How to set up staff access in Provision Map? Admin, teacher, custom roles..
Week 2 at my new school – The first ‘normal’ days of term. Looking at control over staff, calendars & templates.
[CONTROL OVER STAFF, CALENDARS, TEMPLATES]
Now, I’ve had the first few days of term playing with and checking the information, I’d better give some other staff access so that they can help me enter details onto the system.
Control over staff:
That’s under ADMIN>Staff Details.
Creating an account is pretty easy. Simply find the member of staff and click ‘create account (usually about half way across the screen.)
I don’t hand out too many ADMIN level accounts, they can see and mess about with everything. But TEACHER level access is pretty good for anyone who needs an otherwise fairly high level of access. Or Read Only for those who are known to mess about (would it be unfair to blame the Head of Geography?)… or custom level access. You can click custom and then go across and fill in the check boxes for an individual, but that’s going to take me some time to do if I have several staff with similar roles. I want my TAs to be able to view plans, view, create, edit and review provisions, view passports, communicate with parents and access the meetings log. It might be useful if they can use School Robins too as we have this as an add on to the program. Nothing else. So, I’m going to create a custom role called TA and allocate all the ticks to the role I want creating.
Now, back to the staff details page and let’s assign that to some staff (it appears in the drop-down checklist) and adjust their salary information too. I could ask for this to be pulled directly from SIMS, but as my local authority will only work with their figures it makes more sense to enter the generic salaries for different staff. There’s no offence caused if they spot a salary by mistake, which doesn’t usually happen as only those with admin access can see these numbers on this page or on the provisions page when I create one. What I do need to remember to do is include any on-costs, the amount it actually costs the school to employ that member of staff. The TA might take home the equivalent of £10 an hour, but the cost to the school is £10 + national insurance + tax + pension contribution + other bits…
By entering the wages data into here it means that any calculations I do that involve a member of staff will automatically include their costs.
Oh, hold on…that won’t be accurate. I haven’t entered my school calendar for the year.
How to set up School Calendar in Provision Map Settings:
I need to go into ADMIN, school settings and change the calendar.
All I have to do is click any box where the school is closed for a holiday, INSET day or other event that means I don’t want provisions to run. So, if I run drop-down days or have full sports days and Christmas plays, I might want to ‘deduct’ that from the total number of intervention sessions. It does depend on what you are doing with the staff that run them at that time though…they probably still need paying, but strictly speaking they are not running their usual provision, so I could create something new to assign them.
That’s done.
Yes, I have a two-week October break…and we have aggregated all the INSET days into twilight sessions so we can finish a week earlier in the summer!
Whilst I’m on this page, I might as well have a look at the other information too.
Most of this drives the background of the program, things like font face and what I want to appear on printouts. I’ll just need to come back here if I want to make a change later.
Library of Provision Templates and Custom Provision Templates:
Ahh, there’s the templates section…I like the learning plan that is offered as standard, a good old-fashioned IEP. But the program lets me create my own which having an all-through school I might want to use something different in the Early years foundation stage to what is presented at post 16.
There’s a library of templates I can steal some from. Like medical plans and something for Pupil Premium. But I think I’ll have to create something similar to the templates that the school is currently using…not too different from what they are currently using otherwise I’ll have a whole staff go into meltdown!
I’ve added their titles but I’ll create the templates later when I have a bit more time and when I know exactly what I want to include on them.
EHCP recording and reporting is so easy:
I need to record somewhere how much additional funding I receive for my EHCP students so I’m going to add a box to the custom pupil fields. I’ll have to add this information manually but that’s OK, it helps me get to know more about those pupils. I’m also going to add one for Date of Arrival as we have lots of international new arrivals. I know I could look it up somewhere else, but I really want it in one place.
How to set up pupil passports or one page profiles:
I can set up my passport master whilst I’m in here too. I use passports for a quick overview and as a transition document from one year to the next. I also have these available for new or supply teachers. They have just enough information to keep staff informed on a temporary basis, but not enough for a long-term solution (we use plans for that.). I’ll do it later though. The format of a passport is the same across the whole school so I really need to think carefully about what boxes I want to include. It might be better to create some of the passports/profiles in the plans section instead if they need to be drastically different. I could then use this section for students who are PP or EAL and don’t need a plan but I might want to share information…I’ll have to have a think about what will work best for this school.
Provisions:
I need to add in my ‘types of provision’ too. Things like Literacy and Numeracy are obvious, but I want to reflect everything that goes on, so I’m going to include exam concessions, reasonable adjustments, virtual learning provision, home education, medical support and all of those other categories of support. I’ve not got to grips with the pastoral side of the school yet, but once I do there might be some other categories to add. I can always come back and add them later.
I have the funding streams turned on too. So, I can allocate each provision to where I am paying for it from. This will be really handy. My local authority wants to know that I’ve spent the non-existent £6k notional SEN budget AND any pupil premium allocation or LAC premium before they’ll let me apply for any top-up funding.
Automated SEN reviews:
I don’t need any reminders for reviews yet, but let’s set it up ready. I think 3 weeks is a good timescale to work with. And Friday is a good day.
I just need to add my school logo and that’s all the SEN side of things set up. I’m not going to worry about School Robins or Safeguarding for the minute. Oh, didn’t I mention, I’m the Designated Safeguarding Lead too!
Where should I start them?