What is it?

We’ve planned work to make improvements to timetabling in Arbor. This work is ongoing and not quite ready yet. We want to reassure schools that we are aware of the issues they had and we’re actively making changes to improve this.

What we’ve been up to

• Now when you set a timetable slot to be deleted, you can no longer match a slot that you’re importing against it until it’s finished processing

• Scheduling timetable slots now happens in batches, this means that you can select all your slots at once, and we’ll work through them a few at a time, improving reliability  

• We’ve done a lot of work in the background which means scheduling timetable slots process much quicker, reducing timeout or failure rate

What we’re working on specifically for Tes Timetabling (Edval) schools

• A new API endpoint, specifically for timetable slots. 

  • Timetable partners integrating via our API will be able to send more timetable slots at once, allowing us to process those slots much more efficiently 

  • This will also create better error messaging for any partner integrating with us, making sure the timetable slots have all the information they need against them

• A new screen to allow you to better understand what you’re importing. 

  • The new screen will show you:

    • Slots that are currently scheduled, but aren’t in the new timetable file (i.e. ones that need ending)

    • Slots that are changing (e.g. a new staff member or room)

    • Brand new timetable slots from your import file that aren’t already in Arbor

  • From the new screen, you’ll be able to schedule just the changes, or import the whole timetable  if it’s the first one of an academic year

    • You will be able to import timetable changes much faster mid-year, as we’ll only be scheduling the changes, not the entire timetable every time

    • You won’t have to end all your timetable slots before importing a new timetable from Tes Timetabling (Edval)

    • You’ll be able to use this functionality to master your timetable changes in Tes Timetabling (Edval), instead of making major changes in Tes Timetabling (Edval) and smaller adjustments to the slots in Arbor

• On our wish list, if we have time during Summer, we’ll also look at how we can further optimise the scheduling of the above timetable slot changes

When can you expect to see these changes?

• The team have been busy working on all these improvements in collaboration with Tes, and we are hoping to get this out by October 2024

Key benefits:

• New reconciliation report that has filters which will allow you to group transactions from your latest payout by accounting code, description or customer account type

Key benefits:

Give you access to the data that you need within our payments reports in order to complete your financial tasks with ease.

We are adding:

• 'Paid Amount' column to Money Received Report

• 'Accounting Code' column to Money Received and Payouts Overview reports

• 'Description' column to Money Received Report

And updating our Description values in Payouts Overview and Settlement Statement Report to be the same as in our new Settlement Summary report

The Arbor Student App has been designed to allow schools to increase engagement with students and help students access their data. This will be a brand new app which schools can turn on/off.

This will be our first release so there will be limited features. However please feedback on features you'd like to see included in future versions of the app.

First features are:

• Biometric login

• A modern calendar component. Student will be able to see:

  • Lessons

  • School Events

  • Clubs

  • Detentions

  • Trips

  • Invigilation Sessions (Exams)

  • Exclusions

• Receive in-app messages

• See a basic student profile

What is it?

Allow MATs to create Parental Consents in MAT MIS and then push them to selected schools.

Key benefits

• Creates consistency in naming for unified reporting

• Allows MATs to control what information they need to request from parents

• Reduces admin time versus creating these in individual schools

• Allows centralised reporting

What is it?

We intend to add a significant number of new datasets to Arbor's BI connector and improve the template dashboards we offer.

Key benefits

• Create more customised insights from your data.

• Work with data at scale.

• Reduce the need for supplementary data from exports or live feeds

• Identify areas for improvement or focus

What is it?

Building upon the work we have already done with other cashless catering suppliers (Civica, Live Register and CRB Cunninghams), we will be working with Pebble to support them in building a two-way integration with Arbor via our recently released Payments API.

