A new member of staff in our SEN department posed the question 'How would I email boys/parents with a particular SEN need'.
Thinking it would be easy, I tried to perform the action and realised that there is no real interoperability between the student manager and the student register.
There is the faintest of integrations, that is, I can search for pupils in student manager only if they are on the register, or if the need is mild/severe , but nothing more detailed.
I can see within student registers I can filter on a 'custom groups', but I cannot manage or add to custom groups. That would at least be a start, a group could be made based on the register filters, and then those groups picked up in student manager for email wizard purposes.
No matter which way I try to attack the problem, it is seemingly impossible to select a 'random' selection of students from the Student Register Module using its data/filters and use that list for email wizard mail merging in the student manager.
This is very limiting, it makes it impossible to send emails or letters to parents, for example, to invite them to a workshop or coffee morning regarding a particular type of SEN requirement (Which is what the new user is trying to achieve).
Could ISAMS look into making some of the Student Register fields usable within student manager?
Alternatively, making the email wizard available to be called from the register screen would work. This would allow the detailed register level filtering of pupils with a certain need, and then allow emailing of parents.
All of this was quite possible with schoolbase - the centralised nature of the pupil finder and the workflows hanging off of the pupil entity made for a very simple/powerful workflow that was easy to follow and quite flexible.
The separate module nature of ISAMS means that in some cases the data may as well exist on an entirely different platform.
Many thanks,
Scott Woodcock
Radley College IT Dept.
01235 543037
