Reducing the number of columns in the programme of study marksheets

The Programme of Study marksheets (PoS) are a great way to record formative assessments against the national curriculum. All SIMS schools already have access to this system – there’s no extra charge.

Many schools don’t understand how flexible the SIMS program of study system is. Not keen on the the column headings? Or do you want to use a another scheme entirely, and need completely different columns and statements?

Too many columns!

One of the criticisms of the program are study marksheets is simply that there are too many statements for each sheet and schools want to reduce the number of columns, perhaps just keep the key objectives for any given year.

There are four techniques for reducing the number of columns visible to your staff:

1. Click Show/Hide at the top of the PoS marksheet screen and choose Show Statutory Columns Only
2. set up your own PoS marksheets with fewer statements – it’s easier than you think!
3. use school expectations to schedule when statements are shown or not shown
4. set an inactive period when the statements will be omitted from the PoS marksheets.

In this article I’ll show you how to set an inactive period and how to use school expectations.

Hiding unwanted statements in the PoS marksheets by setting an inactive period

• Go to Focus | Assessment | Program of study management.
• Click ‘manage content’. You’ll see a list of the areas covered by the Program of study marksheets.
• Choose the year group you want to amend (for example year five). You’ll see underneath there is a section called subjects/strands that lists all the subjects and strands relevant to the relevant year group.
• Choose the strand you wish to edit and open it up by clicking the small plus sign.
• Navigate to the statement you want to remove. You’ll see that this green statements are the core national curriculum statements and the blue statements are the optional ones.
• Highlight the statement you wish to hide and double click it. This brings up an ‘edit statement’ box. Although we can’t delete this statement, what we can do is set an inactive period.
• Click new to create a new inactive period and set it inactive for the current academic year. Leave the end date open ended so that you can choose when to reinstate this particular statement.
• Your screen will look like this:

Go through the all statements in the list and make them inactive as you require.

Hiding unwanted statements in the PoS marksheets using ‘school expectations’

Every statement in the PoS marksheets can now be associated with a particular term or half term. Once this is done, the programme of study marksheets can be easily filtered to only show statements that will be taught this term. The result is a list of statements that is much shorter and more relevant, and hence easier for teacher to use.

• Go to Focus | Assessment | Programme of study management | Manage content.
• Choose the year group
• Choose the subject and strand. You will see a screen like this:

• At the right hand side of the screen you’ll see the terms as yellow column headings against each statement.
• Tick the terms when you want the statements to be displayed – usually you will follow your school’s curriculum plan.
• And that’s it!
• To use the school expectations simply open up the PoS marksheet for the same year and subject.
• Click Show/Hide from the menu at the top of the marksheet
• Click ‘Show School Expectations Only’