Spare a thought for the data managers.
While hurling well-deserved brickbats at Crapita, spare a thought for the poor sods who are going to have to sort this mess out: the schools' data managers. These downtrodden individuals have to work with SIMS (or equally appalling products like CMIS) all the time. As non-teaching staff they are treated as being the lowest of the low and, usually being term time plus some holiday working, get paid three-fifths of damn-all with pensions to match.
Summer holidays? Forget it. School management will leave it until the last moment to tell you about the assessment scheme they want you to implement for next year, so what with that and exam results analysis it leaves precious little time to squeeze in a vacation.
Some will even be forced to produce the school timetable using Nova T6, a package so evil that 'user hostile' doesn't come close to doing it justice.
Couple all of this with execrable software from practically all suppliers to schools, dealing with teaching staff who have all the IT skills of a small piece of putty, laughable local authority support and lies from Capita and you'll get some idea of how happy I am to be retired.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
