The Arbor Blog

Using SMS in your school/parent engagement strategy

It goes without saying just how important parent engagement is in schools. What many schools are finding is that communicating with parents via SMS/text is an effective and efficient way of notifying guardians with urgency and encouraging two-way communication. 

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But how exactly can using text messages improve your parent engagement strategy?

1. Reduce admin – With Arbor, you can send out messages to parents in bulk, to certain groups or to individuals. For example, you can text all the parents whose children are part of a specific intervention with just the click of a button, which makes life easier for office staff and means parents are notified in a timely way. 

2. Improve safeguarding – If a child is expected in school and has not shown up, the time in between this information reaching the office and contacting a guardian is crucial. SMS messages can be sent instantly from the office so that the information reaches the parent instantly. Guardians are also more likely to see a text message, with 90% of text messages being opened within three minutes of them being delivered. 

3. Visibility and efficiency – Text messages are an accessible way to reach parents and guardians. Most people carry their phones with them, meaning the message is likely to reach them with a sense of urgency, which isn’t guaranteed with emails or paper copies. It also encourages parents to reply where needed!

Read here for some top tips on how to make your parent communication strategy even more effective across all mediums. 

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How does using SMS messages work in Arbor and how does it help my school?

If you use Arbor MIS, your school will also be able to use our built-in SMS service for parent comms, making parent engagement:

• Simpler – When you add new students or update parent’s details in Arbor MIS, your SMS contacts are updated too. So you don’t have to worry about keeping details updated in another tool 
• Clearer – In Arbor, you can see all the messages you’ve sent to at a glance. This parent communication log means you know exactly who was sent what, and when
• Faster – You can highlight groups or single students you’d like to message about in Arbor – like those who are absent, or going on a trip – and text parents directly from the list. Great for when you need to get the word out quickly

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Arbor SMS Subscription is here!

We’re excited to introduce our new annual SMS tariff, making it simpler to kleep parents in the loop. Our Subscription SMS is ideal for schools who regularly send SMS. Pay yearly and get the benefits of an ongoing subscription:

• Save money vs buying individual SMS Bundles
• No regular top-ups
• Manage spend easily with one annual invoice

To find out more about SMS Subscription speak to you Account Manager today.

Not yet using Arbor MIS? We’d love to hear from you – get in touch with our friendly team here. 

Top tips for managing your workload from School Business Leaders

On 10th June 2022, we’re celebrating #NationalSBLDay in collaboration with our partners SBS. National School Business Leaders Day celebrates the incredible impact School Business Leaders have in schools and the wider community. Check out the event.

Staff in schools working in lots of new ways right now (and harder than ever before), with School Business Managers and Leaders especially feeling the strain. The upside is that we’re seeing more and more awareness of wellbeing and ways to prevent overload.

We asked School Business Leaders within the SBL Connect network to share their top three tips for managing their workload on Twitter. There were some fantastic pieces of advice around reducing screen time, prioritising tasks and delegating to colleagues. 

We’ve gathered some of the best tips below but you can check out all the activity on #WorkloadTopTips @ArborEdu.

Star advice: Clare Payne, SBM at South Lake Primary

1. monthly tasks as soon as possible, leaving the rest of the month for project work
2. Set specific times of the day for emails and try to ignore them the rest of the time
3. Set two tasks that will be completed each day, and make sure they (even if nothing else) get done

We thought Clare Payne’s top three tips were pretty smart and practical, so we awarded her first place in our competition and sent her some brownies to share with her colleagues!

Rebecca Goddard, SBM at single form entry primary school in Swindon

1. Keep a to do list
2. Know when you contracts are up for renewal so you have time to look around for new ones
3. Keep talking to your HT/colleagues and let them know if it’s all becoming too much

Jonny Coates, SBL and Business and Finance Director in MAT

1. Empower your teams through delegation, trust and saying thanks!
2. Use digital technologies to unlock efficiencies to YOUR time
3. Shift your mindset. Prioritise key deadlines first. Take the time to do things in a considered way

@SBMWestSussex, Primary School Business Manager

1. Automate emails as much as you can to save time and move from your inbox to a task list
2. Take a break. Coming back fresh is more productive than just slogging away
3. Prioritise and ditch non-essentials if necessary

How do you manage your workload? We’d love to hear from you – join the conversation: #WorkloadTopTips

If you’d like to discover how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could transform the way you work and reduce your workload, why not join a free webinar. With sessions tailored to primary, secondary, special schools and MATs, find out what’s on and book your place here.

