How to save hours a week of school admin 

Joanna Paterson - 18 September, 2020

School Operations

Category : Blog

How to save hours a week of school admin 

At Arbor we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work with intuitive, people-friendly tools that help staff work faster, smarter and collaborate more.  

With constant new demands on schools right now on reporting, logistics and communications, staff are working longer hours than ever to keep up. We believe this is preventable. When you’re stretched to maximum capacity, you should be able to lean on your MIS to pick up the slack. 

Whether you’re part of SLT, or work in the school office, discover below five of the top ways you’ll save you hours of admin each week with Arbor, and accomplish more – put together by Arbor Programme Manager, Joanna. 

1. Save time each day by automating your reports
2. Save duplication across your teams by sharing reports
3. Cut down on repetition with bulk actions
4. Manage data retention and keep GDPR compliant in a couple of clicks
5. Make your communications smoother using templates

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1. Save time each day by automating your reports 

With Senior Leaders spending around 4.4 hours per week on data analysis, automating their reporting can help give you valuable time back to focus on understanding your data and driving impactful decisions.

In Arbor you can use ready-made reports and schedule them to be sent to your colleagues on a regular basis automatically. For example, you could schedule a weekly attendance report to all SLT showing students with < 90% attendance. This cuts down on the time you would spend manually gathering data and creating the report each week. 

Here’s a few geeky details: 

• Thanks to the ‘relative dates’ feature in Arbor’s Custom Report Writer, you only have to create a report once, then it automatically refreshes the data each week. You can choose your own relative dates, e.g. “today”, “this week”, “this academic year” etc. 
• With flexible scheduling options, you can arrange for your report to run at any time and on any basis. For example, every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; or once a week on a Friday lunchtime
• Embedded communications means you can quickly take action on the basis of your report results (e.g. follow up with parents) directly, without jumping between systems 
• We’ve got lots of report templates to get you started, including some you might need right now, such as Mode of Travel, Native Language Numbers and Attendance for 1st September 2019 – 20th March 2020

Discover more ways Arbor’s automation will help you streamline routine processes, reduce errors and mean you spend less time on repetitive tasks here.

2. Save duplication across your teams by sharing reports

Arbor is designed to make it easier to collaborate with colleagues, and to give everyone a shared view of progress and purpose. Built-in dashboards give staff at all levels quick access to the information they need, but it’s also quick and easy to share custom reports you’ve made with other colleagues at your school or schools within your wider trust.

The ins and outs: 

• Choose from a range of options to share your report with a colleague – either within Arbor, where it will get added to their list of reports or externally by SMS, letter or email (we do not recommend this if the report contains sensitive information)
• You can also notify other staff members that you’ve sent out the report to keep them in the loop
• In Arbor everyone has a business role, so if you share a report with someone who has left the school, it will automatically reach their replacement 
• Once you’ve scheduled a regular report, you can make changes to the frequency or staff members at any time

Thanks to Arbor’s link to Microsoft Power BI and other BI tools, you can also export your reports if you want to customise how you look at your data. Read our five steps to creating your own BI dashboard here.

3. Cut down on repetition with bulk actions

Bulk actions in Arbor allow you to perform actions or add information for multiple students or staff at a time. It’s amazing how much time this can save! 

Here are just some of the tasks made much easier using bulk actions:

• Assigning students to interventions – Wherever you are in the system, whether you’re in an attendance report, or a marksheet, you can select a group of students and add them to an intervention in bulk
• Sending communications – From any dashboard, such as a list of persistent absentees, or a list of students with balances due for a club or trip, you can select students you want to follow up with and take action right away, such as emailing their parent
• Chase meal balances – See all the monies owed to you and ask parents to top up, all from the same screen
• Assign candidates to exam seats – When you’re arranging large exam sittings and complex schedules, spot quickly which students need to be seated and assign the missing places in bulk
• Resolve behaviour incidents – Check through the behaviour incidents assigned to you and click to clear the resolved ones all in one go
• Replace academic leads – When a staff leaves, reassign their course to the new Teacher in bulk
• Creating custom groups – This is where automation meets bulk actions. Set criteria, for example “more than four behaviour incidents in a week”, which automatically puts students who fit into a custom group. This means you’ll be able to report on and follow up with this group of students all in one go

4. Manage data retention and keep GDPR compliant in a couple of clicks 

Keeping on top of GDPR regulations for the data you keep on students and staff can be time-consuming and cause a lot of worry for Admin Staff. In Arbor, we take the hassle out of data retention with an automatic dashboard for both students and staff. Arbor will flag for you which records have passed the recommended retention time. You can then select and delete them safely in bulk.  

5. Make your communications smoother using templates

Do you send out the same communications to parents at regular intervals? Maybe it’s a weekly newsletter or a regular bulletin to parents whose children are missing lessons. With Arbor’s built-in communication templates, you can have SMS, letters or emails saved and ready to go when you need them. We’ve created a bank of typical templates but it’s also easy to make your own!

If you want to be even smarter, you can set up your communications templates to automatically include data from a report you’ve created. For example, you could send an email to the parents of Year 5 EAL boys whose attendance is below 90%. Arbor will automatically send the right attendance figure to the right parent.

Choose a better way to work

We know it can sometimes feel daunting to change the ways you’ve been used to working for a long time. But as Arbor schools tell us, switching your mind set to more efficient processes can save you a lot of time and hassle in the long run. 

Hear it from Joanne Hedges, Data Manager at Manshead Academy:

“I’d been working with our old MIS system both in support roles and as the Data Manager here for over 20 years, so I think everyone was really surprised at how I embraced the change to Arbor, but I could see at an early stage of the implementation process that it had some really powerful and easy to use features for creating custom groups and sending out communications for all the curriculum groups as well as the custom groups. I thought I would need to create lots of custom reports, but most places where the information is displayed you can just use the download button instead. I really wouldn’t want to go back to the old system.” 

And Julie Smith, PA to Headteacher at Parkroyal Community School: 

“The first word that comes to mind [when describing Arbor] is ‘simplicity’. It’s easy to grasp, and new users can quickly work their way around the system’s functions – you don’t feel like you need hours of training, as you do with other systems. Something I love about Arbor is the fact that it’s multi-functional across the school. By that I mean that most areas of the school use Arbor, whereas with our previous MIS provider, we found that it was only really the School Office staff that were using it – classroom teachers were using it to take the register in their classes, but that was about it! Now everyone in school knows how to use it. Arbor is a school-wide tool, not an office-based MIS System” 

Interested in finding out how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS can help you work more easily and collaboratively this term? Book a demo today, or join one of our webinars. 

tellmemore@arbor-education.com | 0208 050 1028