ChrisRyall

Like any business sector education suffers from its fair share of acronyms. The ones above refer to:

• SIMS – Schools Information Management System, is a product from Capita which we use to manage our student data.
• SEN - Special Educational Needs
• IEP - Individual Education Plan, but now we’re looking at ILPs, Individual Learning Plans

Part of my job is to develop our use of SIMS. Today I spent some time with the staff responsible for our students with particular learning needs, adn we came up with the following ideas.

• How can we use SIMS to better communicate and manage students IEPs and specific targets resulting from review meetings?
• Can we improve our collection of information from staff relating to students with particular learing needs?
• How can we extend our best practice of IEPs to ILPS for every stduent?

Naturally, our use of ICT has some input into these questions, so as a result:

• Our network administrator has activated the alerts and messaging feature within SIMs for me to trial with some staff – this now leaves me with a training job to fulfil.
• I have a copy of IEP Writer, an additional module for SIMs, to explore and evaluate with a view to using it as part of our academic review process and to build and use ILPs with each student.
• I need to prepare some training for our Learning Support Assistants and some administrative assistants in the use of the SEN module in SIMs.

As I mentioned yesterday, every small step or discussion seems to lead to two or three more actions! Although the job doesn’t have a name, it isn’t hard to find things to do
Luckily one of our assistant head teachers has booked some SIMs training for next week which should help me along.