The Autumn Upgrade Of SIMS, FMS And Discover Will Be Available Via SOLUS3 From 17th November

Dear Colleague,

This email is aimed at the technical department in school; we would be grateful if you would forward it on as required. If you have no technical staff, please call the help desk for assistance.

The Autumn upgrade of SIMS, FMS and Discover will be available via SOLUS3 from 17^th November 2025.

Where we complete the upgrade on your behalf, please see below for how this will work.

Using a phased approach, we will email the school to arrange a date for the upgrade from Monday 17^th November onwards; the upgrade will be released from 4pm on your upgrade day.
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 help desk a call.

The software that will be authorised is listed below; this list is dependent upon the modules utilised by the school.

For those schools who deploy their own upgrades, we will release the upgrades to you on Friday 14^th November 2025 after 4pm.

SIMS (Autumn 2025) Full Release (7.226)
FMS (Autumn 2025) Full Release (6.226)
SIMS Discover (Autumn 2025)

If you require any support, please contact us via one of the below methods:

Customer portal – https://my.www.schoolicts.co.uk/
Telephone – 0345 222 6802 option 1
Email – helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk
Live chat – available after logging into the customer portal

For any newly supported customers joining our service, if you have not already done so, please ensure that your school has informed PPG 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 PPG management console (SOLUS3). If you are unsure whether you have done this, please call us and we can confirm whether this has been done on your behalf (or not, as the case may be).

Primary SchoolsThe Autumn 2025 upgrade of SIMS, FMS and Discover has some new features including:

New Features and Release Notes

School Census Spring Return – Statutory Returns
Reports New FSM Ever6 Report – you can import using the following file Predefined_reports_v7.224 RptDef
Nursery Phase – 4-Year-Olds Inclusion for EYPP
Qualified Teacher Status Date field is updated with validation and reporting enhancements
SIMS NextGen Enablement – Phase 2 With each release, new module and record-level navigation buttons are being added to SIMS7
GDPR – Update of ICO Guidance in Download Data Agreements
Additional Learner Needs (ALN) Reform – Student ALN Terminology updates across SIMS7 replace all references to Special Educational Needs (SEN)
Ethnicity lookup descriptions for Staff have been updated to be in line with CBDS
Updates to Fees Billing – Please see the SIMS Upgrade Release Notes

Secondary Schools

School Census Spring Return – Statutory Returns
Reports New FSM Ever6 Report – you can import using the following file Predefined_reports_v7.224 RptDef
Qualified Teacher Status Date field is updated with validation and reporting enhancements
SIMS NextGen Enablement – Phase 2 with each release, new module and record-level navigation buttons are being added to SIMS7
GDPR – Update of ICO Guidance in Download Data Agreements
Additional Learner Needs (ALN) Reform – Student ALN Terminology updates across SIMS7 replace all references to Special Educational Needs (SEN)
Ethnicity lookup descriptions for Staff have been updated to be in line with CBDS
Updates to Fees Billing – Please see the SIMS Upgrade Release Notes

For further details of the new features, please take a look at the upgrade release notes which are available on our customer portal.

SIMS Upgrade Release Notes

FMS 6 Upgrade Release Notes

School ICTS customer portal

SIMS Upgrades Campaign News
We will update the campaign news page on our customer portal with any changes or known issues or patch requirements. Please keep an eye on this page for latest details – SIMS Upgrades Campaign News.

Important Notes Regarding Upgrades

As usual, prior to performing any upgrade, please ensure that you have a successful back-up of your SIMS system.

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 we have found that these can cause issues.

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 prior to the upgrade taking 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.

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 should get a screen opening that tells you that your workstation has been upgraded. If you don’t get this, and you see a SOLUS3 popup, you can click on the “Deploy Now” button:

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 7.226 and FMS to 6.226. If after following the above advice you receive an error message when logging into SIMS please contact us so that we can investigate and resolve the issue to prevent this happening in future.

SIMS.net Reports
After your upgrade has completed, it is advisable to re-import your reporting suite via Reports | Import. Below is a link to instructions on our customer portal. The latest version of reports is 7.224

Re-Import Pre-Defined Reports

Should you need any support with the Autumn Upgrade, please contact the School ICT helpdesk on: 0345 2226802 or e-mail: helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk