Inevitably, Covid-19 has had a disruptive effect on schools up and down the country. After all, almost overnight, children everywhere had to abandon physical classrooms and fill up digital alternatives. And though students are now gladly back in schools, two years of the sort we all went through were bound to leave a mark.
The upshot is that schools everywhere have been working incredibly hard to ensure the marks left by the pandemic are by no means lasting and that children’s education hasn’t suffered. In fact, this time last year, the Government announced that all schools and colleges will receive extra funding to help students catch up.
SIMS 7 can provide teachers with vital assistance, too. The Interventions function, which we first rolled out in 2015, can help teachers provide the pupils that need it with a little bit of extra support, whether it be helping a child go up a grade in maths or improving classroom behaviour.
At its core, SIMS exists to support both teachers and students – the user experience is our absolute priority. Working with our extensive team of experienced engineers, and including insights from teachers, we’ve gathered feedback from users and have further enhanced the feature to allow:
- Easier tracking of attendance: Knowing how many intervention sessions a pupil attended is useful, but what is even more helpful is knowing precisely the sessions that were missed. For the child attending maths catch ups, did they attend the first five but miss the final two, as a result missing out on the fractions catch up? We’ve adjusted the system so the user will now be able to see not just how many sessions were missed, but the specific sessions, too.
- More customisation: At the minute, interventions can be tagged with one of five options: academic, attendance, attainment, behaviour or other. We’ve made a few changes to allow users to customise how sessions are categorised – whether that be SEN or wellbeing, for instance – to allow interventions to become more bespoke
- Session notes: Interventions exist to improve student progress and so we’ve introduced a new feature on the Intervention report, allowing the user to incorporate notes taken during the intervention to be included on the report output. This assists in demonstrating the student’s involvement, whether that be highlighting successes or indicating where a child might have struggled or lost focus.
The update is set to go live tomorrow (4th November) and will be available to all SIMS 7 users. We’ve had some great feedback on the new features, so hope the update will help you stage successful interventions.
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