Education, Teacher Assessments 2006

Reporting Teacher Assessments

This was created in 2006. It’s thus probably completely wrong now and many of the links will be broken.

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Schools need to tell parents and the National Assessment Authority of their assessments of pupil achievements in the key stage tested subjects and the non tested subjects.

The obvious first place to start is DFES, this has an RSS Feeds Page but we get rapidly pointed at NAA. This site has a document very relevant called Electronic Submission of Teacher Assessment. This is the NAA statement about what needs to be done and is worth checking out. It also has specific advice about SIMS, the school MIS software. The link is Capita’s SIMS home page, Capita are the author of SIMS.

Another crucial part of the picture is TeacherNet. This has a page http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/s2s which is where the assessment needs to be lodged in a “Common Transfer Format” aka CTF. TeacherNet documents the Submission of Teacher Assessments.

Two further potentially useful links are

• Teachernet’s CTF Page about the common transfer format
• Teachernet’s XML Schema Page which is the data model

Most importantly this page hosts this document which is a Word format document and has been uploaded to this site (see aside). The document is called “SIMS guidance for submission of Teacher Assessment levels to NAA (v2)”. You should use the DFES document not my uploaded version.

Finally TeacherNet has some forums which might be a fantastic resource. They often are. I havn’t checked them out yet. The link is TeacherNet Forums

The MIS Software suite is SIMS, which is written and supported by Capita. SIMS obviously has speciifc reports to produce the parent reports and the CTF file. This is hopefully documented in the word document above and referenced elsehwhere. They will have a telephone support team. I think that these resources will get you to the point where you can create a CTF file and send it/upload it.

We now need to consider how you ensure that the data is complete and accurate. Accuracy is a human process, there should be a program that allows you to review the completeness of the report and Capita (or the product manuals) should be able to guide you to this process. NB You have payed for the support and they may argue that this can only be obtained through training but they needn’t have the last word.

Some Capita links

• the Capita Site Map
• the Capita support page

I also did a Google search “Capita SIMS CTF”.

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• Teacher+Net+Guidance
• TeacherNet+SIMS+Guidance