How your MIS can reduce your staff workload

Staff in schools are under a lot of pressure. With regular inspections, reporting requirements and funding cuts, staff are working longer hours than ever to keep up. Overload and burnout are common problems, as a large proportion of staff time is taken up with admin tasks, data analysis and additional duties.

According to the DfE’s 2016 Teacher Workload Survey, staff spend approximately eight hours a week on administration, much of which is taken up by behaviour management and escalation, and a further 3.8 hours on parent and guardian interaction. Senior Leaders spend around 4.4 hours a week on data analysis alone. 

Teachers, for whom more than half of their time is spent on non-teaching tasks, cite workload as one of the most common reasons for leaving the profession. 1 in 5 Teachers said in 2016 that they intend to leave their job because they feel overworked. In the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), 59% described their workload as unmanageable.

 

What is school data workload? 

Data collection and data management are two of the key areas that can cause excess workload in schools. Staff are spending more of their time collecting, entering, updating, analysing and making sense of students’ data than with the students themselves.

 

Lack of integrating systems

The reason that data tasks are so time-consuming is often due to schools having many competing systems which don’t connect easily to each other. This means they have to enter the same data into multiple places to keep everything up to date. This leads to greater chance of duplication, inaccuracy and inconsistency of data.

If you’re using different systems to manage behaviour, assessments, attendance, HR and communications, it’s also difficult to get a clear overview of what’s happening across your school, or Multi-Academy Trust.

 

Data fatigue

A high data workload can also mean that you’re simply collecting too much data without a clear purpose. It might be that there are unclear roles and responsibilities around the data staff are supposed to collect, or that there wasn’t a strategy in the first place for exactly why each data set was required. Having too much data leads to “data fatigue”, where the likelihood is that most data collected never actually gets analysed to good effect.

 

Lack of data skills

Schools can also find themselves in a situation where the data expertise sits with only a few members of staff, such as the Data Manager or someone in the Office. These staff members can get inundated with requests from colleagues to generate reports for them whenever they need to find out even the smallest of data points. As a result, reporting in schools can be slow and admin-heavy. It can also mean that staff are less likely to question or improve the processes they’re following because they’ve been using them for years.

If departmental Leads, pastoral Heads and Teachers, being able to readily access and make sense of data themselves, without having to rely on other colleagues, they’d be able to spot when something doesn’t look right faster, and intervene straight away. 

Check out how SENCOs can make the most of their time and data with Arbor 

 

The impact of covid on workload

During the pandemic, schools have had to pivot their plans, processes and arrangements dramatically – sometimes responding to changes to government regulations overnight. This has resulted in a huge burden of extra work for staff and even longer hours.

In Autumn Term 2020, TES reported that 84% of teachers felt stressed, whilst according to The Key, 48% of Business Managers reported an increased workload during 2020.

For many schools, their IT systems were part of the problem. As staff needed to work in flexible new ways remotely, older technology that only worked on the school’s on-site server simply couldn’t keep up, making it very difficult for staff to work remotely from home if they had to isolate. As a result, 2020 saw a huge wave of schools moving to cloud-based MIS (Management Information systems) to allow them the flexibility they needed.

Read how Orwell MAT switched MIS during covid

 

How to reduce your staff data workload

 

DfE workload reduction toolkit

Governing bodies have been aware of excess workload in schools for some time. In their 2018 letter to School Leaders, the DfE, Ofsted and several prominent teaching unions gave three main recommendations for how to reduce staff workload:

1. Minimise or eliminate the number of pieces of information teachers are expected to compile
2. Have simple systems for logging behaviour incidents and other pastoral information
3. Review and reduce the number of attainment data collection points a year and how these are used – as a rule, it should not be more than two or three a year

The DfE also brought out a School Workload Reduction Toolkit which contains practical tools and materials that School Leaders can use address workload.

