We’ve got some exciting updates in SIMS Next Gen, designed to make life easier for teachers, senior leaders, and office staff. From streamlining staff absence management to enhancing SEND/ALN support and simplifying leaver records, these new features help schools save time, improve accuracy, and ensure key information is always at your fingertips.
Senior leaders and office staff can now access Staff Absences across all school phases, complete with new reporting, illness categorisation, and analytics to track trends. Meanwhile, SENDCos and teachers will benefit from enhancements to the SEND/ALN Log, making it easier to track and highlight critical pupil information. And for office staff, managing leavers is now more seamless than ever, ensuring accurate record-keeping and easy reinstatement when needed.
Let’s explore what’s new this month:
Pupil Profile
Additional SEND/ALN
Helping you support pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), or Additional Learning Needs (ALN) is a top priority, and our latest updates to the Pupil Profile ensure that key information is easier to input, find, and act on:
- View and update additional support areas carried over from SIMS7, ensuring continuity and compliance.
- Access a new SEND/ALN Log, exclusive to SIMS Next Gen, where SENDCos/ALNCos can record detailed, tailored information about a pupil’s needs.
- Use the pinned status feature to highlight the most critical notes for display in other areas of SIMS Next Gen, such as the Class View Pupil Profile, ensuring that teachers have the right information at the right time.
Staff Absences
Now available for all schools
Previously only available to Primary Schools, Secondary Schools are now also able to create/edit/delete staff absences - all in one place, within SIMS Next Gen, with immediate writeback to SIMS7.
With Staff Absences, you can quickly record, or update staff absences and easily gain a clear overview of staff availability at-a-glance:
- Customise, export, and print absence lists - A top request from our Early Adopter schools, enabling schools to run reports and share insights more widely.
- Record absences by period - Making it even faster to log timetabled staff absences.
- New ‘Sub-type’ field (Illness category) - Bringing in SIMS7 illness data to provide deeper insights.
- Analytics overview in Staff Profiles - A much-requested addition for HR teams and SLT to easily identify absence patterns and act proactively
Stay tuned - more functionality is coming soon to Staff Absences!
Pupil Profile
View and edit leavers
Our latest enhancements to Pupil Profile make it faster and easier to manage leavers, ensuring accurate record-keeping and better data management.
- Quickly create groups of leavers or process individual leavers.
- Search for leavers using multiple filters and reinstate pupils on-roll when needed.
Leavers completes the School History section, and is another key building block in Pupil Profile, ensuring schools have a single source of truth for key pupil information.
Useful links
With each update, SIMS Next Gen is evolving to make school operations smoother and more efficient. From giving leaders better insights into staff absences to ensuring SEND support information is readily available, these new features are built around the needs of schools like yours.
Stay tuned for even more enhancements coming your way soon!
Not set up yet? Speak to your leadership team about accessing the latest SIMS functionality in 5 simple steps.