Pastoral Care Changes Guide (v17)

Overview

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In v16 we introduced the Pastoral Care module for customers on the Elite plan as a way to help record, monitor and report on student wellbeing at schools. Since this initial release, we’ve had many suggestions from our community posted in the Pastoral Care Ideas forums on how we can further improve this module. This has resulted in a number of changes and additions to the system including:

  • a number of new policy controls
  • the Pastoral Care dashboard
  • the ability to create Pastoral Care groups
  • an improved Synergetic integration

For administrators and pastoral care teams, there are a few new policy controls and workflow changes that will require decisions to be made. To help you work through these, we've provided a guide to the changes below.

Contents:

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Display important records on pastoral dashboards.

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On the pastoral dashboard, there is now the option to display records of a specified severity. This could be useful for staff members who receive a lot of Pastoral Care record notifications, but only need to action records of a certain severity (ie: critical).

First navigate to Admin>Lists>Pastoral_Record_Severity. Then, choose whether you are going to display records of each severity on the Pastoral Care dashboard.

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When you set a severity level to “yes”, the 5 most recent Pastoral Care records with this severity will appear on a user's pastoral dashboard screen under the heading 'important records'.

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If more than one severity level is set to appear, the top 5 records are combined and listed in chronological order. So, you may see a mixture of 'medium' and 'high' records, for example. 

Disable pastoral record severity.

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You can now disable the ability to view or specify pastoral record severity entirely. This means that users will not see ‘pastoral severity’ anywhere in the system.

To disable severity on pastoral records, navigate to Admin>Settings>Pastoral_Care, then adjust the toggle.

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Set SIS document classifications (Synergetic schools only).

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Synergetic assigns permissions based on what it refers to as 'Document Classifications'. Previously, we did not export document classifications, so records were written back to Synergetic without any permission information.

Now, you can set document classifications in Schoolbox so that Synergetic can assign relevant permissions to records that come from Schoolbox. To assign document classifications:

1. Navigate to Admin>Lists>Pastoral SIS Document Classifications.

2. Click '+ New Row'.

3. Enter Name & SIS code. The SIS code should match the code in your SIS lookup table for this pastoral record type (e.g: luDocumentClassification). If you are not using, or don't want to export back to your SIS, this field can be left blank.

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4. Click 'Save'.

5. Click on the 'Pastoral Types' tab.

6. In the SIS Document Classification field, use the drop down menu to match the pastoral type to the correct SIS document classification.

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After you have set your SIS Document Classifications, all future records that are added or updated will be associated with the relevant document classification in Synergetic. This has no effect on any existing records in Synergetic.

Set the number of records on a pastoral page.

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To set the number of records to display on a student's pastoral record page, navigate to Admin>Settings>Pastoral_Care and set the number of records you wish to display in the 'records on pastoral page' field. Make sure you click save if you make any changes. 

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Linked Records

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In v17, we've further enhanced the functionality of 'linked records', so that you can now see from a student's record page a list of students who have linked records, and how many records are linked. There is also a landing page which allows you to see exactly which records the students have in common. 

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Create a link to the pastoral care dashboard.

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Managing workflow changes for staff.

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The changes to the Pastoral Care module may result in some internal policy changes that impact the way that your staff are using the module. The ideas outlined in our major release change management tips guide can be easily applied to the management of changes to the Pastoral Care module. Below are a few specific considerations.

Pastoral Record Severity

As well as deciding whether you will enable or disable this feature, it's worth considering how you will communicate this to your staff. Now that severity levels can have an impact on the records displayed on the pastoral dashboard, you may wish to document which severities should be used in particular incidents and what will occur when these severities are set. For example; when you set a 'critical' or 'high' severity, this will be added to the important records list on pastoral dashboards, this will be followed up by the relevant staff members. Any records with a lower severity will not elicit a follow up action. 

Pastoral Record Visibility

In v17, we have removed the somewhat confusing 'hide content from selected roles' toggle and added the new concept of pastoral groups. This will change the ways in which staff set the visibility of each pastoral record they create. If you are planning on using pastoral groups, you may consider writing a guide to help your staff choose when they should select specific pastoral groups as the audience of a record.

Furthermore, the removal of the 'hide content from selected roles' toggle will mean that records that had this option toggled on, will now be considered 'private', and won't be visible to any users. So, staff may lose visibility of record titles that they previously had. 

Pastoral Dashboard

Staff can continue to add records and create reports in the same way that they did prior to this release. However, as of v17, they can also access records and generate reports through the pastoral dashboard. It is worth highlighting to your staff the added benefits of changing their workflow to use the pastoral dashboard to search and generate reports, including: the search function and the displays of recently viewed records, pastoral group membership and important records. We suggest that you use the section on changes to the pastoral care module available in the changes for teachers guide. 

Revision History

Pastoral Moderators will now be able to view the revision history on a student's pastoral record. This will show who has edited the record, when the record was altered, and the original details of the record. To maintain transparency, you may wish to communicate this added functionality to staff, so that they know that their changes can be viewed by Pastoral Moderators.

Pastoral care report builder

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Further Resources:

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    Did you find the information on this page useful?

    Posted by Megan 8 years ago