SIMS in the Classroom

Top Ten Reasons for Giving your Teachers Access to SIMS in the Classroom

1          Sims Home Page

The SIMS Home Page is the key place where a class teacher, Head of Year or Key Stage can pick up on key performance data about the groups they teach or monitor.  The Home Page is your dashboard to school performance, displaying information on attendance, behaviour and achievement and tracking pupil progress as well as providing a secure interface for messages about pupils

2          Registration

Giving classroom access to SIMS brings information to where it is needed. Schools completing electronic attendance in the classroom see impressive timesaving and improvements in attendance.

A Primary Attendance Officer says: “Before SIMS was in the classroom, I would spend one day each week correcting and scanning attendance OMRs… time I now use more constructively.”

3          Record Achievement and Behaviour

How do you know which pupils are continuously producing excellent work or getting themselves into trouble?  Combined with star charts and praise in class, recording Behaviour and Achievement in Sims allows a consistent approach across the school.  Use this information in your reports and display it online to parents in learning gateway.

4          Assessment Tracking

SIMS Assessment can support your assessment policy and engage parents and pupils through regular progress reports. Assessment data entered once by teachers is combined with national data programmes such as Fischer Family Trust to set and monitor targets. Colour-rendering highlights pupils’ current progress towards these targets. SIMS Performance Analysis will help your school highlight in more detail how certain pupils, departments and staff perform.

It is best to leave this in the words of a head teacher: “Teachers enter their assessments once, and the data is available all around the system – so we spend less time data crunching and more time planning and carrying out the teaching. The tracking sheets are used in pupil progress meetings, where subject leaders report on cohort and individual progress towards targets. Milestones are then set and entered in SIMS Assessment, so that teachers can easily see who is falling behind – and action can be implemented immediately.”

5          Pupil Information at your finger tips

At a parents evening, make sure you have up to the minute data about the pupils you teach at your fingertips, by using the Pupil Teacher View page as your dashboard on an individual pupil, with links to assessment, SEN, Achievement and Behaviour and any other information you need

6          SEN

Store all the support information you need in the SEN register on SIMS.  Each visit or intervention can be recorded for easy retrieval by key staff.  Store IEPs or Provision Maps as attached documents

7          Reports

At any stage a simple report can be run to give your teachers the information they need, be it a simple list of children’s birthdays to an assessment report on the number of Free School Meals Boys working at level 4 in English Reading.

8          Writing Reports for Parents

As part of the SIMS Assessment suite, SIMS Assessment Manager Individual Reports uses pupil information already in SIMS, ensuring the correct name and gender is included to produce professional reports within the school’s customised template.

SIMS spell checks as teachers select and edit their comments, reducing the checking burden on senior staff.

9          Parental Engagement

SIMS Learning Gateway (SLG) securely brings live SIMS information, via the internet, into the homes of pupils and teachers. This enables schools to meet the online reporting agenda, engage with parents and give staff flexibility over where they work.  These include at-a-glance headlines, attendance data and a ‘what’s changed recently?’ feature. PDF copies of pupil reports, produced from SIMS Assessment and SIMS Profiles, are available via the SLG. This is in addition to the attainment and progress information already shared.

10        School Diary

School events, including term dates, half-term holidays, public holidays and events such as school trips, training days, staff meetings, etc. can be viewed in the School Diary panel on the Home Page

Reviewed 18/02/2015