Key benefits

• Parents will be able to use one application to make payments for meals, as well as making updates to students’ profiles, communicating with the school, tracking their child’s progress and more, all within the Arbor Parent Portal or mobile app

• School staff will no longer need to spend additional time supporting parents using multiple systems

• Balance top-ups made in Arbor MIS or Arbor Parent Portal will be pushed through to the Cashless Catering system

• Payment transactions will be pushed back into Arbor from the Cashless Catering system, meaning all payments can be reconciled in one place

What

Allows parents to log attendance through the Arbor Parent App/Portal.

Why

• Address Time-Consuming Workflows for Attendance Officers: We’re tackling one of the more time-consuming workflows for Attendance Officers, to allow you to get your most time-crunched and admin-heavy jobs done as fast as possible (both via the app and via our AI answerphone solution).

• Highlight Unexplained Absences: This should help not only save time, but allow Attendance Officers to notice and action unexplained absences much earlier on in the day, thereby improving safeguarding.

• Free-Up Time for Proactive Working: We want to help Attendance Officers get the tedious admin work done so that they can focus on the real job of supporting students and families to improve their attendance in school.

Why

Just started with Arbor or finding Arbor's terminology a bit tricky? Maybe you're transitioning from another MIS where things were named differently. You're not alone!

What

To simplify your navigation through Arbor MIS, we're enhancing the Global Search with more intuitive terms, ensuring you find what you need, when you need it, with ease.

How You Can Contribute:

Share your insights! Let us know the terms you use or expect to find within Arbor. Are there areas you'd rename for better clarity?

Your feedback is crucial in making Arbor as user-friendly as possible 🚀

What is it?

Allow MATs to include central team information in staff reports from Custom Report Writer

Key benefits

• Allows MATs to get consolidated reports for staff

• Gives MATs a way to retrieve data on trust staff

What is it?

Staff Contract Post report in MAT MIS Custom Report Writer

Key benefits

• Allows MATs to report on salaries/contract details across all staff in the trust

• No need for Live Feeds from every school site

• Quick glance to fill in any gaps for Workforce Census each year

What is it?

Adding Staff Development functionality to MAT MIS staff profiles

Key benefits

• Allows MATs to record Appraisals, Objectives and Training Courses for central team staff

• Support MATs who don't have an external HR system to manage all of their staff records and keep everything in one place.

We'd love to hear your feedback about the new Arrange Cover page.

How is your experience with it, and what can we do to improve your experience with it?

What is it?

We want to add some additional functionality to give greater control and visibility within staff cover to allow staff cover manager to better understand whom they're assigning cover to.

Key Benefits

Some of the improvements that we're considering at the moment are:

• show a calendar view of selected staff

• show number of covered hours this week

• show number of overall free hours this week/today

• show subjects they teach

• the ability to filter the list of staff members you want to view the calendar

What is it?

Arbor School MIS has a data import area which allows users to upload data from Excel spreadsheets for things like Pay Scales, Staff and Student data. It would be great for MAT MIS to have these as well for relevant items that can exist on the MAT site.

Key benefits

• Allows new Trusts to onboard quicker to Arbor and get their data entered from other systems fast.

• Allows users to upload some annual data like Pay Scales that needs to be entered manually.

What is it?

Easily report on exam fees for an internal and private candidate in Arbor.

Benefits:

• Report on exam fees by Awarding Organisations

• Report on exam fees by Series

• Report on exam fees by Internal or Private Candidate

What is it?

Including the Allowances section as part of contracts for MAT staff

Key benefits

• Accurately recording additional responsibilites

What is it?

We'll be adding the ability to send SMS/in-app messages to Primary Guardians via the bulk actions in the trip participants table. At present, you can only send an email/letter.

Key benefits:

• Utilise the right communication type for you needs, e.g. using SMS/in-app to send messages to guardians that need to be seen ASAP

• Easily send different communications to students that have confirmed their trip place vs those that are eligible but yet to sign up

What is it?

Currently, Arbor creates an assessable for everything found in the Component file with the basedata. This means that exam officers are having to use workarounds to resolve multiple components being set at the same time, or when an exam runs over multiple days.

