Opportunities for LAs, MATs and School Groups to Partner With Us

There is always some form of report that a senior member of the management team wants, usually at a moments notice and without regard to the day job of the team.  With the best will in the world ESS will not second guess every need but there are ways to roll your own solutions. To solve the problem the starting points are:

1. Having somebody competent and available to:
   • Pull the data from all of the schools
   • Assemble the data in some way
   • Extract and validate the result.
2. Getting access to the data:
   • Are all of your schools on a WAN? 
   • Are all of your schools hosted?
   • Are there web APIs that can deliver the data need?
   • Does the data exist? (Strangely this is not always the case).
3. Do you have all of the legals in place?
   • GDPR
   • Data Processing Agreement?

If you have legals in place, someone to do the work and have a way of getting the data then it may be possible to meet the senior manager's needs.

Example

As a local authority admissions officer, I want to know how many pupils are currently on roll by year group at each school and how many places are available.

Unfortunately SIMS does not have a concept by year group of maximum year group size, however this is a pretty simple ask for the Head / Deputy or data manager and one that would take schools 5 minutes to put on an email.  Additionally schools change from year to year and the number of places available may also change as such, a termly email check would be a simple ask and response.  To maintain a file with the capacities in a computer readable file even a CSV if creativity is challenged!

<SchoolCapacities>
   <School>
        <Name>School A</Name>
        <Number>1234567</Number>
       <Scale>
            <Year>
                 <YearName>Year N2</YearName>
                 <Boys>15</Boys>
                 <Girls>15</Girls>
            </Year>
            <Year>
                 <YearName>Year R</YearName>
                 <Boys>30</Boys>
                 <Girls>30</Girls>
            </Year>
       </Scale>
   </School>

</SchoolCapacities>

SIMS does have the number of pupils per year group available via a web DeX OData API.

https://seli00apm01.azure-api.net/ssli01/Learner/v3/LearnerIdentifiers
?$filter=OnRollState eq 'Current'&$select=CurrentYearGroup,GenderCategory&

which returns pupils on roll simply describing gender and year group.

    public class CurrentYearGroup
    {
        public string Description { get; set; }
        public string ExternalID { get; set; }
        public string Type { get; set; }
    }

    public class LearnerIdentifier
    {
        public string GenderCategory { get; set; }
        public CurrentYearGroup CurrentYearGroup { get; set; }
    }

Which returns

 {
            "GenderCategory": "Male",
            "CurrentYearGroup": {
                "Description": "Year  N2",
                "ExternalID": "3ec2552d-533b-4a99-9cb8-6733cf70942e",
                "Type": "PastoralGroup.Definition.YearGroup"
            }
},

Care needs to be taken just in case there is a continuation URL at the base of the response for larger numbers of pupils.

There is even code which will allow you to iterate through all the schools who have consented to the underlying web application and collect the data for all of the schools in the group. See here.

Repeat for each school and augment the data with the relatively static capacities and there is a beginning to meeting the Admissions officer's needs.

No doubt the requirement will change as the potential of integration is understood but a proof of concept can be delivered in a day or two for simple needs.

If web APIs are available then the task is simpler but even if it is not and the schools are on a WAN of some description then SIMS 7 command reporter could be used to achieve something similar, simply create a report that has Gender and Year Group and apply similar logic to the above.  

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<SuperStarReport>
  <Record>
    <Gender>M</Gender>
    <YearGroup>Year 11</YearGroup>
  </Record>
  <Record>
    <Gender>M</Gender>
    <YearGroup>Year 11</YearGroup>
  </Record>
</SuperStarReport>

In this case there is also a need to create users in SIMS and grant them access and then to keep a list of schools and credentials securely - do remember that these credentials could be used for nefarious purpose if lost.

<Schools>
  <School>
    <Name>School A</Name>
    <Number>1234567</Number>
    <Server>Server1</Server>
    <Database>S1234567</Database>
    <User>LAUser</User>
    <Password>*****</Password>
  </School>
  <School>
    <Name>School B</Name>
    <Number>7654321</Number>
    <Server>Server1</Server>
    <Database>S7654321</Database>
    <User>LAUser</User>
    <Password>####</Password>
  </School>
</Schools>

However in essence, this may be a simpler task than using the web APIs.  See here for code samples.

If this looks interesting to your for your LA, MAT or school group, then please contact us.