18th January 2006
All Schools are Running SIMS.net
During the past 14 months, staff at Baglan IT has achieved a creditable task in managing the conversion of all School's Information Management software to the new SIMS.net platform

Why now?
Capita announced in September 2004 that all PLASC Returns from 2006 would only be administered in SIMS.net. As this is a compulsory statutory return to be completed by schools, the deadline date of December 2005 was definite.

What has this meant?

• A wealth of planning and coordinating covering all aspects of the project from data checks to training courses to converting the data from "old SIMS" to SIMS.net.
• A dedicated MIS Team taking a lead roll in checking each school's dataset prior to conversion and resolving massive amounts of inconsistencies - imagine the task, checking every data item for every pupil record on each school's database (both current and leavers). This is being estimated at over half a million data items!
• Planning, writing and delivering training courses to schools. With changes to the software and bug fixes being released on a daily basis, this was a challenge.
• The conversion of each school's database from old STAR to the new SIMS.net was a lengthy process - just one file relating to an old setup routine many years ago would halt the entire process.
• Continuing the planned developments and on-going telephone and on-site support for all other applications as well as SIMS during this period.
• In the Spring and Summer terms of 2005, staff also trained and converted all schools to Attendance for Windows with all previous year's Attendance information converted into the new software.

Conclusion
After a lot of hard work - we got there!

What was achieved in 14 months, took five years back in 1990 when SIMS was first introduced to schools in this LEA. There is still a lot of development work required on the product, however, the tool is far more powerful that previous versions of the software.

Over the next few months, developments will begin here in Baglan to allow teachers to access SIMS.net from their own classroom PC, allowing them to view and enter relevant pupil information.

Have your say
If you would like a feature in the software that would benefit your school, or indeed something which was used before and is no longer available, please email your comments to j.thomas1@npt.gov.uk who will raise it with Capita on your behalf.

Back to News Archive