With this update you will be able to mark an assessable as Do not show in Scheduling. This will mean it doesn't appear in Timetables, Allocate Seating, Clashes etc. You will then be able to create custom assessable which can be used in the Scheduling areas.

This will not affect Entries or Results. The assessables will still exist they just won't be used in our exam scheduling functionality.

Problem

The current logic in the auto reconciliation won't work with the new BACs formats.

Solution

By updating the logic customers can use the new way of working with saves them time.

Benefits

• Saves time

• Simpler to understand the bank statement

• Preserves the detail needed at the school level for detailed understanding

We are updating the CFR file to meet the statutory requirements from the DfE

Problem

Staff contract data is stored in Arbor. Schools want to do a reconciliation with their payroll every month based on this data.

Solution

We will copy the data across to Arbor Finance so staff can import the payroll file into Arbor Finance and complete their monthly payroll monitoring. They can also post the actuals from the the payroll file into Arbor Finance once the checking is completed.

Benefits

• No double typing of information

• Data is accurate and up to date

• Easy to monitor the payroll

• Single source of the truth

We will be making changes to support School Census 2023/2024 returns over the summer.

New data items

1.4.1.1 Sex

Data item <Sex> (N00TBC) records (add description here). This new item is to be collected for all pupils from Autumn 2023 and replaces <Gender> (N00TBC).

Existing Data Items

None

Discontinued items

1.4.3.1 Sessions Coronavirus

From Autumn 2023, <Gender> will no longer be collected.

What is it?

Make the school permission Documents: Administer available to MAT users as an ad-hoc permission.

Key benefits

• Allows central team staff supporting schools through onboarding to Arbor to see migrated documents

• Allows MATs extra flexibility of their user permission

What is it?

Allow MAT MIS users to create a pay scale once and push it to relevant schools. Additionally whenever changes are made these can also be pushed to schools

Key benefits

• Improves setup time for creating new pay scales

• Ensures consistency across all schools in the MAT

• Allows quick updating when pay scales change

What is it?

Adding Suspensions (Fixed Period Exclusions) as an option for report type on MAT MIS Custom Report Writer. Currently MATs can only choose fields in the Student base report, these don't report in the same way and show the distinct number of DfE reasons for suspensions over the time period rather than the specific reasons related to each period of suspension.

This can lead to confusion between school and MAT data since it's not comparing the same thing.

Key benefits

• Allows MATs to report on exclusions in the same way as school level so reporting correlates as expected.

• Allows MATs to do granular analysis of each suspension rather than an aggregated view of suspensions per pupil

What is it?

Make it easier for parents to see that they owe money to the school when they're logged into the App or Parent Portal.

Key benefits:

• Parents pay on-time

• Schools spend less time chasing late payments from parents

Key benefits:

• Get an overview of all the trips you're running, and associated information (such as staff members, dates etc)

• Ability to report on trip participants by key demographic groups (e.g. SEN/Pupil Premium etc)

What is it?

Arbor and NFER are working together to allow you to sync MIS data from Arbor into NFER. This will also then sync NFER assessment into Arbor, which will be stored with the Attainment section of the student profile.

Key Benefits?

• Easily transfer student data into NFER

• NFER Assessment data stored with your student record

• School MIS NFER KPIs

• MAT MIS NFER KPIs

• NFER Assessment data reportable in the Arbor Custom Report Writer

What is it?

Adding the staff name Abbreviation field for MAT staff profiles

Key benefits

• Allows MATs that need to have unique abbreviations set for all staff to be able to include MAT staff in their reporting

• Useful for any MATs that link external software which requires a name abbreviation

What is it?

Adding the Transportation section to MAT staff profiles

Key benefits

• Allows trust staff based on school sites to capture car details for parking

• Allows Trusts to analyse how their staff get to work to support sustainability policies

Allow users to delete grades from pay scales

Why?

Users should have the option to delete unused grades as they need to if they're not linked to staff contracts.

What is it?

