’re super proud of the hard work and dedication of our team and, as always, we are committed to serving excellence in the coming year.

Here’s to another fantastic year ahead!

• General Updates
• SIMS
• Arbor
• Bromcom
• ScholarPack
• Integris
• MIS Training
• Additional Updates

Hey, everyone!

I’m Jason Bromilow, the Training and Consultancy Team Leader here at School ICT Services, bringing over 25 years of hands-on experience in education—as a School Data Manager, Timetabler, and as a member of the School Leadership Team.

My mission is to supercharge your school’s success by empowering leaders, teachers, and support staff with the skills they need to fully leverage their MIS systems.

I’m driven by a passion for making a real impact, offering customised training and consultancy that’s tailored to your unique needs. Together, we can unlock the potential of your MIS, helping students thrive and reach their full potential.

Our top-notch training and consultancy, delivered by MIS experts with deep roots in the education sector, is just a click away. Book your session now at  https://www.schoolicts.co.uk/online-training.

Prefer to learn at your own pace? We’ve got you covered with distance learning options, complete with all the resources you need. Whether it’s bespoke training, specialised consultancy, or our exciting new Bitesize course range, we’re here to support you.

Ready to take the next step? Give us a call at 03452 226802 or shoot an email to helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk. Let’s collaborate and create something amazing together!

Please be aware that we are receiving an exceptionally high amount of calls at the moment and we thank all of our customers for their patience when calling.  Please remember that you can also log tickets via the customer portal or by leaving a voicemail.  Both methods automatically generate a ticket and this means that the person who can help you best is the person who will call you back.   See below for guidance on how to do this:

Logging Tickets

The first few weeks of September are very busy in school, and also for us as a support unit.  If you call and the phones are busy, you can leave a message which will automatically generate a ticket in our queue for someone to call you back.  If you do this, PLEASE leave your name, the name of the school, the best number to call back on and a brief description of why you’re ringing, as this means that the best person to help you is the one that will call back.

Alternatively, you can send an email to helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk and this will also automatically create a ticket or you can log your own ticket via the customer portal:

All of the tickets go into the same queue and don’t rely on someone picking them up and moving them over and in the first couple of weeks this can sometimes be quicker than holding on the phone.

When you log a ticket via the portal, you will get a little menu that may appear once you’ve added your reason to the Summary box:

Clicking on the links in this pop-up (or the bottom link to view further articles) may well help you to resolve your issue without our input, so please also make use of this.

We know you like to speak to us (and we like to speak to you!) but in order to offer the best service to our customers, this is sometimes the quickest way at busy times.

Due to continued growth within the company we have two exciting opportunities!

Senior MIS Consultant and MIS Consultant.

Are you familiar with the following MIS Packages: Arbor, Bromcom, Integris, ScholarPack or SIMS? Are you an experienced school user or work in a similar role and are looking for a new challenge?  Would you like to join our amazing team?

School ICT is one of the largest, independent providers of MIS support in the country. We currently offer support and consultancy services to over 1600 schools on a national basis. 

The roles involve providing remote MIS support, facilitating communications between schools and School ICT, staying up to date with the latest products, services and developments. You will also be responsible for delivering training and consultancy, supporting schools moving MIS platforms as well as updating key guidance documentation.

For full details of the vacancies and how to apply please visit: https://www.schoolicts.co.uk/vacancies/

The new Attendance codes have now come into force.  Please check your system and make sure that you can see them/are using them.  This will be crucial for the January Census, as that census will be looking at the Autumn Term attendance and if you leave it until (October) Census day to run the upgrade, then ALL attendance up to that point will need to be re-input, even for the codes where it looks like there is no change, e.g., /, \, N, U, etc. as it is the coding behind these that has changed, so if you haven’t had your upgrade you will end up having to reinput EVERY code for EVERY child for EVERY  session for EVERY day for the term up to the point that the upgrade is applied.  Even though the codes will show, the coding behind them will be wrong, so they will have to be re-input, so if you’re not on version 7.218 of SIMS, then please chase this!

Reminder: New Attendance Codes Effective from August 2024

Attention Schools:

Starting August 19, 2024, new attendance codes and guidelines from the Department for Education (DfE) came into effect. Schools should check their systems to ensure these codes are visible and in use.

