Once all this is completed then we will provide advance notice before the old interface is finally retired, allowing your staff time to become comfortable with the changes before they become permanent. We will run several webinars on the new interface to assist schools with making the changes closer to the time.

Changing the Default Interface

Go to;

• Profiles Setup > General Settings > Profile Version
• change the version
  
• click Save. 
  

This will change the default for all users. You can easily revert this at any stage, or jump back to the old Profiles interface by clicking the View Profiles V1 button. 

Major Changes

New student timeline: The timeline view of student data, shown on the initial page of a student’s profile, allows you to see a chronology of that student activity/events. Where appropriate, these are hyper-linked to take you straight to the relevant record. You can use the slider at the top to look at different time periods in a student’s life, and in a future update you will be able to toggle on and off the different types of events that are displayed in the timeline. Almost any date-stamped record or event will be shown in the student timeline, such as

• A student’s absence from school
  
• Their involvement in a wellbeing incident
  
•  A new plan creation
  
•  A student’s academic report being published
  
• Participation in various school/extra-curricular activities
  

Reworked menu structure: The reorganised menu structure provides a better alignment with the modules now available in Sentral and the way data is organised inside them.

Easy access to Student Notes:  The Notes feature in the Wellbeing module arrived in 2014, providing a more sophisticated way of adding pastoral notes about a student with very detailed granular access controls – far more so than the pre-existing methods. It’s location in the student view of the Wellbeing module means that a lot of schools haven’t discovered this functionality. This feature is now given prime position within the new Profiles interface, allowing staff to see relevant general comments and observations about a student, classifying those notes into categories, and add new notes directly from the Profiles view. This functionality replaces many of the old anecdotal notes functions in the old Profiles interface, such as the “Staff Comments” feature.

Unified correspondence register: The Correspondence Register provides a single, centralised view of all correspondence for a student sent and received from all Sentral modules. The advantage of this is that it is automatically updated with a copy of every email, SMS and letter that is generated and/or received by Sentral. You can also add manual records at any time – for instance, recording the details of a phone call with a parent or notes from a face-to-face meeting. This provides a single consolidated view of all correspondence with parents or carers of a student.  Please see the Frequently Asked Questions below for more details on this feature. 

Ensuring all current Sentral data shows: As Sentral has continued to grow, some of the data sets did not fit well in the existing Profiles interface and required going into various modules to find that data. The new interface has been reworked to accommodate the current structure of Sentral’s modules, ensuring data such as Health, Analysis, Plans and other data is all clearly visible.

Removal of obsolete functionality: Profiles is now designed as a point of access for student data, not for data creation. The data entry capabilities within the module have or are being moved to other Sentral modules, leaving only a few key data entry items within the Profiles interface. For instance, Legacy Student Plans is moving into the Plans module; Diagnostic Records will shift to Markbook. Existing data will be migrated once this functionality moves across.

Other Enhancements

Unified student profile dialog: The Student Profile Dialog is being rolled out across all Sentral modules, and provides a consistent snapshot of student information from the ‘student’ view of any Sentral module. This provides basic student details; contact information, timetable and will soon add sibling details. 

Cleaner display of student flags: Student flags are now collapsed to the sidebar where they take up less space and remain visible on every screen in Profiles. Notes can be viewed by hovering over the (i) symbol, and when many flags are present, can be expanded by clicking on the “All Flags” link.

Improvements to display of complex family relationships: The contacts display now supports improved complex relationship information from external data sources, including support for multiple families and more than 2 contacts per family. This may not be available in all data sources just yet as it has to be wired up one by one.

Access to past student history: The student’s past school years, roll groups and teacher information is now available under the Student History tab.

Improved visibility of supplementary details: Supplementary details allow you to supplement information that your school administration system may not store, by creating and editing extra fields. These are now visible on the right-hand sidebar when present.

Streamlined notification of student’s teachers and parents: A new Notify Teachers button on the left-hand sidebar unifies email and Sentral notifications of teachers. It will soon also provide shortcuts for notifying a student’s parents via the Portal.

Real-time filtering from home screen: When selecting search criteria, the results are shown automatically in the centre screen area, allowing further refinement of the filters to be applied and displayed in real time.

Expanded quick search criteria: New filters have been added allowing additional criteria to search and filter student lists. 

Summary tiles on home screen: The summary tiles show common school demographics, with quick links to show the relevant student groupings. We would welcome any suggestions for further additions!