Display metrics relating to how frequently parents use the Arbor Parent Portal. Show summaries on volume of sent In-App messages, SMS and Emails

Key benefits

• Identify schools which have a good strategy for parental engagement

• Support schools which have lower levels of parental engagement

• Identify demographics which have lower levels of parental engagement and take action.

Added ‘Prev.Day’, ‘Today’ and ‘Next Day’ to the calendar widget on the mobile app to enable parents to switch between previous and future dates.

We will be making changes to support School Workforce Census 2023/2024 changes. The dates have been rolled over, with the date of the next census set for 02 November 2023.

The more significant changes are:

• A new post of School Business Professional (SBP) has been added

• A flag to identify members of the Senior Leadership Team in schools has been added

• Destination and Leaving reason will be required for SBPs

• New qualifications have been added to the code set, for the use of SBPs

What is it?

We will be improving the parent login flow for the Arbor App by adding biometric login, enabling parents to login using facial and fingerprint recognition.

Key benefits

• Once enabled, parents won't be prompted for an email and password every time they access the app

• A reduction in password reset requests, as parents will not need to remember their password

• Quicker access to the app, particularly when tapping on push notifications for in-app messages

What is it?

Updates to the gender field to align with the changes that the DfE have recommended for recording sex and gender.

Key changes:

• Current "gender" field will be relabelled to "sex" to account for its current use (this will align with changes to school census collections)

• New "gender identity" field to allow schools to record student, guardian and staff gender, where applicable

What is it?

To help with managing Access Arrangement and making sure teachers make adjustments for them in students' normal ways of working we want to make sharing this data easier. Therefore we are looking to add Access Arrangements as an option on the Lesson Dashboard.

Benefits:

• Quickly share Access Arrangement with the correct staff

• Access Arrangements will be shared in a common place for teachers to see.

What?

Be able to report on Curriculum Mark (by Statement and Curriculum Mark (By Module) in the Custom Report Writer.

What?

Exam Officers will be able to bulk unassign candidate numbers for candidates that don't have any entries within the academic year.

What is it?

A new KPI on the MAT MIS Attendance dashboard to report on statutory measures of attendance

Key benefits

• You'll be able to see attending excluding guest students

• You'll be able to see attendance only for compulsory school aged students

• When used alongside the Whole School attendance this will give you the full picture of attendance in your Trust

What is it?

A new KPI on the School MIS homepage dashboard to report on statutory measures of attendance

Key benefits

• You'll be able to see attending excluding guest students

• You'll be able to see attendance only for compulsory school aged students

• When used alongside the Whole School attendance this will give you the full picture of attendance in your Trust

Arbor Report Cards are currently fixed templates. However, we know schools want more flexibility with the layout and what data will show.

What are we thinking of doing?

• Bulk adding summative and ad hoc assessment columns to Custom Report Writer

• Use Custom Reports in Report Cards

• Implement Word like editing in Report Cards

• Better ways of managing merge fields

• Generate report cards and these be fixed documents

Allow MATs to have an overview of where each of their schools are in the process of New School Year Setup so they can support schools to be ready for the next academic year.

What is it?

Create a single page with brief details of staff members across all schools and the MAT

Key benefits

• Allow users to find which school a staff member works in

• Run quick checks to find inactive staff members

• Login directly to the school site from the table record

What is it?

A data table containing details such as Last Login date and Number of Logins this academic year. Filtering available for specific schools

Take action with bulk emailing option

Key benefits

• Identify staff who are regularly engaging with their school MIS

• Identify staff who aren't logging into Arbor on a daily basis

We are looking into how to improve Behaviour workflows in Arbor to ensure it continues to work for our schools.

We would love to hear more about how you use Behaviour workflows currently, and what problems you are running into while using it.

• What workflow option is the most important to you? (Notifying staff, messaging guardians, escalations, adding/deducting points, etc.)

• How do you prefer escalations to work? Based on behaviour type, severity level, or both?

• Which is more important to you between having more severity levels and having more workflows?

• If we were to allow workflows for individual behaviour types (e.g. bullying), would you still want severity-based workflows (e.g. -3, -4)?

