Hands up who can tell me which pupil details transfer system has glitched. Yes, Capita's Schools using Capita's information management system have been warned that there is an "incident" with its Spring release – just months after it 'fessed up to an issue with the same data-transfer mechanism in a previous release. crying kids in school Capita strikes again: Bug in UK-wide school info management system risks …
Why "for no fault of their own"? The school is the data controller, it's their responsibility to ensure they take all measures to protect this data. That includes not blindly relying on a third-party vendor well-known for its poor track record in terms of data privacy.
Of course schools don't have the resources to properly assess the security of their systems, and Capita was probably imposed on them anyway, but that doesn't remove their obligations for data protection.
SIMS is always a nightmare, for everything. It's only redeeming feature is that everyone in state education standardised on it, so it gets vendor support from a lot of other products/services.
But, to be honest, as an IT guy in education, I have yet to see an MIS that isn't at least 20% shite. They all are. State, independent, offline, web, cloud, they all have shiny interfaces on some parts and absolute trash on another part.
It's taken me 4 years to get a nice listing of staff CRBs out of our provider (who shall remain nameless). Literally to the point that I coded up an Excel with ODBC to pull in the data from the database, sanitise to something approaching order by automatic formulae, then print it so it comes out on a single sheet in a nice compact tabular format (as requested by ISI inspectors - the equivalent of Ofsted for private schools - when we had an inspection who said the default report was basically useless). They still can't manage it, despite being in control of all the reporting output via Crystal Reports and all kinds, and don't make headway because "Well, one of our guys used to work for ISI years ago and he says it's fine").
Four years to get a report, and I'm still no closer, despite pulling in every ranking person in the school to chase it, multiple meetings with them, literally supplying them a format and showing the database fields I manipulated to make it work, etc.
back in the client/server day there was no major system I used that didn't let you design your own reports, mainly by using Crystal Reports rpt files.
The Delphi ERP system i worked on used QuickReport and again users could design and upload their own.
Its basic functionality and replacing it with a listview in a webpage you can group is no replacement.
The common transfer files (CTF) mechanism is used to send children's information between primary and secondary schools for moving pupils and other ad-hoc transfers.
Capita went on to say that schools shouldn't use this to share pupil and contact details with other schools...
Yeah, you know that system for transferring pupil details, well, please don't use it for transferring pupil details, it's not designed for it...
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