Limitations of the SIMS GroupCall Migrator (England Only)

This article outlines key data migration limitations when migrating English Schools from SIMS to Arbor using the GroupCall API. It covers what to expect for future-dated records, student and staff details, parental consents, user-defined fields, timetables, behaviour, exams, applicants, and documents.

You'll find specific guidance on how different data types—such as pastoral notes, guardian roles, business roles, and document types—are handled during migration. It also highlights known exclusions, such as lesson cover records, non-EDI exam results, and certain timetable models. Use this guide to understand what will migrate automatically, what requires manual setup, and how to prepare for a smooth transition to Arbor.

Future Records

• Only basic student and staff personal details will migrate if they have a start date on the future.
• A future academic calendar, including holidays and terms will migrate. 

Students

• Pastoral notes will always have date of migration as note date
• Students' home email addresses will be imported as the type 'Personal'.
• Student work email addresses will be imported with the type 'Work' with the assumption that these will be school / student email addresses (where present).
• Person ability (Gifted and Talented) does not exist on GC.

Parental consents

• When migrating parental consents, the student's date of admission will be their date of consent.

Guardians

• If the Parental Responsibility field is ticked (true), we set the Legal and Primary Guardian as 'true' in Arbor
• If the Parental Responsibility field is not ticked (false) then we set Legal and Primary Guardian as 'false' in Arbor
• Authorised to Collect is always set to 'False'. This is easy to bulk update from the 'Browse students' page in Arbor.

User defined fields

• All UDF's are migrated as string types.

Staff

• We do not migrate Staff Transportation Methods, only staff vehicle information.
• All staff next of kin relationships will migrate with a type of 'Other'. 

Staff Absence Notes

Only the first absence note—sorted alphabetically—will be migrated for any staff absence record that contains multiple notes.

Example

Note 1: We have received a self certification from the staff member.

Note 2: Further doctors note provided by staff member.

In this scenario, note 2 will migrate because it starts with the letter 'F' and Note 1 will not migrate because it is lower alphabetically.

Staff Disability - Statutory School Workforce Census Field (New 25/26)

The statutory field that indicates a staff disability, with the options (Yes, No, Refused, Information Not Yet Obtained) is not currently migratable from SIMS, because SIMS haven’t made this available in their API. We already migrate the staff impairment, however we can’t assume that someone with an impairment record will automatically have ‘Yes’ as their disability status.

For example, a member of staff might have an impairment that limits their mobility, such as chronic back pain. However they may not consider this to be a disability or consider themselves as disabled, so their disability status would be ‘No’ or ‘Refused’.

Staff Renumeration

• We do not currently have the ability to migrate staff pay scales or superannuation. 

Staff Business Roles

This is how we migrate business roles:

• If staff contracts are present in your SIMS database, we will use these to create business roles
• If staff contracts are not present in your SIMS database, we will use the 'roles', 'teacher category' or the 'isTeacher' status from the staff table to create business roles.
• If those columns are empty, the staff member will be set as a 'teacher'.

Timetables

• SIMS classes do not match the Arbor concept of Teaching groups. Instead, everything listed as a 'Teaching Group' is migrated as a course.
• We are unable to migrate timetable patterns greater than 10 days as Arbor is unable to accommodate them.
• We are unable to migrate non-class timetabled events, such as PPA or assemblies.
• Only the currently imported timetable model for the current academic year will migrate.
• Previous versions of your timetable model will not migrate.
• Timetable models from historic academic year will not migrate.
• Timetables with a start date after your migration cannot be migrated.
• Customers migrating after the start of the academic year should read this guidance. This also applies to schools migrating in-year who will be making a change to their timetable post-migration.

Post-16

• It is not possible to migrate programmes of study with the type of traineeships. This will need to be manually updated against each student post-migration.

Behaviour

• All behaviours will be created with a -1 point score if they had an existing, non-zero points value, otherwise they will be given a 0 point score.
• Similarly, all positive behaviors will be given a +1 point score if they had an existing, non-zero point value, otherwise, they will be given a 0 point score.

Exams

• We do not currently migrate non-EDI exam entries or results.

Applicants

• We are unable to migrate an assigned Registration Form or Year Group for applicants. These will need to be assigned to the applicants post-migration.
• Only applicants with an application status of 'Accepted' will migrate.

Document Manager

• We do not currently migrate general school documents.
• Documents are often very slow to migrate, due largely to the significant size of the SIMS document server, however server performance can also play a role in the speed at which the documents migrate. Please check the SIMS pre-requisites document to ensure your server meets the recommended standards prior to your migration. 

Staff

• We do not migrate staff documents if the document file path is empty.
• Documents relating to a staff medical condition will only migrate if the document type is 'EMPMEDNOTE' and a medical condition record is linked.
• Staff contracts will only migrate if they have a document type of 'CONTRANOTE'.
• We are unable to migrate staff impairment documents.

Students

The following student document types will migrate, providing the document file path is not empty:

• Student medical event documents are created if the entity type has a value 'STUDMEDEVT', entity type has the value PERSON and 'attachment name' is not empty.
• If there is a student medical note without an attachment, we will skip those where the summary field is 'To be obtained from previous school'.

Attendance

• We only migrate attendance mark notes for statutory student attendance, but not for lesson attendance.

Lesson Cover/Supply Teacher

• We do not migrate any lesson cover or supply teacher records via GroupCall.

Student Permanent Exclusions 

• We only migrate the permanent exclusion record and cannot provide the migration of Governor or Independent Review Panel reviews, dates or outcomes. These will need to be manually added to the relevant student records.