© 2018 Capita Business Services Ltd. All rights reserved.
Capita Education Software Solutions is a trading name of Capita Business Services Ltd. Our Registered office is 30 Berners Street, London, W1T 3LR and our registered number is 02299747. Further information about Capita plc can be found in our legal statement.
SIMS the MIS of choice supporting teachers, senior leaders and wider staff with the tools to efficiently drive improvement in their schools.
This document is aimed at software developers who are or may be considering exchanging session attendance marks with SIMS.
A number of partners have chosen to write back attendance marks to SIMS as part of their software. This module sets out to describe the simplest mechanisms to achieve this and help avoid some of the potential pitfalls in so doing. Examples are shown from SIMS 7 but similar principles apply to SIMS Primary.
Under UK education law a school must record two attendance marks per day for each and every student of statutory school age. This should not be confused with the recording of ‘Lesson Attendance’ where a student is marked as present or otherwise within a lesson. Overseas schools may choose to have only one attendance session per day.
This module does not set out to induct the partner in the complexities of what marks can be given in what circumstances. For each National Government DfE NAW, DENI et al, partners need to do their own research and ensure that their software can comply with any appropriate legislation appropriately.
At present there are a set of approved single character codes which are allowable for session attendance recording. This set may be different to the set of codes allowed for lesson attendance. At this time, only lesson codes are user definable, session codes are mandated by national governments. Technically SIMS is coded in a way which allows codes to be locked down as far as the user is concerned but amendable in effect via code.
This figure shows lesson monitor enabled in the school.
A session mark is defined as follows:
Student ID (Internal ID)
Session ID 1= Monday AM, 14= Sunday PM
Attendance week id The attendance week concerned.
Session Status S/E TBA
Session Start Date time for the session start
Last Updated When the mark was last updated.
Mark The mark for the student
Comment Optional comment on the attendance session for the pupil
Minute Late Optional minutes late for the pupil at the session.
The interface provided through the third party business objects simplifies the data required from the user to be:
Session Date Date of the mark
Session AM or PM
Mark The mark for the student
Student ID The internal ID for the student
Comment Optional comment on the attendance session for the pupil
Minute Late Optional minutes late for the pupil at the session.
These are the fundamental data items required for any attendance recording and should make the partner’s work relatively easy.
Attendance codes are subject to change and such changes are usually driven by National Governments, each of whom may have different requirements. ESS recognizes that partner systems may store snap shots of mark codes and hence will endeavour to avoid the automatic updation of marks and mark codes. Partners must however recognise that the set of codes may well change at any time at the behest of one or more of the governments and ESS will need to provide our customers with the mechanism to update attendance codes and this process may break partner applications. The reason for providing a non automatic facility is to allow the school to synchronise the updation of partner applications but clearly there is scope for user error.
Partners should also be aware that session marks are part of the various census returns to government and will typically fail validation if schools have used obsolete codes.
This is a difficult question to answer in the abstract. If the partner product provides access to the data and fully replaces SIMS then writing back weekly for census might be sufficient. Where a school uses ‘SIMS Parent’ or other parental portal/application whose data is taken directly from SIMS the there may be a need for multiple updates per day. Updates take time and processing power and this needs to be balanced against how the data will be used. Partners must draw their own conclusions; however the answer may be very different from one school to the next!
Actions in SIMS such as exclusions do cause attendance marks to be updated in SIMS. Partners are asked to note that this may be the case and that this may lead to data conflicting between the 2 systems. Partner systems need to identify the resolution for any such conflicts.
Anyone producing an attendance enhancement must ensure that their application delivers the correct marks in to SIMS. The marks will be used in census, reporting and via the home page pushing data to those who need to know. Clearly it is of high importance to ensure that the data is correct and to minimize user error where possible.