Interventions make a difference – prove it!
As well as working with school assessment systems, I’m a school governor for a medium-sized primary school in a deprived area near Manchester.
Not surprisingly I’m keen that our school uses SIMS to best effect and was pleased to talk with Lucy Crawford at this year’s SIMS annual conference. Lucy is the product manager for SIMS Interventions, a new module currently in development by Capita. She describes SIMS Interventions as:
…a system to track under performing students, allocate additional support and resources, and track how those resources affect KPIs, as well as how much those resources cost, from a central area, so that outcomes can be tracked against cost.
If you are going to make an intervention with a pupil, it’s very important that you have a means of measuring the impact on the student. It’s a variation of the question that governors are taught to ask of their schools: ‘how do you know?’
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We need to know that when a school makes an intervention, the interventions is proportionate to the individual pupil’s needs and that the intervention is timely and cost-effective. Proportionate, because we don’t want to overreact or be ineffective. Timely, because there is no point delivering a wonderful intervention just one day too late. Finally, interventions must be cost-effective, because we all know that school budgets are under pressure.
What is SIMS Interventions?
SIMS Interventions are a way of managing your interventions within the SIMS database. The plan is that they will harness the ability to plan, run and analyse the effectiveness of you interventions. Capita are developing the module now and plan to release it in 2017.
How does it work?
Interventions can be set up once and used many times. Each intervention contains the name of the intervention, subject area, start and end dates, and expected outcomes. 
Staff and pupils are allocated to each intervention. Each pupil’s start points and targets can be recorded and progress is measured as having exceeded, achieved, partly achieved or not achieved the target.
Each intervention can be managed in bulk (with facilities to set targets and start points for the whole group ) and down to the pupil level (where individual targets and start points can be entered). All the interventions offered by the school can be brought together in a single, manageable format.
Reporting
‘How do we know these interventions are working?’ is a typical governors question. SIMS Interventions provides a set of reports and enhancements to help answer that question.
Adding Interventions as group filter in Assessment Manager
With my interest in assessment, I do like this! A lot of school currently set up user defined groups to do this. It will be much easier with a direct link to SIMS Interventions. Basically, a new ‘interventions’ filter will be added to the existing list of group filters.
Adding Interventions to the reporting dictionary
Adding Interventions to the reporting dictionary means that you will be able to create your own reports and mix intervention data with assessment, attendance, behaviour data etc. Regular users of SIMS reports will be able to create some fantastic analysis!
The school intervention report
A school intervention report is a grid with pupil names as rows and with the interventions they have been assigned to as columns, so you’ll always be clear about the interventions each pupil has been allocated.
The intervention outcome analysis
Each intervention offered is displayed as a row with a breakdown of the percentage of pupils having achieved or not achieved their targets.
Interventions in SIMS Discover
Combine data from all areas of SIMS into informative and easy to analyse graphs. Imagine being able to cross reference interventions against outcome grades, behaviour points and attendance percentages (and on the same graph if you feel so inclined!)
Pricing and Availability
SIMS Interventions is due for release in 2017 and will be included as part of the basic SIMS annual license cost. In other words, free of charge. If your school attaches any importance to the outcomes of interventions (and what schools doesn’t?) it’s bit of a no-brainer.
Hi,
Thank you for this update!
Will SIMS Intervention apply to Secondary Schools as well?
Cristina
Yes it will – both primary and secondary.
Hello,
Will it include costings as well or just recording data? and will it be integrated with TeachersApp in order for designated staff to record the data directly into SIMS?
Thank you.
Kindest regards
J.
Yes, costing are included, so you can cost out staff and other costs against each intervention.
Hi
Would you think this would be a useful tool for Pupil Premium tracking and spend?
It’s ideal for monitoring pupil premium spend. Each intervention can be costed in terms of up front costs and recurring staffing costs. Progress can be measured in whatever terms you want and there are a set of useful reports that will summarize the costs for you.
Hi David,
We run a lot of year 11 Interventions and I think this method will be useful. At the minute teachers request students they want to attend an intervention, but it means that we often have a lot of clashes – so students being requested for more than one subject after school. Does the system recognise if a student has been requested for more than one intervention on the same date? And is there a way of prioritising which intervention they attend?
Many thanks
Hi Ali, SIMS Interventions doesn’t plan interventions down to the specific timetable period, so it won’t flag pupils who have clashes.