As we wrap up another year at Arbor, we’re looking back on some of our favourite releases. We released over 200 new and improved features over the past year, here are some highlights…
September
Easily find past mail merges
We’ve made it quicker and easier to find your sent mail merges for email, SMS, in-apps and letters. Choose between ‘exact word’ match or ‘include any words’, or apply a date range to narrow down your communication search results.
Staff Development in MAT MIS
You can now manage your staff’s development in MAT MIS. View Central Team staff appraisals directly from MAT MIS and set and manage their objectives the same way you do for your school staff. Learn more.
October
Settlement summary report
As part of our improvement to make payment reconciliation a less manual and time-consuming process, our new ‘Settlement Summary’ report lets you group payments by Description, Accounting Code, or Customer Account Type. Learn more.
Integration with helloData
With our integration, schools can set up their assessments and enter marks in Arbor, then use helloData’s interactive reports to analyse performance and identify your school improvement priorities quickly. Learn more.
November
Arbor Student App
Give your students a convenient and intuitive way to access day-to-day school information, understand their progress, and receive in-app messages. Learn more.
Consent Types Pushdown
Align your schools’ consent types with our new pushdown in MAT MIS! Set consent types across your trust, giving you full oversight over consent collection and recording, and more robust data for safeguarding. Learn more.
School Ofsted details in MAT MIS
Head to the brand new Ofsted Inspections page in your MAT MIS to see Ofsted details for all your schools in one place – it even includes your schools not yet using Arbor. Learn more.
December
SAMpeople Data Connector
Analyse your HR data alongside your MIS data! Stream your HRIS data from SAMpeople into your BI tool, so you can easily spot trends and make informed decisions with your HR and MIS data. Learn more.
Edit trip details
You can now edit trip details right up until the trip end date/time, so you can easily make last minute changes and communicate to students and parents about the trip more easily.
Make every day tasks easier with Arbor AI
We’ve rolled out three AI-powered features to every Arbor customer, all for free! Get Arbor to draft an email, letter or SMS for you, create an instant student report, or create a formula for you in the Custom Report Writer and display the results.
January
Basket functionality in the Parent App
Parents can now buy multiple items quickly and efficiently by adding items to their Arbor Parent App basket, letting them make one transaction rather than several. Learn more.
Track assignments in the Student App
Following your feedback, students can now mark assignments as complete, and download attachments in the Arbor Student App. Students can easily track the tasks they’ve completed, and teachers don’t need to manually update the status of each assignment. Learn more.
Arbor AI Dashboard
If you haven’t already, make sure to take a look at the Arbor AI Dashboard, where you can review your school’s AI usage, and see how much fair use credit you have available. Learn more.
February
Custom Report Writer improvements
Creating new Custom Reports is now much quicker and more straightforward. Plus, you’ll get better visibility over which reports are actually being used, so you can safely delete the ones you no longer need. Learn more.
Candidate count for exams
We’ve added a candidate count to the Candidate List and Exam Registers which displays the number of students per exam in each invigilation session.
March
New PowerBI dashboard template
We’ve created a brand new Arbor template to make accessing your MIS data in Power BI even easier. The template includes dashboards for Attendance, Behaviour (Suspensions and Exclusions), Assessments, Staff Context, and Pupil Context. Learn more.
Fines for unauthorised absences
To complement the DfE’s plan to reduce unauthorised absences, we created a new page in the Absences section of Attendance to automatically show all students absent for 5 days in a 10-week rolling period.
Custom Report Writer pushdown
Say goodbye to manually exporting and importing Custom Reports. You can now share Custom Report templates with your schools straight from the Custom Report Writer in MAT MIS. Plus, select which business roles should have access and/or edit rights. Learn more.
April
Copy Custom Report Card Setup
Instead of setting up Custom Report Cards from scratch each time, you can now copy an existing Custom Report Card setup in just a few clicks, including its formatting and the linked Custom Report (if one is attached) with the new Copy Report Card button.
Suspension Statistics Tables in MAT MIS
We’ve added a brand new set of tables to help you monitor and track suspensions across your schools, directly from your MAT MIS. Head to Analytics > Behaviour to see the headline suspension stats at-a-glance for each school and student, plus week by week trends and student suspensions across groups. Learn more.
May
Report Library
We’ve created a brand new home for all your Arbor reports – the Report Library. Now you can find any type of report from just one place, and search for your reports by type, date, and more. Plus, build new reports quickly and easily with the Template Library. Learn more.
Auto Absence
Auto Absence saves you at least one hour every morning by giving you a ready-made list of everyone who’s not in school and why. Every voicemail is written up into Arbor for you – all you need to do is review and approve. Learn more.
Communications inbox and outbox
To make it easier to keep on top of and manage your communications, you now have a separate inbox and outbox. See which messages have been read, and filter your comms by date range, message type, or sender to find exactly what you’re looking for. Learn more.
Staff Allowances in the Custom Report Writer
We’ve added a new Staff Allowances report to help school leaders report on employment costs more holistically. This more detailed view of staff allowance payments helps to inform more strategic financial planning. Learn more.
June
New DfE datasets in the BI Connector
We’ve released two new DfE datasets to our National Data Connector – the weekly absence datasets covering Reasons for Absence and Persistent Absence figures for all schools in England. Easily benchmark your school without needing to import the data yourself. Learn more.
New Custom Report Writer base reports:
To give you more detailed reporting options, we’ve added two new base reports to the Custom Report Writer – Student Funding Report and Student Absence Note Report. Both reports help you drill down into more granular detail and inform decision-making.
July
Improvements to Business Roles
To give you more granular control over permissions, you can now revert permission management for group business roles directly from MAT MIS, without needing to contact the Arbor Support Team. Plus, to make it easier to read and use, we’ve converted the Business Roles page to a table layout.
BI Connector datasets released this year
We’ve released over 70 datasets and hundreds of new fields to our BI Connector this academic year! For a full list of datasets, head to the Help Centre.
The Arbor School Management suite brings together best-in-class, specialist tools to support operations across your whole school or trust, and streamline the most time-consuming tasks and processes your staff face today.
To keep up-to-date with all our latest releases visit our Change Log or to see what we’re working on next visit our Product Roadmap.