Please also remember that there have been changes around the issuing of penalty notices, with a ’10 in 10 threshold’:

“The threshold is 10 sessions of unauthorised absence in a rolling period of 10 school weeks. A school week means any week in which there is at least one school session. This can be met with any combination of unauthorised absence (e.g. 4 sessions of holiday taken in term time plus 6 sessions of arriving late after the register closes all within 10 school weeks). These sessions can be consecutive (e.g. 10 sessions of holiday in one week) or not (e.g. 6 sessions of unauthorised absence taken in 1 week and 1 per week for the next 4 weeks). The period of 10 school weeks can also span different terms or school years (e.g. 2 sessions of unauthorised absence in the Summer Term and a further 8 within the Autumn Term).”

For more details, please review the full guidance of Working together to improve school attendance here.

If your school has a staggered start, the DfE are requesting that the codes used should be:

• Reception children – code X for the sessions they do not attend
• Year 7 children – Y7 exceptional circumstance, with a comment in to explain, as this code requires a statutory explanation

As the new year begins, we know that a lot of schools will have new staff or staff who are changing their role within school. With this in mind please see the scheduled training courses for the first few weeks of the new academic year below, and don’t forget our Distance Learning courses too!  You can access the full list of DL courses here and you have access to the DL course for 12 months from date of purchase, so if you need to check/re-check anything, you can just log back in and re-watch the video during that time.  The course content and the price are the same as the ‘live’ courses, but you can work through each course at your own pace. They can also work well if releasing a staff member for the duration of a live course is difficult.  If you’re not sure, why don’t you try our free ‘Try before you buy’ SIMS Housekeeping Course , or our free Arbor Business Roles & Permissions Course.

If you would like to book onto the training sessions below, you can do so by clicking on the link for the relevant course, or to see the full list of courses, you can click here.

Autumn Term MIS Webinars and Vendor Spotlight Series

Do not link staff records to old pupil or contact records in your MIS.  It’s easily done but invariably causes problems!  Even though they are the same person in real life, they are different people on your system – you wouldn’t expect a parent to be able to access areas that a staff member can, or likewise a pupil wouldn’t access areas that staff can, so these roles must be kept separate.

There are a few housekeeping tasks that need to be completed regardless of which MIS you use:

• Updating Photos in your MIS
• Creating the CTF for your Reception Baseline Assessment
• Update Staff Details
• Update Pupil Details
• Downloading PP file from GIAP (see below for 2024-25 values)

Please see the relevant section for your particular MIS, where you can find guidance and useful links to common September issues.

You should be able to download your Pupil Premium file for the 2024-25 year from Get Information About Pupils (GIAP) and import it into your MIS. Please see the relevant section for guidance on doing this. The values for 2024-25 are:

Curriculum Years for 2024-25 (the dates of birth that dictate each year group) are available on our customer portal here.

This doesn’t mean the year that the children are taught in if they are taught out of year – this is the year group they should be in according to their date of birth.

GOV.UK provide a free service to Central Government, Local Authorities and the NHS, which allows texts, emails and letters to be sent for free, so this means that state-funded schools have access to the service and can send up to 10,000 texts for free along with unlimited emails!

You can read more about the service here: https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/

And we’ve created a helpsheet for SICTS customers, which you can view via this link: https://my.www.schoolicts.co.uk/kb?btn=46&text=notify&entity=articles&id=806

For TIO customers, you can access via this link: https://portal.turniton.co.uk

The new teacher pay awards will be made as of September. This is something that should be updated within your MIS as soon as you can to ensure they are up to date for the School Workforce Census (SWC). We have help on our portal for doing this.

Please visit our Customer Portal here for guidance on how to update your payscales within your specific MIS. If you do need any support on this matter, please contact the Helpdesk in the usual way and one of the MIS Support Team will be happy to help.

Exams 2024/2025 Key Dates

The key dates for 2024/2025 are available from the JCQ website, as follows:

• November 2024
• January 2025
• June 2025

Please see below the dates for the October Census: –

Census help and guidance here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/complete-the-school-census#suspension-or-permanent-exclusion

And check your items here (this is a really useful document!!): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/complete-the-school-census/check-your-data

Check the training courses above for the Census courses.  This is the biggest census in terms of generating funding for your school.

If the information in your system isn’t correct or isn’t in the right place, YOU WILL LOSE FUNDING and nobody wants that!!

Thinking of exploring alternative MIS Solutions?

If you are interested in exploring alternative MIS solutions, our expert team can advise on the best solution for your school. School ICT work closely with leading providers, namely SIMS, Arbor, Bromcom, ScholarPack and Integris. We can help guide you through the migration process and continue to provide ongoing support.

