CASPA and your school Management Information System
If you use SIMS.net or another school Management Information System (MIS), you will already hold your definitive records of pupil information in electronic form. In keeping with our principle that data should be entered once and used many times, basic pupil records in CASPA can be maintained by import and refresh of data from your school MIS. By use of the simple import and refresh options within CASPA, pupil data in CASPA can be created and then kept up to date to take account of changes to pupil data, new admissions and leavers; CASPA will also automatically detect when your school MIS rolls forward to the new academic year and will import additional data as appropriate.
The means by which pupil data in CASPA is imported and refreshed varies according to the type of school MIS in use:
If you use SIMS.net
Data is exported from SIMS.net by importing and running a SIMS.net Report Definition file; pupil data in CASPA is then created or refreshed from this export file by the use of simple menu options within CASPA. For further details on transferring basic pupil data into CASPA for schools using SIMS.net, please click here.
If you use a school MIS other than SIMS.net
For schools who use a MIS other than SIMS .net, data is exported from the school MIS via either a Common Transfer File (CTF) or Spring School Census (SC1) file; pupil data in CASPA is then created or refreshed from this export file by the use of simple menu options within CASPA. For further details on transferring basic pupil data into CASPA for schools using a MIS other than SIMS.net, please click here
If your school does not use a MIS
Some schools do not have a commercial school MIS capable of producing a CTF compliant with the DfE’s CTF specification. Units and Resourced Provisions in some mainstream schools find it more convenient to not go to the main office to obtain the necessary export, so CASPA enables alternative approaches to support these scenarios.
Schools which do not use a MIS are able to import pupil data via CSV file or will need to manually create pupil records in CASPA and manually administer the CASPA system to trigger actions such as the rollforward to the new academic year of pupil records in CASPA. For further details on transferring basic pupil data into CASPA for schools who do not use a MIS, please click here.