 

How to reduce your data workload

Given the significant proportion of staff time spent on data management, the DfE dedicates a section of the School Workload Reduction Toolkit to reducing data workload. The Teacher Workload Review Group also has some useful advice for managing data more efficiently in schools. We’ve broken this advice down into a six-step checklist for Senior Leaders:

1. Identification – Identify the key student and staff data points that are important for your school to collect in line with your strategy and statutory requirements. Look out for duplications in the data you’re currently collecting. Make sure you’re calculating data in a standardised way across departments (or schools if you’re a MAT)
2. Ownership – Define roles and responsibilities for inputting, collecting and analysing particular data sets, as well as a clear owner of the data collection process
3. Timelines – Identify dates for data collection, analysis and presentation on a single calendar made available to key stakeholders. Keep staff to deadlines to ensure there’s time to put interventions in place based on the data
4. Sources – Audit the costs of all your IT systems and ensure each subscription is serving a specific purpose that brings value. Make sure your systems connect up together to avoid having to enter data into multiple places, which leads to a lack of consistency and clear overview
5. Process – Create a process to review your data periodically to ensure that your forecasts match your results. Keep an eye on the time it takes to gather data so you can make your processes more efficient
6. Results – Define the frequency of reporting that works best for your school, share reporting templates with staff to ensure consistency, and make sure staff understand how to interpret reports. It’s also useful if certain stakeholders (such as Governors) have access to your MIS so they can pull their own reports when they need to

Read how LEO Academies Trust launched a brand new digital strategy

 

How your MIS could cut staff workload

Once you’ve completed a systems audit, you should discover that you can cut down the amount of systems your school uses and replace them with one MIS that can do it all. 

A smart, cloud-based MIS not only saves you paying for multiple subscriptions; the right one can (and should) help you to work faster, smarter and collaborate more across your school. 

Here are the three main ways a good MIS can support staff and reduce workload burden – access, automatic actions and alignment:

 

1. Access

As school staff are having to work more flexibly, across multiple sites, and sometimes remotely, cloud-based systems allow them to do their work and access the data they need from wherever they are.

The best MIS systems not only make data available remotely but also give staff access to the right data at the right time. If staff have in-built, easy-to-understand dashboards that give them instant reports, they can integrate reporting into their everyday routines, rather than having to wait for a spreadsheet to come from the Office.

Access to the right data also makes it easy for staff to pull together a rounded picture of their students, with data from all areas of school life. By looking at academic progress and attainment data alongside patterns in behaviour, attendance and pastoral information all in one place, staff can get to the root cause of performance faster, so they can support students sooner. 

Discover effective strategies for tracking pupil progress at your primary school

 

2. Automatic actions

Since time in schools invariably gets sucked away by “busywork” (or time-consuming admin), having a good MIS that automates key tasks can save staff hours every week.

Communications

Sending communications home is one of the most essential and most time-consuming tasks in schools. It might seem impossible to automate, but the best MIS systems give staff the option to send different types of communications wherever they are in the system, which saves them time jumping over to an external app. For example, from a daily whole-school attendance report, they could filter for absences with No Reason, and send emails to the parents of those students in a few clicks.

Having a specialised Parent Portal or App is another great way to save time on your communications. Even better are MIS systems that give you the option to share information or reports automatically with targeted groups of parents. With communications built into your MIS, you’ll also have all your contextual information at your fingertips, you’ll be able to target your communications to the most hard-to-reach families. This also makes it easier to track, and improve parental engagement over time.

