GO 4 Schools

This article is to support schools with a consortium 6^th form set up. A typical consortium will exist of two or more schools who operate a single 6th form provision to ensure the offer of 16-18 education is viable financially, in the breadth of the curriculum offer and for shared teaching resources. In the setup of a consortium 6^th form using GO 4 Schools, we would expect a separate school account to be used containing just students from years 12 to 13/14.  The 6^th form site will enable staff to log in to view these year groups and the corresponding data alongside the functionality available using any additional Go 4 Schools modules.

This article will cover the set-up requirements of the MIS, the finance structure and the implementation and maintenance of a 6^th form only GO 4 Schools site.

Pre-requisites - technical

One school within the consortium will need to nominate for their MIS to include all required information for all 6^th form students [School A]. 

• School A will need to install the feed tool on a different server to the one they use for their “main” subscription. You will need the SIMS client software on both. The second machine could be a desktop rather than a server – as it only needs access to the SIMS client and Active Directory.
• All students from both schools need to be on School A’s SIMS server, students from other schools should be added as guests. 
• When processing feeds GO would force all students to be on roll rather than guest students from School B. 
• To view the timetable this will need to be also added to School A, including all additional guest students with subject and group memberships and teaching staff assigned.  
• For teachers to access the 6^th form site they should be added to the active directory. A group of users can be added in active directory into a specific security group for the 6^th form site access and so they would not be able to access the 7-11 site for School A. It is possible to add users using a text file, but this requires manual updating as staff join/leave.

Additional considerations:

• An attribute for ‘Home school’ will need to be set up so data can be viewed and easily extracted if required for students from School A, B etc. 
• The student attributes will only populate via the feed for the data added to the MIS for students from School B.  Guest students will require a full record. 
• Post-16 courses and learning aims are required in the census so are required to be maintained in each school’s MIS with detailed course information. 

We would advise schools to consider the time implications required to add the additional data to the main school MIS as this work would need to be undertaken and completed prior to commencing the feeds from GO 4 Schools so all aspects can be thoroughly tested.

Finance model

The new 6^th form consortium site is a new school so pricing will be based on this approach.   Most consortiums are small in comparison to main schools so the price usually will be in the 0-399 or 400–799 range for larger 6^th forms. The cost of the starter version remains the same regardless of the size of the school, but additional modules will be priced within the appropriate 6^th form roll size.

As the consortium is usually part of a group of schools who are all users of GO 4 Schools an additional 5% discount will be applied as a multi-school purchase. One referring school will also receive 5% discount from their next renewal. The Customer Service Team can review existing subscriptions and make the necessary adjustments to bring these payments in-line if the costs are being covered by a Multi-academy Trust.

So, this simplifies the subscription:

• If any of the main schools lose 6^th formers and their subscription band lowers because of this, we would calculate a reduction accordingly.  The schools will drop to the next band down and the balance could be used against the cost of the new consortium, or we could carry it forward to the next renewal. 
• New +16 school is charged as a standard new school for their subscription.
• All schools benefit from the 5% MAT reduction.  (a referral discount is added to School A for the addition of a new school).

Curriculum set up.

To view the timetable for all students and staff the 6^th form consortium timetable will need to be added to School A.   The curriculum model offered by the consortium should be considered as part of the timetable set up. 

Consider are your subjects taught exclusively at a single school, or are they split and taught at different sites. Also are some subjects taught exclusively at each school. 

For example, you may wish to indicate the school site where the subject/lesson is being taught, this is particularly useful if lessons are split across sites.  One way this can be done is in the naming of the subject in the timetable.   History @ School A or Maths @ School B. If using this naming convention, it is important to note that this is how the subject names will display on take home reports and outputs in GO 4 Schools.

If a subject is taught across different sites and the subjects have different names and therefore separate markbooks, as in the example above, you will need to use the Discount pathway on the subject page for a single view of subject attainment. 

However, it is also worth considering that when using other analysis tools the subjects will show separately, for example in the Year group ribbons and statistics.  But if you want to see the subject performance in each school then this will show the data you require. 

A simpler approach is to have a single subject set up that all teaching staff can access and enter the required assessment data. 

Feed rules can be used in the 6^th form consortium school to set up additional non-timetabled subjects, such as EPQ and for tracking wider curriculum areas such as destinations and careers.

Additional modules

Attendance

If the consortium wishes to record both session and lesson attendance of 6^th form students in GO 4 Schools using Tier 3 attendance this is possible as all students appear in the site with an enrolment status of ‘Main’.

We cannot write back attendance data from the consortium site to the individual school sites. This would need to be a manual process completed by the schools involved.  If using SIMs, School A has the option to maintain attendance write backs for session attendance into the MIS, this will not include the guest students.

School B may be required to block fill their MIS with attendance marks (for the census).

6^th form attendance is not part of the statutory return in the school’s census; however, we would advise schools to ensure they retain any additional information required in the MIS for the annual returns to the DfE.  The census in School A should not be affected as the additional Guest students added to the MIS are not included in the return.

Attendance management

Using the custom attribute for ‘Home school’ this can be set to use for special registers which will allow a register to be viewed for all students from each school.

An attendance officer for each school can be added to the AD of the 6^th form consortium school if they wish to view the attendance or use the register download to manually update attendance in the MIS.

Markbooks

Most consortium 6^th forms choose to use GO 4 Schools to enable staff to easily record assessment data to track student performance across the consortium and the curriculum.  This therefore includes the use of markbooks.

• If all schools are new to GO 4 Schools and have no previous markbooks then these can be set up as required from scratch to collect the assessment data in the format used by each subject.
• If schools have existing markbooks set up in the main school site for 6^th form, then we can offer to set these up as templates and copy the structure over to the new 6^th form site.  It is important to note that data for previous academic years will remain in the main school sites.

Other modules

Additional modules can also be added to the 6^th form consortium site as required such as Parental engagement to share data with parents, Progress reports, Seating plans, Homework, Behaviour etc.

All other key functionality available with the starter version will be accessible including communications and consents if required.

If using take home reports as lesson attendance is recorded for all students, the consortium may prefer the option of adding lesson attendance rather than session attendance to reports.  If this is required, then the lesson attendance will reflect the set up of subjects from the timetable.