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Systems

Archiving Pupils
Setting the Form List
Setting House Staff
Prospective Pupils
Finalising the Task

The Shadow Page

At the end of the school year it is necessary to update the records of some prospective and all current pupils so that they reflect the changes between the current year and the next. The most important items, the update of which can be automated to some extent, are:

  • the movement of pupils in their final year into the Archives
  • the movement of all other current pupils into their new forms
  • the movement of some pupils into a new part of the school
  • the change of pastoral tutors
  • the change of the status of new pupils from prospective to current

All of these processes can now be carried out well before the end of the current academic year. A new tab labelled Shadow has been added to the records of prospective and current pupils.

Pupil Shadow information

On this form can be entered the form, PType (section of the school), year, tutor and house that the pupil will be in for the coming academic year. These changes can be made as a block, either using the Multi-edit function or using the AnnualMovements form. The values can be changed as many times as you wish before the end of the year. They are only finalised when you click the final button on the AnnualMovements form. When you are ready, the shadow values can be used to populate teaching groups for the coming academic year. Movement of new pupils into the school now depends on them having shadow values entered. Those without values will not be transferred.

Most of the stages of update are handled via the
AnnualMovements form. Normally this would only be accessible from the Data Manager’s menu.

Annual Movements form 

Archiving pupils

Normally the whole of the top year of the school will be moving into the Archives.

First select your final year from the
Current year dropdown. Next select the date that you want to record them as leaving the school. We suggest you standardise this to either the last day of July or the last day of August so that it is easier to locate leavers by date in the future. Having done this click the Move into Shadow archives button.

Setting the Form List

Setting form list 

Stage 2 is to determine which forms pupils will move to next year. Clicking on the Step 1 button opens the ClassList form for editing. You can of course make this form available separately if you wish to delegate this stage of the task. It is also accessible from the Timetable Menu.

Forms list

For each existing form, add in the Shadow columns the form pupils will move into next year and the tutor who will take over that form. Where a form with that name does not currently exist, you must create a new entry at the bottom of the list. For the form or forms containing leavers leave the two shadow columns blank.

When you have the list complete, close the form and then click on the
Step 2 button.

You can repeat this process as many times as you wish, so if you have a re-think, don’t worry.

Setting House Staff

Set house staff

If some of your pupils are assigned tutors on the basis of the house they are in, you can use the Stage 3 to do this. First, however, you must make any necessary changes to the house staff allocation by clicking the
Check house staff allocation button. Here you can edit each house in turn, assigning only the tutors. Each tutor can be allocated to a particular year. If a tutor looks after more than one year in that house you should make an entry for each year that tutor supervises. If the housemaster/mistress or assistant are going to change next year, you should leave the change at least until the year’s final reports are written.

Now you can allocate tutors to pupils a year at a time. Select a year where the tutor is allocated on the basis of house, then click the
Assign house tutors button. Do this for each year where tutors are assigned in this way. If no years have their tutors assigned like this then ignore this button. Once you have assigned all the appropriate years, move onto the next stage.

Once you have done this task, you may want to change the house staff allocation back to its current state if this is going to affect some of your reports. This should really only be necessary for housemasters and housemistresses.

Prospective Pupils

It is likely that the bulk of your prospective pupils will be going into a small number of year groups, e.g. Reception or year 7, so it is useful to be able to populate their shadow year and Ptype in one go. This is done through Finder.
1. Open Prospective Pupil Finder.
2. Select the year group you want to update by using appropriate criteria.
For example:

Prospective pupils


3. On the right hand side, in the functions tab, choose Multi Edit.

Multi edit

4. In the Column headers you can choose shadow year and shadow ptype, then in the first pupil's data, fill these in to the values you want (in this case Year 7, Ptype Lower). Tick the Copy columns 1 and 2 tickboxes, then press Copy to all from selected row & columns to copy this data to all pupils.

Multi Edit is a very powerful tool within SchoolBase® which is particularly useful when setting up the shadow year. All the Shadow fields are available within Multi edit, and it can be used for such tasks as:

  • Setting Shadow Forms and Tutors for groups of prospective pupils.
  • Placing pupils in different form groups than the default (e.g. to split existing pupils from one year 6 class throughout 4 year 7 classes, where many new pupils enter in year 7).
  • Setting Shadow House for prospective pupils.

Basically any application in SchoolBase® where it is useful to make the same update to basic data belonging to a group of pupils, multi edit is the right tool for the job.

Finalising the task

You should only use the last tab when you are ready to move to the new academic year. The button to carry out the task will only become visible after the end of the summer term (or whichever is the last term of your academic year).


Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 July 2010 08:30
 
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