As a school you are required to demonstrate to Ofsted Inspectors, governors, SLT and parents how well you are assisting pupils in overcoming specific barriers to learning i.e through the effective use of Pupil Premium Funding. They will also need to know how the funding received has impacted those pupils since joining your school.
SIMS Discover allows you to assess and report on specific groups of pupils, such as your Pupil Premium students, enabling you to monitor their progress and demonstrate the impact of your Interventions.
Here is a quick way to monitor PP and safeguard future funding:
Dynamic Groups in Discover
By monitoring the progress of your PP Students you can easily demonstrate how effectively you are using your funding. The easiest way to do this is by using SIMS Discover to create Dynamic groups that can be used in any of the attendance reports – you can then set up alerts to notify you of any changes to your groups for e.g if a student’s attendance falls below a certain level. You can then ensure that interventions are put in place as soon as they are required.
Comparing pupil progress with other pupil groups
You can use SIMS Discover to demonstrate individual pupil improvement by comparing your PP students with any other specific groups. It is possible to compare by attendance, punctuality, achievement, behaviour, or any other common pupil indicators. This comparison will help you to successfully identify where gaps exists between your Pupil Premium students and other groups, this data easily demonstrate how your Pupil Premium funding has been used to narrow those gaps.
Conduct Report
Designing SIMS reports to analyse the conduct of students’ behaviour is a quick way to evidence the impact of PP funding of eligible pupils – you can drill down to individual details in a list report or export data to excel for further analysis. You are also able to monitor this from your SIMS homepage using the conduct widgets, enabling your to view Key statistics about individuals within the group or sub-groups.
You can provide evidence of the specific impact of your Pupil Premium funding on students’ behaviour by quickly creating SIMS reports.
Track and monitor the effectiveness of your interventions.
School inspectors and governors will also be looking for evidence of the interventions that you put in place. The Interventions module allows you to plan, run and report on all your interventions. You can track the cost effectiveness of each intervention and monitor the success of each intervention for your PP students and other vulnerable groups. You can use this information together to demonstrate the direct effect of the interventions to parents, governors and Ofsted as and when required.
End of Year Procedures and Housekeeping
It is that time of the year again where we need to start thinking about creating a new academic year and maintaining a standard of housekeeping in SIMS. It is important to remember that you can create your academic year (and Admission Groups) at any time, the sooner the better – do not leave it till August. Your school’s academic year must be based on Your School’s term dates – the start of the academic year should never fall on a weekend.
As part of the housekeeping routine it is a good idea to start with running Database Diagnostics (Tools>System Diagnostics>Database Diagnostics):
This process can take quite a long time so it is a good idea to run it overnight. Once run, you will be able to print a report – the red items are errors and need to be fixed and the blue items are queries that need to be checked for accuracy, the items in black can be ignored.
Try and fix as many as you can and if you need assistance call the helpdesk. At this stage don’t worry too much about really old data and focus on maintaining accurate data for all your current students.
After you have run your database diagnostics you can follow your housekeeping routines: Tools>Housekeeping – in this area you can delete unlinked contacts, merge agents and tidy up all your addresses. As Attendance marks can take up a lot of space it is important to archive old attendance marks this will help speed things up if your database is a little sluggish.
Lastly, you will want to Validate your memberships – Tools>Validate Memberships
Please get in touch or visit our IT/SIMS services page for more information.