The link below to our previously recorded webinar on moving MIS is below along with a sheet to assist with assessing functionality and cost:

https://halo.transforming-learning.co.uk/portal/kb?btn=46&id=805

If you would like to arrange a meeting to discuss this further, please do not hesitate to contact us on 0345 2226802 or via our portal my.www.schoolicts.co.uk

The cyber threat landscape in the UK education sector presents a critical challenge, far surpassing the average for UK business sectors in terms of vulnerability and frequency of attacks.  The ParentPay Group have put together a white paper highlighting some of the statistics and how they’re helping customers protect their data.  The full paper can be found here

School ICT Customers: 

Contact: 0345 222 6802 Option 1, helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk

Portal: https://my.www.schoolicts.co.uk/

turn IT on customers: 

Contact: 01865 597620 Option 2, mis.support@turniton.co.uk

Portal: https://portal.turniton.co.uk

Our customer portals allow you to: –

• Log and track tickets
• Watch webinars
• Search Knowledge base for information
• Keep Updated with the latest news

Reminder – Please check that you can see and are using the new attendance codes!!!

If you are still on the old ones, ALL attendance (NOT JUST THE NEW CODES!) will need to be updated when it comes to the January Census (this will mean every code for every pupil for every session for every day for the whole of the Autumn term, so it will be a MASSIVE task if left until January and you will have VERY, VERY upset Census staff), so please check NOW!  They were included in the Summer Upgrade and there are some patches that should have been applied as well.

You can see the codes by going into Focus | Attendance | Edit Marks (or Take Register for the teachers), open a register and click on the ‘Codes’ button and you should see this (you might have to drag the bottom edge of the box down to see them all):

If you don’t see your codes displayed like this speak to whoever does your upgrades and double/triple check that the Summer Upgrade has been applied to your SIMS (if the codes aren’t showing like this, it HASN’T!!). You can also check the version of SIMS that you are on by clicking on Help | About SIMS.net:

When the window opens, check the Version:

You should be on 7.218. If you aren’t on this version, then the Upgrade HASN’T been applied, and needs to be. You can close this window by clicking on it.

Talking of registers…

Did you know that you can show Accepted Applicants in your class registers in SIMS? If you didn’t, we have a Helpsheet to guide you through the process which you can find here.  You will still have to Admit your children, but this process means that they can be seen on the register for the class teacher on the morning they are due to start (so before you’ve gone through the admission process).

We also have some guidance on September tasks on our portal via this link: https://halo.transforming-learning.co.uk/portal/article?id=505&showmenu=false

This is aimed at both primary and secondary schools, so please make sure you read it carefully as some of the tasks may not apply to your phase of education.

We’re very pleased to tell you that the Attendance Analysis Reports for the 2024/25 Academic year have been updated and are available for our customers who use SIMS to download from the portal.  As usual, you can download the file, as well as instructions on how to import it if you can’t remember by clicking here.

We have created resources to assist with generating the CTF to upload. There is a helpsheet and a short video to demonstrate the process. These are both available on the School ICTS customer portal here and for turn IT on customers please follow this link: https://portal.turniton.co.uk

Did you know that there is a facility in SIMS to check the data within a CTF before you import?  The CTF Matching Screen allows schools to compare the data in the CTF with existing data in SIMS, and this helps to identify and therefore resolve any discrepancies or conflicts before importing the data:

We have a helpsheet and a video available on our Customer Portal to help with this task.  You can update the pay awards in bulk, and this will update all contracts automatically.  You can find them both here.

For schools who link FMS and SIMS for Salary Projections within FMS, these will need to be done in order for calculations to display correctly.

You can start these as soon as you like in SIMS.  Make use of the bulk update tool to check and amend pupil data first.  This is available under Routines | Pupil | Bulk Update.  You can update lots of fields in here that the Census will pick up, which will save you lots of time later.  We have a Helpsheet on the portal to help with this and you can access it here.

As the new year begins, we know that a lot of schools will have new staff or staff who are changing their role within school. With this in mind please see the scheduled training courses for the first few weeks of the new academic year below, and don’t forget our Distance Learning courses too!  You can access the full list of DL courses here and you have access to the DL course for 12 months from date of purchase, so if you need to check/re-check anything, you can just log back in and re-watch the video during that time.  The course content and the price are the same as the ‘live’ courses, but you can work through each course at your own pace. They can also work well if releasing a staff member for the duration of a live course is difficult.  If you’re not sure, why don’t you try our free ‘Try before you buy’ SIMS Housekeeping Course , or our free Arbor Business Roles & Permissions Course.

If you would like to book onto the training sessions below, you can do so by clicking on the link for the relevant course, or to see the full list of courses, you can click here.