The parental feedback process

Parental feedback allows local authorities to produce individual letters to parents of every child measured, advising parents of their child’s measurements and offering useful advice, including information about local services and contact numbers.

The feedback process consists of four stages

1. (Optional) apply filters to the pupil grid, to show only the pupils that meet specific criteria for example all pupils in Year 6 who have been measured.

2. Identify and resolve warnings.

3. Generate and export a CSV file containing pupil data.

4. Use Microsoft word to mail merge the exported NCMP child data with a letter template. The templates could either be those recommended by Public Health England or templates approved by your own LA.

You may want to send letters to parents whose children meet specific criteria for example., all Year 6 pupils who have been measured and categorised as healthy. To extract this data, you must apply a filter to the pupil grid.

1. From  the NCMP Public Home page, click the schools tab at the top of the page.

2. Click the pupil grid link for the school you want to extract data from. 

3. You can select criteria to apply to the pupil data, on the fields shown below.

4. Once you have selected the criteria, click the filter button. 

Data warnings are intended to bring missing data or abnormal measurement values that are not within expected ranges to your attention. Warnings are highlighted with an amber coloured border and a warning symbol is placed next to each records that requires attention. 

It may be that measured values are outside expected ranges, in which case you are given the option to suppress a specific warning for a specific value. Once suppressed, the warning will not appear again.

A record will be highlighted with a warning if

• a child's postcode is blank
• a child's postcode is the same as the school's postcode
• a child's height, weight or BMI is outside the expected rang

NCMP data warning saying the post code is blank. 

NCMP data warning saying the postcode is the same as school. 

NCMP data warning sign saying the height is outside the normal range.

NCMP data warning saying the BMI is outside the normal range. 

Once all warnings have been resolved, the required data is ready to be downloaded to your local network.

1. In the schools page, click the pupil grid link for the school you want to extract data from,

2. The pupil for the selected school is shown.

3. After applying any filters, from the pupil grid, click the letter generation link under the export records heading.

4. If there are warnings on any pupil records selected for letter generation, a list of pupils and their associated data warnings will be displayed. Depending on the number of warnings, this may only be a partial list.

5. Depending on your security settings, you may see a security warning at the top of the browser. Click the link Click for options, then click download file.  

6. If there are no warnings, security or otherwise, you will see this dialog box is shown when the letter generation link is clicked.

7. Click save. 

8. Navigate to the folder where you want to save download file to.

9. We recommend changing the filename to reflect the downloaded data set depending on the filters you applied (if any). 

For example, if you applied a filter of healthy’ on the BMI category field for Appletree Gardens First School, you may want to save the file with the name of PupilDataHealthyAppletree.csv.

10. Click save. 

11. The downloaded file will be saved in the specified folder and each record included within the file will be flagged as having parental feedback generated with a mail symbol. 

13. To view the downloaded data, either

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the downloaded file. Double click the file to open.

Or open Microsoft Excel. Click the File tab & select Open. Then, navigate and change the File type to  Text File.   Select the downloaded file and click open.  

The download file contains the following fields which will be used during the mail merge. 

The file should look similar to these images.