Manipulating subjects and groups via feed rules

GO 4 Schools includes a very powerful feature that allows school managers to change the subject and groups available within the system. For instance, using this facility you can:

Change the names of subjects to make them more meaningful to parents and students.
Create subjects and groups in GO 4 Schools that do not exist in your MIS, primary schools can create subjects which are not timetabled in their MIS.
Split a single subject in your MIS into multiple subjects in GO 4 School, e.g. split year 11 English into year 11 English literature and year 11 English language.
Add virtual groups containing a subset of students in a subject which can then be analysed as if it was a real teaching group, e.g. a set of students who may be receiving extra tuition in English.

We recommend using rules to bring the subjects and groups in GO 4 Schools in line with the courses taught within the school. We advise against using rules just to allow you to have different markbooks for different groups studying the same qualification. The reason is that GO 4 Schools reports statistics for each subject separately, so if you split maths into six subjects, e.g. one for each group, you will see six separate sets of maths statistics rather than one consolidated set.

How feed rules work

The feed rules feature works by manipulating the contents of the feeds that we receive nightly from your school. Each manipulation is performed by a rule that you create, with each rule being applied to the feed in turn.

Because we process feeds overnight, you will only see the impact of any rules you add, change, or delete the following day. We realise you will probably want to see changes sooner than this, but unfortunately we aren't able to process feeds during the day because of the negative impact it would have on users within all schools.

Please note that some feed rule changes can impact timetables - if feed rules move groups into new subjects so that you end up with multiple new subjects that contain groups with the same name (e.g. splitting Science into Biology, Chemistry and Physics), we may not be able to link to a markbook or show behaviour/seating plan quick links in the timetable if there is any ambiguity over which markbook is the correct match for the timetabled group. You may want to consider making group/timetable changes in your MIS before using feed rules where possible.

A warning: Please ensure that your subjects are set up as you wish them to appear before the end of the academic year. In order for feed rules to take effect, we need to process your latest MIS feed. During the summer holidays the feeds that are harvested from your MIS often do not contain the necessary information such as student/group membership, so we are unable to process these feeds. This in turn means that new feed rules do not process over the summer holidays.

Types of feed rules

The various types of rules that you can create are listed below. In some cases, you might need to add two or three rules to achieve the desired effect. Some examples of how you might combine the rules in this way are given here.

Type of rule	Example/notes
Change a subject's name and/or year group	Example 1: Change the name of subject "ResMat" to "Resistant Materials" to give a clearer picture to parents and students. Example 2: Change the year groups for tutorial subjects to make them easier to work with. For example, if you use vertical tutoring your tutorial subjects may be scattered across several year groups.
Copy groups into another subject	Example: Copy a year 11 English group into a new subject called "English literature", but leave the group in the original subject (year 11 English) too. This allows you to create separate markbooks for English and English Literature, so you can track students in those subjects separately. Note that the destination subject does not have to exist in your school's MIS, so you can use this type of rule to create entirely new subjects which can each have their own markbook.
Move groups into another subject	Example: Move a group from year 11 ICT into a new subject called "ICT - single award", removing the group from the original subject (year 11 ICT) at the same time. This allows you to track the two subjects separately. Note that the destination subject does not have to exist in your school's MIS, so you can use this type of rule to create entirely new subjects which can each have their own markbook .
Change group teachers	Allocate a teacher to a group in a subject that does not exist in your school's MIS, or change a teacher assigned to a group that is in your school's MIS.
Delete a subject	Prevent a specific subject from appearing in GO 4 Schools. Any markbook and marks held for the subject are retained by GO 4 Schools, so if you subsequently disable or remove the rule, these will re-appear.
Delete groups	Prevent specific groups within a subject from appearing in GO 4 Schools. Any marks held for the students in the groups are retained by GO 4 Schools, so if you subsequently disable or remove the rule, these will re-appear
Delete a year group	This will hide all subjects and groups for the chosen year group. You may want to use this to tidy up data if, for example, you have only a few year 12 and 13 students that are guests from other schools that you don’t want to track using GO 4 Schools.
Add students to a group	Hand pick students and add them to: A new group in an existing subject A new group in a new subject An existing group in an existing subject Example 1: Create a new subject called "Dance" with a group containing six students. Example 2: Create a new group in the existing year 11 English subject and add twelve students to it.
Move students into another group	Hand pick students and add them to: A new group in an existing subject A new group in a new subject An existing group in an existing subject Note that this type of rule will remove the students from the source group Example: Move students from a group in year 11 ICT into a new group in a new subject called "ICT - single award". The students will be removed from year 11 ICT.
Remove students from a group	Prevent one or more students in a particular group from in appearing in GO 4 Schools, in that group. Any marks held for the students are retained by GO 4 Schools, so if you subsequently disable or remove the rule these will re-appear.
Remove students from a year group	Prevent one or more students in a particular year from appearing in GO 4 Schools. Any marks held for the students are retained by GO 4 Schools, so if you subsequently disable or remove the rule these will re-appear.

Please note: At present you do not have the ability to change group names in GO 4 Schools. Groups created by feed rules will be given names automatically. This is to minimise the possibility of clashes between group names that come in from your MIS, and groups that are created by feed rules.