• How would you want the hierarchy of Workflows to operate if you have individual workflows for behaviour types and severity-based workflows? Would you want the individual workflow to run instead of the severity-based workflow? (if both are available)

What is it?

We'll be creating a few reports that allow you to report on key data related to clubs, in particular attendance.

Key benefits:

• Ability to report on attendance data across all of your clubs

• Ability to report on club attendance of key demographic groups

What is it?

Schools often need to have a way of entering results for a student for a qualification they didn't take at that centre. Currently these are being stored in externally or as an in-house exam.

We are looking at creating a new workflow where schools will be able to add results for awards from another centre.

What is it?

The Qualification Offering page shows you the exams your school are taking this academic year. This needs to be built each academic year, however, most of the qualifications will be the same.

Therefore we are looking at creating a bulk copy option so that you can easily create the following year's offering.

What is it?

Change the data source for the existing SCR table to Snowflake

Key benefits

• Improved performance - users can view data from multiple schools with no timeouts

• Create live feeds for data from all schools

What is it?

We will be providing the ability to schedule mail merge communications to send later within School MIS. This will enable schools to schedule Emails, SMS and In-App messages to send automatically at their chosen date and time.

Key benefits

• Communications can be scheduled to send outside of core school hours, e.g. at the end of the day or over the weekend

• Messages can be written in advance and automatically sent without requiring user interaction

• Scheduling functionality will be available for Email, SMS and In-App Messages, so you can pick the right communication method for the message you want to schedule

What is it?

Arbor's Exam Result Analysis was released the other year and it allows users to see Attainment 8 scores, Ebacc entry, good pass in Eng & Math etc. More information on it can be seen here.

We are looking to replicate this analysis using Arbor Summative Progress 8 assessments.

Key Benefits

• In-built secondary school accountability measures predictions

• Comparison between in year assessments and GCSE exam results

What is it?

This relates to a set of changes in the Administration side of the Dev Portal to make administration of permissions easier and in turn quicker.

Leave feedback to let us know your thoughts!

What is it?

Allow MATs to retrieve staff absence data at school level combined with Trust staff data

Key benefits

• Removes reliance on live feeds or custom reports

• Improved performance

• Data aggregated into one place

What is it?

We are looking to surface information about School Shop orders onto one overview page, so you can easily see your outstanding orders and have the information you need to process them. As currently, you have to click into each individual product to access order information.

Key benefits

You should get:

• Better visibility of all your orders as they'll sit on one page and be split out by 'paid', 'issued', 'all'

• The ability to download information about your orders, so you can more easily fulfil them

• The ability to search through orders to quickly find the ones you need

This is currently available as part of Payments Plus.

What is it?

On the Parent Portal, all overdue assignments are visible, even those from previous academic years. This can lead to sorting through hundreds of assignments that are no longer relevant. We want to change that so only overdue assignments from the current academic year show up for Parents and Students.

Key benefits

• You will now only see overdue assignments from the current academic year instead of the current and previous years.

Currently it is possible to add new non-teaching activities to Arbor as school events via a timetable import, but it isn't as easy to edit those events in bulk if you want to adjust a duty rota or change when staff members have time for PPA.

What are we changing?

We are planning to add the ability to bulk update school events to change:

• end date

• start date

• start time

• end time

• members of staff

• room

• Delete

• Prevent editing/deleting of past events

We will also add a new permission for this bulk update events functionality so if the timetabler decides to devolve managing school events to other staff members, they will be able to change just school events, without having access to edit the whole timetable.

What is it? Using our nationally representative sample of over 3500 English schools we are able to offer live attendance benchmarking from within your MIS. Compare your attendance to the average, see which percentile your school sits in, and drill down into student groups for a deeper understanding of your gaps.

Key Benefits

• Understand your relative performance in real time; no more waiting for DfE data drops

• See which percentile your attendance sits in for greater context to your performance

• Understand how attendance within demographic groups measures up nationally for a clearer picture of your gaps

Updates to school workforce census to ensure dates and validation files are ready for the Autumn 2022 collection.

