With SIMS7 summer release due in early July, at the recent SIMS Support Conference, we were excited to share news of some of the improvements we will be delivering to schools with our latest update.
As ever, we have worked hard to put users' needs at the heart of our work and deliver the changes that are most important to them. We have continued to listen carefully to their views and input – which have come to us loud and clear through the SIMS Ideas Portal, as well as through customer forums, the SIMS7 satisfaction survey and via regular calls to our support desk.
Some of the improvements in our summer release include:
Emergency Alert fields in Design Reports
We’ve added additional fields under the Communications area of Design Reports. This enables reporting on the use of the Emergency Alert function which allows schools to analyse how often it’s been pressed and who most frequently uses it – amongst other scenarios.
Ability to Untick ‘Private’ box on Custom Reports
If a report is saved as ‘Private’ there isn’t a simple, easy way to change it to ‘Public’ so as to share with other users. However, we’ve enabled users to right click on the report and amend the category, without the need to recreate and change.
Personal Pronouns
Following requests from a significant number of schools and extensive consultation we have cosmetically relabelled the ‘gender’ field within the user interface to ‘sex’. This is the area where schools will enter a pupil’s sex, as recorded on their birth certificate or gender recognition certificate. As the DfE’s Common Basic Dataset (CBDS) defines the values for ‘Gender’, we have not changed the label within statutory areas such as CTF or Census to avoid any issues in sharing data. There is also a completely optional data item for ‘Pronoun(s)’. This enables schools who opt in for this functionality to record a pupil’s or staff member’s preferred personal pronouns. We have also further enhanced existing functionality to adopt the new data fields within the register, marksheets, reporting and bulk update.
‘Result Owner’ into Design Reports
The new ‘Result Owner’ data item in the Assessment Results area of Design Reports will allow schools to understand the full picture when looking at a learner’s results. This could be the result itself, when it was obtained and who awarded it.
Watch this space for further updates on our summer release, and as ever – if you have feedback or suggestions for improvements to SIMS7, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.