UK School Software Bug Assigns Kids to the Wrong Parents
IT firm Capita has come clean about a bug in the software it supplies to UK schools that has been mismatching kids with the wrong families since December 2017.
According to a message sent to school administrators this week, the bug affects the Schools Information Management System (SIMS), a type of software used by UK schools to keep track of students, their grades, classes, and parent information.
"The problem concerns the corruption of a SIMS software matching routine for new pupils since a Capita SIMS upgrade in December 2017," Capita wrote in its message to school administrators. The bug doesn't affect all students but occurs only during student data import operations. More precisely, the bug affects how SIMS processes CTF files. These are files for moving student data in bulk, when children transfer between schools, or between primary and secondary school phases.