We’ve added a new To-do on My Homepage to make users aware if there are duplicate email addresses used for different types of accounts such as staff and guardian account using the same email address. We also added a new column on the Duplicate email Address data quality page, showing what email addresses will likely cause login issues.

Why? If duplicate email addresses exist for a user of two different types such a person that uses the same email for a staff and a guardian account, they will not be able to log into their staff account as we will always log them into the account with the least permission access to allow schools to keep tight security on their data.

What is it? The ability to analyse marks within a marksheet, for example, see the difference between current and previous marks. Or how much progress is needed to get to target? Key Benefits:

• Better analysis for teachers in mark sheets

• Reduce the need to set up calculations

• Improved reporting capabilities

What is it?

Building upon the work we have already done with other cashless catering suppliers (Civica and Live Register), we have worked with CRB Cunninghams to support them in building a two-way integration with Arbor via our recently released Payments API.

Key benefits

• Parents are able to use one application to make payments for meals, as well as making updates to students’ profiles, communicating with the school, tracking their child’s progress and more, all within the Arbor Parent Portal or mobile app

• School staff no longer need to spend additional time supporting parents using multiple systems

• Balance top-ups made in Arbor MIS or Arbor Parent Portal are pushed through to the Cashless Catering system

• Payment transactions are pushed back into Arbor from the Cashless Catering system, meaning all payments can be reconciled in one place

What is it?

We are going to provide schools with the ability to set up rotating menus (weekly, bi-weekly etc.) and enable parents to select meals choices for their children in advance via the Parent Portal and Arbor App.

Key benefits

• Schools will be able to define more detailed meal menus

• Parents will have visibility of available menus and have the ability to make choices online, making them more involved in their child's school life

• Reduced admin burden on teachers, as meal choices made in advance by parents rather than in the classroom (existing classroom meal registers will still be supported)

What is it?

This functionality should allow teaching staff to trigger an emergency button when a situation is escalating in the classroom. This should alert staff members that are on call for immediate support in the classroom.

Let us know your thoughts on this functionality by voting, then commenting below. Here are a few questions that we have:

• What should the alert contain?

• How are staff members on call most likely to see the alert?

• How do you set staff members that are on call?

What is it?

Implement a new method of retrieving recent inspection data for schools and display this in MAT MIS

Key benefits

• Data is accurate

• Data is updated more quickly

What is it?

Allow MAT users to have ad-hoc permissions in the same way that is implemented in school MIS

Key benefits

• Reduces the need to have multiple business roles assigned

• Can target permissions more accurately to staff roles

For schools using the Options module by TimeTabler, this work will allow schools to import student's choices from Options into Arbor, which will create course enrolments for the relevant students and year groups next year.

We know that sometimes, to get a timetable to work, it's necessary to create courses with some overlapping lessons, especially for sixth form students. At the moment, scheduling the clash in Arbor is possible, but students are then scheduled to be in both places at once.

This change would allow you to exclude students from a particular timetable slot within a course, without having to un-enrol them from the course, or have them missing from other timetable slots.

What is it?

We want the homepage alerts to inform your staff whenever an important change happens in your school that might affect their day-to-day.

This alert is about:

• Alerting teaching staff when a new student is joining their course

We hope this might reduce the admin burden on support staff that often has to inform relevant staff members about student changes via email.

Let us know what you think of this idea by voting then commenting below.

We know that schools that jointly use Arbor and TimeTabler initially build their timetable in TimeTabler, then import it into Arbor to use in time for the start of the academic year. From there, schools often make tweaks to rooms or staffing directly in Arbor, but will rebuild their timetables in TimeTabler part way through the year.

What are we changing?

This change will allow schools to export what their current timetable looks like in Arbor and import it into TimeTabler - this will mean that when rebuilding the timetable mid-year in TimeTabler, all the updates made during the year in Arbor will be reflected, which should should save the timetabler time, and increase data accuracy.

