Hello from your Scomis team, amidst the heavy downpours and blustery winds.

This week we highlight the last chance for schools to get into the super-fast gigabit broadband programme. Free, whizzy fast broadband into your school by 2025. We urge you to jump onto this vital opportunity, see details below. Also this week, a great story of inspired customer feedback that enabled us to improve EdTech accessibility. And we feature a really valuable course on timetabling that is designed for new timetablers and those in need of a refresh.

Reminder for Hosted Application Service Users to log off by 5pm this Friday 25th November. More information in the last article "Hey Sarah!"

Thousands of rural primary schools to get huge broadband upgrade

DEADLINE FOR SOUTHWEST SCHOOLS IS 1ST DECEMBER - ACT NOW!

Up to 3,000 primary schools across rural England will get lightning-fast gigabit broadband.

The Department for Education are working with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and Building Digital UK to deliver the Schools Gigabit Broadband programme.

This programme is to ensure that all maintained schools in England have access to high-speed internet by the end of 2025. We are working with schools in the Southwest to check their eligibility for the programme, with the aim of going to procurement on the 5^th December 2022. You can read more about the programme here.

This article is part of the DfE's last push to reach those schools that are eligible to be included. Please check your inbox for any emails sent by 
schools.FIBRE@education.gov.uk. And, if you are a school with poor broadband connectivity email the team at schools.FIBRE@education.gov.uk.

Training - Timetabling

Following our last CPD, Training & Courses email, packed with opportunities, our four day SIMS NOVA T6 for New Users remote tutor led course, starting in January, is available to book now!

NOVA T6 for New Users provides a step by step explanation of how to use Nova-T in the production of the school timetable, including populating the system with core data (rooms, staff, subjects) and submitting the completed timetable to SIMS.

SIMS Next Gen

We have been rolling out SIMS Next Gen to Scomis’ primary school customers this month. It’s exciting to be at the forefront of this move to the cloud, and impressive overhaul of the SIMS functionality and user experience (how intuitive your screens look and feel).

JOIN US ON THE NATION’S JOURNEY INTO THE CLOUD

If you are a primary school customer and are ready to see what the Next Gen slices can do for your school, including speed and ease of taking the register, get in touch with us here. Just to remind you, SIMS 7 continues to be developed alongside SIMS Next Gen, you can switch between them both, and the two synchronise with each other effortlessly.

If you’re not ready to take this step with SIMS Next Gen, we strongly recommend our Hosted Application Service, which is a smaller but vital step into the cloud for your SIMS MIS. Your account manager or the Service Desk can help you get started with taking this step.

Inclusivity and accessibility improvements for customers 

Recently a customer with dyspraxia mentioned to one of our awesome Service Desk Analysts that they have trouble when it comes to typing their password into the 'Confirm password' box on Scomis' Hosted Application Service. The customer often couldn't remember what password they had entered in the 'New password' box due to their dyspraxia. They had devised a workaround, which was to first write their new password in a Word document so they could copy and paste it into the two boxes. But this has security implications.

Thanks to this suggestion into our 'All Ideas Matter' forum, the Scomis Infrastructure team have developed a feature to make our Hosted Application Service password reset function more accessible for people who have dyspraxia, dyslexia and associated conditions.