Enjoy your retirement Helen, we will all miss you!
Attendance Hubs
The Department for Education has announced the launch of new sector-led school attendance hubs. Primary, secondary, special schools and Alternative Provision providers who wish to register their interest in joining a hub and receiving free school attendance support should complete the short application form by 8th May.
Attendance hubs will be led by senior leaders in schools with strong attendance practice, who will share the strategies and resources they use for improving attendance. Participating schools will be expected to revisit and revise their systems and protocols for managing attendance, join half termly virtual hub meetings to share practice and discuss progress and challenges.
This programme builds on a pilot hub established last year led by North Shore Academy, which saw some participating schools achieve significant reductions in their absence and persistent absence rates.
New guidance for 16 to 19 tuition fund 2023 to 2024 (Post-16 students)
Please read the new DfE guidance for the 16 to 19 tuition fund and note the deadlines to opt-in for funding.
The DfE encourage all eligible institutions to opt-in to the funding to enable you to deliver tuition support to your students. There will be 2 windows for you to opt-in, if you are not eligible for auto-renewal, or opt-out for funding with the first opening at 8am on 09/05/23.
Support Staff additional days annual leave
As you may be aware from 1st April 2023 all support staff have been given an additional day’s annual leave. The tables in the background of SAP have been updated manually so no additional paperwork needs to be completed and sent off.
The staff contracts within your MIS will however need to be updated. How this is done will vary on the MIS you use and full guidance on this will be available on the DMS Portal by May half term.
Deletion of Spinal Point SCP1 (HA.1 and HB.1)
From 1st April 2023 SCP1 will no longer be in use. Any member of staff on this grade will move to an SCP2.
The NJC are planning to review the pay scales over the next few years so while a few schools may need to look to make changes most will be able to wait for the changes to come and we’ll likely have a SCP1 again in the fullness of time.
Full guidance on how to manage this will be available on the DMS Portal by May half term.
Bromcom on the DMS Portal
We are pleased to announce that our Bromcom Support page is now live on the DMS Portal here. Our content will continue to grow over time, you will be able to access guidance documents and reports to assist you with your everyday tasks.
What’s new in ScholarPack?
-
Improvements to the Data Digger including but not limited to renaming of Protection Register to Protection Plan and ability to now report on these students: Young Carer, Child in Need, Students with Post Looked after arrangements and Students with school-led tutoring.
- Updates to the Admin > Personnel > Staff Group Updates to allow .academy addresses
-
An additional column has been added to the Ever 6/Pupil Premium Report to show whether a child is in Local Authority Care. You can now easily compare your records with the Pupil Premium data downloaded from Get Information About Pupils (GIAP).
- The Attendance Percentage Between report has a filter to allow schools to exclude dual registered students.
- The Student Attendance Reports (Bulk) page no longer displays former students.
Exams Officers
OCR ask that exams officers do NOT send EDI amendment files for changes to or withdrawals for Cambridge Technicals (separate to Cambridge Nationals which amendment EDI files can be sent).
Further information on this can be found on the OCR website.
We recommend that you make the relevant changes in your MIS, create the EDI amendment submission file but do not send via A2C.
SIMS Exams
New document DMS337 – SIMS InTouch Exam Results now on DMS Portal
Arbor Exams
Did you know…you can add a footer to Candidate Timetables. Go to Students > Examinations and from left menu select Administration then Setup. Scroll down to the Printing section and add any custom text required.
ESS SIMS Parental Engagement Survey
The ESS product team would love to get your views on parental engagement as they build a roadmap to improve their parental engagement products.
If you would like to help please spare 10 minutes to complete the ESS survey, here is the link.
SIMS Admissions and ATF Documents
Admission and ATF documents have been updated and are on DMS Portal.
Keep your eyes peeled for SIMS End of Year documentation which will be available shortly.
SIMS Connected
We are aware that some schools have moved to SIMS Connected, if you have moved to this service then please can you let us know via the Service Desk.
New HFL Easy Tracking Assessment reports (Arbor) plus new Arbor guidance video
We are pleased to announce that new resources are now available for exploring attainment data using HFL Easy Tracking in Arbor for PA Plus subscribers.
They consist of an Arbor Custom Report Writer report to capture assessment data in Arbor and a Microsoft Excel report template.
Together they will provide detailed analyses on pupil attainment for all three assessment check points used in HFL Easy Tracking.
Visit the Easy Tracking Resources for use in Arbor page to download the resources and the accompanying guidance document (DMS354).
Please make sure you are logged in to your HFL website account to access these resources.
The Assessment Team has also added to the Easy Tracking Resources for use in Arbor page a short video to help Arbor users make good use of the assessment resources including transition matrices. A second video will be produced shortly, to guide users through the new reports just released.
Arbor Quick Follow-Up attendance page
The new Quick Follow-Up page is an easy way to do daily attendance tracking. Using this page, Attendance Officers can quickly see who is in their lessons and who is missing.
If you would like us to switch on this page for your school, contact us via the Service Desk. Once this has been enabled, you access it by going to Students > Attendance > Registers > Quick Follow-Up.
Arbor SMS Subscriptions
Arbor are excited to introduce SMS Subscription, their new annual SMS tariff, making it simpler to keep parents in the loop.
SMS Subscription is perfect for schools who regularly send SMS messages.* Pay yearly and get the benefits of an ongoing subscription:
- Save money vs buying individual SMS Bundles
- No more regular top-ups
- Manage payments easily with one annual invoice
They are also applying an increase to MIS subscriptions in general - which won't apply to HfL customers as the pricing is fixed on the framework.
If you are an Arbor direct customer you can buy your licence through our Framework from your next invoice point and enjoy the benefits of up to 40% reduction on licence costs! For more information email misframework@hfleducation.org
Pupil Premium (Arbor)
At the end of the financial year, the current Pupil Premium Recipients file will become out of date and will no longer show on student profiles. This means that students will no longer flag as a Pupil Premium Recipient until the next upload.
To enable you to report on your Pupil Premium students, make sure all your students have had their Background Indicators recorded correctly - you can see how to do this here.
If the student no longer has any of the background details that would enable them to be in receipt of Pupil Premium (shown in the DfE guides), they will not meet the criteria and will no longer appear as Pupil Premium.
Arbor New Tables Tip!
Did you know, it is possible to do a multi-column sort with the new tables in Arbor! Sort by one column, then hold your SHIFT key and click on another column so sort further by that column.
Arbor Update - Scheduling Communications
There is a known issue within this new feature when scheduling emails in the communications area – scheduled messages are being sent an hour earlier than scheduled. Arbor are currently working on a fix but in the meantime have asked if schools can schedule their emails to go out 1 hour later than needed.
Further details on how to schedule emails can be found in Arbor’s help centre article.
Arbor Rotating Meals
If you have purchased payment plus we have now published our guidance DMS367 creating and managing rotating meal menu’s in Arbor.
Arbor Update on Rotating Meal Patterns (TBC)
Arbor were expecting to release a fix by the end of the Spring term regarding the known issue of meal patterns running through the holidays ( e.g. if your 3 week pattern ends at Easter on week 1 it will update to show week 2 on the first week back in the summer term) but this is an area that they are still testing a fix on and as soon as we have more information we will be in touch with the affected schools.