What is it?

We will be enhancing password requirements in the developer portal to bring it in line with the main MIS solution and wider password management guidelines.

This will affect user accounts and app passwords.

Let us know your thoughts via comments!

What is it?

We're looking to improve and streamline the sign up process in the Developer Portal, so that additional information is captured at the point of sign up, in turn minimising the need for follow up communication.

Let us know what you think via comments!

What is it?

The XML results files will be issued via the A2C Transport application at the same time as your EDI files and can be imported into your management information system (MIS).  This will allow you to use this data to produce more in-depth analysis and reports for students, teachers and other stakeholders.

What impact do we want it to have?

• Import either an EDI or xml file

• Get results for components

• More in-depth analysis

For colleges returning the ILR, this functionality will take exam results from the exams module in Arbor and pull them through into the Outcome Grade field against students' learning aims, based on the QAN/Discount Code, or linked qualification award. This should mean that schools will not have to enter this data manually.

We will be making changes to support School Census 2022/2023 returns over the summer, including changes to:

1.4.1.1 Young carer indicator

The ability to record which students are young carers and when

1.4.1.2 School time

How many hours the school is open

1.4.1.3 Companies House company number

The ability to record companies house number for Alternative Provision placements that do not have a URN or UKPRN

1.4.1.4 Alternative provision placement postcode 

The ability to record a postcode for Alternative Provision placements that do not have a URN or UKPRN

1.4.2.1 Alternative Provision (AP) Placement modules – mandatory

All data items introduced in 2021 to 2022 will be collected on a mandatory basis from Spring 2023. See 4.3.4 for full details.

1.4.2.2 Post Looked After Arrangements codeset

Additional options in the looked after area

1.4.3.1 Sessions Coronavirus

We'll be removing the relevant data items from school census returns that refer to covid related attendance.

What is it?

A new dashboard that will allow MATs and Partners to track the health of their schools through the Arbor onboarding process, and support them through their migrations.

Key benefits

• Quick overview of where schools are in their journey to Arbor

• One place to upload data and credentials

We'd love to know:

What would you as a MAT lead like to have sight of as your schools migrate?

What is it?

Dedicated School Shop functionality within Arbor MIS and Parent Portal, enabling schools to list products for sale and allowing parents to purchase these via the Parent Portal or Arbor App.

Key benefits

• Schools can list products such as uniforms, book / PE bags, tickets and any other miscellaneous items for sale

• Control when parents can make purchases online, which parents can see which products and how much they will pay based on their individual circumstances

• Easily track which students have purchased which items, to speed up the process of issuing purchased products to students

What is it?

We've created an API for a direct two-way synchronisation between Arbor and cashless catering systems of students, staff, payments and meals data.

Our Cashless Catering integration with Civica and Live Register is already live and we will continue to work with market-leading cashless catering providers to help them develop an integration with our API.

Key benefits

• Parents are able to use one application to make payments for meals, as well as making updates to students’ profiles, communicating with the school, tracking their child’s progress and more, all within the Arbor Parent Portal or Arbor App

• School staff will no longer need to spend additional time supporting parents using multiple systems

• Balance top-ups made in Arbor MIS or Arbor Parent Portal will be pushed through to the Cashless Catering system

• Payment transactions will be pushed back into Arbor from the Cashless Catering system, meaning all payments can be reconciled in one place

What is it?

We've provided the ability for childcare voucher payments to be recorded within Arbor MIS via a new method of account top-up. Once a top-up has been made via voucher, parents will be able to use their voucher balance when booking onto paid wraparound care clubs on the Parent Portal and Arbor App.

Key benefits

• Allows schools to differentiate between voucher payments and other payment methods (card, cash, cheque)

• Enables schools to control which students/guardians can pay via voucher

• Enables parents using childcare vouchers to book Wraparound Care Clubs via the Arbor Parent Portal

What is it?

