duncan hield – product manager parental engagement

Duncan Hield – Product Manager

Parental Engagement

““SIMS Learning Gateway

SLG provides secure access to children’s progress for parents and strengthens the triangle of communication between school, parent and pupil.

Neil McClementsRainey Endowed School

SLG Headlines

• Deliver Customer Change Requests

• Continue to enhance Homework

• Develop ease of reporting

Spring 2015 – Homework Statuses

• "show late homework" will be changed to "show homework status“

• web part property to globally hide all statuses

Spring 2015 – Teacher Homework View

• Homepage Widget for teachers to view their own homework

Spring 2015 – Teacher Homework View

• The homework appears in the Timeline according to the due date

• Blue backgrounds indicate future homework

• Red backgrounds indicate homework has not been handed in by at least one student and if homework is due for that day

Spring 2015 – Teacher Homework View

• Green backgrounds indicate all homework has been handed in

• Yellow backgrounds indicate at least one student has been given a homework extension

Spring 2015 – Pre-defined Reports

• All fields available in reporting dictionary

• Homework• Teacher• Hierarchy

• SLG Alert Widget• How many parents have completed DCS• How many parents have read published reports• Report for which parents have not

SLG Focus and Priorities

• Publish reports improvements

• Browser investigation and fixes

• Authentication

““SIMS InTouch

SIMS InTouch saves us time and makes communication instant, helping with behaviour and attendance issues

Janet EpplestonNorth Chadderton

InTouch

• During the recent snow period

• Total Messages sent via InTouch

• Average SMS sent using InTouch 2014

• Primary• Secondary

4,000

12,000

2.4 million

Primary Pricing...Thank you for your feedback

• Your feedback - ‘The Primary price is prohibitive’

• The Primary License price is now £400 from 1st April

• Your feedback - ‘the initial number of SMS is prohibitive’

• Offer before 1st July, 4000 SMS

What have we done in the product?

• Move to web services:• InTouch is even easier to support• Low touch install

• 680 schools have already moved to web services• 200 left to move

Spam Filtering

• Further protects InTouch Schools by providing:

• Spam filtering• Anti-Virus• Banned word scanning• Identify potential threats through attachment

scanning

How Have Schools upgraded?

• InTouch web services and VPN run in parallel

• If SSM not installed, InTouch continues to run with VPN on Autumn

• School upgrades to Autumn

• SSM is installed & InTouch services started

• School receives email, copy and pastes the licence key into set up screen

InTouch Spring - Usability

• No need to set up the Scheduler Service

• Automatic Scheduling of Messages and Reminders

• Improvements to spam filtering

• Further increase speed of InTouch

• Flag messages – Outlookifying InTouch

My Messages Inbox (Flag Status)

My Messages Inbox (Flag Status) In sort order

School Messages Inbox (Flag Status)

InTouch Summer - Customisation

• One mailbox for all messages• Allow schools to customise message defaults to suit their needs:

•Outgoing messages

•Incoming messages

•Recipient

•External Email Accounts

One MailboxInTouch users will now see one mailbox for all messages, with School and User (formerly MyMessages) having icons to identify them

For each message type, default can be changed of who messages are sent from; the school or the user.

Customise Send/Receive as

CustomiseDefaults can be set by the school

e.g. a part time attendance officer could send messages, with the replies received by anyone with School permissions to ensure timely resolution

Customise RecipientsThe default can be changed for the InTouch recipient type

External Email Accounts

Choose message types to be forwarded to an external account.

InTouch Summer - Customisation

““SIMS Agora

Using SIMS Agora has been very easy for our school – it just works! Our parents like the system too and really appreciate the convenience of being able to make payments online, whenever and wherever they wish to.

Mrs Jean Robinson Didsbury CofE Primary School

Agora

• Over 24,000 active parent accounts

• Over £5 million processed since launch (April 2013)

• 145,000 transactions

• January - £600,000 transaction value

Agora Headlines

• Support Unit notifications – end February

• Cashless Catering ready for early adopters

• FMS integration launched at BETT

• Refunds

Support Unit Notifications

• Making Agora easier to support, building on LA demo sites

• Nominate support email contact for notifications

• Part of making Agora the One Stop Shop for parents to make all payments for their children

Cashless Catering

• Only Accredited SIMS Partners

• Ability to roll back data if required

Additional Synchronisation Statuses

The green tick denotes a successful synchronisation

The orange exclamation mark means no synchronisation in the last 24 hours

The red cross means synchronisation failed

The cycle means it has an unknown synchronisation status

The Agora Dashboard screen shows the synchronisation status of the SIMS upload, the FMS download and the School Meals upload and downloads.

Agora interface with FMS

Agora interface with FMS

Agora FMS interface journals

Parent make a £10.00 payment on line

Deposit of funds into schools bank account where a transactions charge is made/taken – this will be a few days later

Ledger Code Ledger Type DR CR

School Dinner Money IN 10.00

External Debtor DE 10.00

Ledger Code Ledger Type DR CR

External Debtor DE 10.00

Bank Account BK 9.70

Transaction Charge EX 0.30

December 2014 Release

• Universal Free School Meals

• Diagnostics and Reporting

• Student Statement of all Transactions

• Documentation for SIMS Support Units

• Record Refunds

Produce a statement for a single student

Choose groups to filter students

Student Statement

Filterable list of each payment, exportable to MS Excel

Show a refund has been made

Manual Transactions screen

Select from dropdown

Select product to refund

Specify Refund

Refunds can be for less than the full product amount but cannot exceed it

Finalise Refund

A reason must be logged for the refund

Print a refund receipt

Previous refunds

Refund Reports

Agora Product Page Re-Design

• Functionality Enhancements• User Experience • Paying in instalments• £0 balance products• Upload PDFs• Parental consent• Improve stock control

• Screens so far.......

Agora Future Priorities

• Improvements to on-boarding process

• Functionality Enhancements• Reporting• Paypoint• Transaction surcharges• Store card facility• Staff Provision

Thank youYour questions?

Ben Jonesben.jones@capita.co.uk