The Spring upgrade of SIMS, FMS and Discover will be available via SOLUS3 from 16th March 2026.
Where School ICT 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 16th March 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.
For those schools who deploy their own upgrades, we will release the upgrades to you on Friday 13th March 2026 after 4pm.
The software that will be authorised is listed below; this list is dependent upon the modules utilised by the school.
- SIMS (Spring 2026) Full Release (7.228)
- FMS (Spring 2026) Full Release (6.228)
- SIMS Discover (Spring 2026)
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 is 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 Schools
The Spring 2026 upgrade of SIMS, FMS and Discover has some new features including:
New Features and Release Notes
- School Census Summer Return – Statutory Returns
- Updates to Fees Billing – GDPR Delete Inactive Bill Payers
Secondary Schools
- School Census Summer Return – Statutory Returns
- Lesson Monitor – Preventing the use of Invalid Lesson Codes
- Updates to Fees Billing – GDPR Delete Inactive Bill Payers
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 – Please note there is an error with the version number in this document the correct version is 7.228
SIMS Technical Roadmap – SQL2012 unsupported by PPG and SQL2016 will no longer be supported by Summer 2026
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 7.228 and FMS to 6.228. 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
Should you need any support with the Spring Upgrade, please contact the School ICT helpdesk on: 0345 2226802 – option 1
or e-mail: helpdesk@schoolicts.co.uk