We are developing the ability for schools to upload external report cards to Arbor in bulk. Within the feature, schools will then be able to use Arbor communication tools and portals to share external report cards with parents/guardians and students.

What impact do we want it to have?

Arbor has inbuilt templates for report cards, however, some schools want to use very customised templates. This feature will allow schools to use these templates, store the report card in Arbor and also share them in the most efficient way possible.

What is it?

Marksheets are how teachers enter assessment data, these are most commonly accessed via an Academic Unit or Lesson Dashboard. Often different subjects and different teachers want the ability to see different contextual data.

What are we changing?

We will be adding the option for users to link custom reports to academic unit mark sheets. Which will allow more customised views and more options for data to show e.g. In House Exam Results

• Display more fields on mark sheets

• Have more course-specific mark sheets

• The ability for Head of Departments to view full subject mark sheets easier

What is it?

Report Cards are a schools way of reporting student progress, attendance and behaviour to parents. These can be shared via the Parent Portal, Arbor App or printouts.

What are we changing?

• Improvement to Attainment Date so it no longer needs to include ad hoc start date

• Importing external report cards into Arbor

• Creating an approval bulk action

What is it?

We currently have the Copy Report Card setup button in Arbor Report Cards, however, this doesn't copy the most time consuming part of a report card setup. Therefore we are looking at improving this feature so that when you copy a setup you also copy the Courses, Progress Assessments, Ad Hocs and Curriculums on the setup (including custom names and ordering).

What impact do we want it to have?

• Reduce the need to keep recreating setups

• Fast report card creation, once you've done and initial setup you should be able to quickly copy each reporting season

What is it?

An initial integration with Access Budgeting to sync staff data, payroll and speed up manual processes.

Key benefits

• No duplication of data

• Scheduled syncing of data

Adding staff data to the data warehouse / PowerBI connector

What is it?

We're going to add the following data sets to the data warehouse:

• basic staff data

• contracts

• absence

What impact do we want it to have?

This will mean that this data is available in the PowerBI connector and in Arbor's Group MIS

What is it? You will be able to set attendance expectations for the schools within their trust.

If a school or groups of students within the school fall below a certain threshold, then users are alerted to this

Key benefits:

• Trust leaders are aware of any potential daily/termly/annual attendance issues in their schools

• Attendance safeguarding alerts can be triggered, alerting key central team staff to potential safeguarding issues (e.g. if certain vulnerable students aren't attending school)

What is it? Our MAT and LA users will be able to check on the completion status of each school's census from Group MIS (e.g. "complete", "with errors", "not started").

What impact do we want it to have?

• Trust central teams can check on school's progress with census and intervene if necessary

• This tool will allow central teams to take a more active role in managing school census' centrally - they could do the census for the school, reducing the need for dedicated school staff

What is it?

The ability to copy your annual policy from one year into the next. This will display as part of your new school year setup and on the Manage Assessments screeen

What are we changing?

Within your annual policy:

• Copy summative assessments:

  • Copy baselines

  • Copy teacher targets

  • Copy aspirational targets

• Copy ad hoc assessments

• Copy formative assessments

Also improve the copy report cards feature so that it copies Courses, Progress Assessments and Ad Hocs, reducing the amount of setup needed.

What is it?

We've added support for Single Sign On (SSO) and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) in MAT MIS, allowing users to login using Microsoft Azure or Google user credentials.

Key benefits

• Flexible configuration options, allowing you to enable SSO + 2FA, just SSO or just 2FA

• Provide a more seamless login experience for staff

• Secure accounts with Two-Factor Authentication, supported by all common authentication apps (e.g. Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Authy)

What is it?

We want to reduce the admin burden on support staff by enabling staff to edit their own personal details on their account such as Next of Kin etc.

We would like to know:

• What other personal details should all staff members be able to edit themselves without approval?

Let us know by voting, then commenting below.

We are aiming to develop and integration with Access Education Finance to sync up back office data and speed up manual processes. If you are using or considering to use Access Education, what data would you like to see integrated? How could an integration benefit your internal processes?