In an earlier post I described how you can install the latest EYFS marksheets and use them to calculate the GLD (good level of development) measure. I’ve also blogged about running the special SIMS report that creates an Excel spreadsheet to analyse that data. In this post I’ll show you how to generate a set of useful graphs using SIMS Discover.
What is SIMS Discover?
Discover has been around for a few years now, but surprisingly few primary schools use it. It’s a free add-on for SIMS that provides a range of pre-configured graphs and allows schools to create new graphs by ‘drag-and-drop’. If you don’t have it already contact your local SIMS support unit who will be able to install it for you.
How do the EYFS Graphs Work?
Once installed the graphs pick up the GLD data from Capita’s GLD marksheets which form part of the EYFS Profile Wizard 2017. These are a set of graphs that I’ve created to help primary schools analyse their data.
Note that you do need to have installed the marksheets as described in this post before you import or run these graphs.
Video Demo
Installing the graphs
- Make sure you have SIMS Discover installed on your PC – note that it has to be installed specifically on your PC. You’ll know it’s been installed because you will have an extra SIMS Discover icon on your SIMS Homepage.
- Download the graphs here:
- Unzip the file to a location you can find in the next step
- In Windows, from the start menu look for the SIMS Application folder
- Within the SIMS Application folder you will find the SIMS Discover Administration Utility. Open it.
- Log in with your usual SIMS username and password
- Choose ‘managing assessment graphs’
- Scroll down to ‘import assessment graphs’
- Navigate to the location where you unzipped the graphs
- Click next
- Highlight all the graphs on the next screen (click one graph then click Ctrl &A)
- Click next – the cohort matching screen will not usually need any changes
- Click confirm
- Discover will now import the graphs – this may take some time
- Check the progress of the import by going back to ‘managing assessment graphs’ and clicking on view import progress. You’ll need to manually refresh the screen.
- Once the graph has imported, you’ll need to start a data transfer between SIMS and Discover
- Go to ‘managing data transfers’ | ‘start a data transfer’ | ‘current year’ and confirm the details on screen
- Again, the transfer may take several minutes, be patient!
- Monitor the progress of the transfer via ‘managing data transfers’ | ‘view transfers’ – press the refresh button to update this screen
- Once the transfer has finished, close any open SIMS Discover sessions, and open a new SIMS Discover session from the icon within SIMS.
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