Spring Term in review – what’s new?

Spring Term in review – what’s new?

And that’s a wrap for Spring Term! As you start to relax and enjoy your Easter break, we take a look back on some of the exciting releases to Arbor MIS and Arbor MAT MIS over the past term that will help support you, your school and your students.

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What’s new for schools

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. Here are just some of our recent launches and updates: 

Scheduling  Comms

No more logging in out of hours – you can now choose when to send out your emails, SMS and in-app messages! Draft as usual, then just click Send later to pick the date and time. Learn more here.

Automated Capita One exports
We’ve worked with Capita One to automate the Capita One Export, reducing school workload and improving data quality for your LA. You’ll need to ask your LA to get in touch with us to get this set up. Learn more here.

SMS Subscription is here

Our new annual SMS tariff makes it simpler to keep parents in the loop. SMS Subscription is perfect for schools who regularly send SMS messages. Pay yearly and get the benefits of an ongoing subscription. Learn more here.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are here

If your school has our Payments Plus module, you can now give parents the flexibility to pay the way that suits them! No more re-entering card details every time on the Arbor App. Learn more here.

School Shop Orders dashboard 

Our new School Shop dashboard gives you an overview of orders, payments and refunds without needing to go into each item individually. Plus we’ve added a new School Shop: Administer permission. Learn more here.

Behaviour comms templates 

Create SMS and email templates to notify guardians about behaviour incidents or detentions. Add detail with our built-in merge fields, or set different messages for different severity levels. Learn more here.

Random Student Picker 

There is always that activity in the classroom where you need to choose a student at random. You now can with the new Student Picker. Engage your students and choose them fairly, the student picker spins to select a random student from your class – perfect for projecting on the board. Learn more here.

Bulk Add Assessment Columns in the Custom Report Writer

Want to add columns for Summative or Ad Hoc assessments to a Student Custom Report Writer in one go? You now can! Plus, add different components for Summative assessments, such as Baseline, Predicted Mark, and Year Target. Learn more here.

New layout and tools for tables

We’re very excited about the new tables in Arbor! The new tables are much more than just a visual change, they’re a whole new tabling tool. We’ve made some exciting updates in the past term and will continue to make improvements throughout Summer Term. 

What’s new in Spring Term for tables:

• Rearrange and hide columns, search for data quickly, and filter tables in places like the Custom Report Writer, Behaviour and Attendance
• Navigate and enter data using only the keyboard, copy and paste and drag to fill, plus whole screen tables
• Analyse all of your data in Arbor, reducing the need for external spreadsheets
• Customise your view of the tables and sort data how you want to. When you select ‘Autosize all columns’, the width of the columns are saved so you can see them the next time you return to the table

• For better visibility, you can turn on the column borders in tables, under the settings button, and it will save on a per-table basis
• We’ve added a ‘Disable Cell Colours’ setting to increase visibility for colour blind users

Learn more here.

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What’s new for MAT Central Teams

MAT MIS is custom-built for better collaboration across your trust, with tools that make it easy to work together as one organisation.

School Staff Absence Reporting

School staff are now included in Staff Absence reporting in MAT MIS, eliminating the need to make a custom report. We’ve also added some extra bonus fields like Bradford Factor reporting and the option to include only workforce census-eligible staff. Learn more here.

New and improved Single Central Record

We’ve made some updates to Single Central Record (SCR) so you can easily and quickly keep staff details up to date across your trust. Choose which columns you want to see in your SCR, and email staff members directly. Plus a small change we know will have a big impact, we’ve added the category of Business Role to the filter options! Learn more here.

New Microsoft Power BI Datasets

As part of our commitment to make sure we’re providing you with the best data possible, we’ve added a number of datasets to our Microsoft Power BI connector this year, including:

• Student Academic Year Enrolments
• User Defined Fields
• User Defined Records
• Improvements to existing Staff, Student, Enrolments and Year Groups views
• User Logins
• Password Rules
• Academic Units & Enrolments
• Timetable Slots

Learn more here.

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To keep up-to-date with all our latest releases visit our Change Log or to see what we are working on next and to give feedback visit our Product Roadmap.