Find out why 73% of staff at The Parks Academies Trust say communication has improved throughout Covid-19 thanks to Arbor

 

Escalations

When something happens in the classroom like a negative behaviour incident, Teachers need to act fast, such as scheduling a detention. But often they end up with limited time between lessons to follow up on their admin. MIS systems that can automate escalation actions, such as assigning detentions or notifying senior staff when certain behaviours are recorded, can save staff lots of time. At scale, automatic escalations can allow MATs to make sure their schools are adhering to consistent behaviour policies.

 

Bulk actions

Having a system that allows you to take bulk actions (doing the same task like adding information for multiple students at a time) is also a massive time-saver. Think about how much faster your follow-ups would be if you could do these things in bulk: 

• 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
• Create custom groups – 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 at the same time

 

Reporting

You can save hours of reporting time by setting up recurring reports which generate themselves automatically on a given basis and at a given frequency. This cuts down on the time you would spend manually gathering data and creating the report each week. The best MIS systems will also allow you to schedule your reports to be sent out to key stakeholders. For example, you could schedule a weekly attendance report to all SLT showing students with < 90% attendance. 

If you rely on other staff to send you information on a regular basis, having a system that can automatically chase those colleagues without you even thinking about it, can be a huge help to your workload, too.

Check out how you can use Arbor’s Microsoft Power BI Connector to visualise your MIS in brand new ways

 

3. Alignment

For Central Teams in Multi-Academy Trusts, a lot of their time is spent gathering data from all their schools so they can put together a clear picture of how their initiatives and processes are working. But setting targets, analysing performance and communicating across a MAT are difficult without centralised tools. Different ways of working and disconnected systems can also pose barriers to schools working together as one.

As MATs grow, many move towards centralising and standardising key processes and policies in order to work in the most efficient way. Having an MIS that’s designed for MATs allows you to truly work as one organisation. Setting common expectations and procedures around behaviour, attendance and assessment helps you to bring everyone onto the same page, and makes reporting and decision making quicker, too. 

Find out more about Arbor MIS – the only true MIS for MATs

 

Choose a better way to work

Arbor MIS is designed to make a measurable improvement to the way schools of all sizes work. Arbor’s intuitive tools free staff from busywork and help them work more easily and collaboratively. With over 1,900 schools and trusts, we’re proud to be the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community. 

One of our impact goals (which we analyse each year for all the schools we work with) is to reduce staff workload to free them up to focus on their students. In fact, 92% users save time with Arbor compared to their previous system. 92% say Arbor has changed the way they work for the better and 81% say Arbor has improved how they analyse and understand data. 

 

Transform the way you work with Arbor 

We’d love to show you how Arbor could transform the way your school or MAT works. Get in touch with us at tellmemore@arbor-education.com or 0208 050 1028. Or arrange a personalised demo today.

Effective strategies for tracking pupil progress at your primary school

The way each primary school tracks the progress of their pupils through school varies considerably depending on the pupils in their care; their needs and learning styles. The areas schools choose to focus on will also be a reflection of their philosophy and ethos. 

How do primary schools assess their pupils? 

Primary schools must report on their pupils’ progress to the DfE via three statutory assessments and one Teacher assessment:

• End of KS1 (reading, writing, maths and science)
• End of KS2 (reading, writing, maths and science)
• KS1 Phonics Screening Check 
• EYFSP (Early Years Foundation Stage Profile) – Teacher assessment

Apart from these tests, schools are free to track progress and attainment using their own methods, without direction from the DfE. In fact, Ofsted’s 2021 directive states that “Inspectors will not expect or accept internal data from schools either instead of or in addition to published data.” 

Many use pre-made frameworks from third party suppliers such as RS assessments (PIRA/PUMA), NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) tests and the DfE’s EYFS Development Matters framework.

Why do schools assess pupil progress?

Given that Ofsted does not inspect primary schools’ progress data, Headteachers may well be asking themselves, what is the purpose of assessment and why do we spend so much focused time on managing and presenting it?

It’s important to remember that when assessments are managed effectively, and in such a way that conclusions can be drawn clearly from the data, this can have a huge impact on improving pupil outcomes. 

Although they don’t look at the data itself, Ofsted explains in it’s 2021 framework that “Inspectors will ask schools to explain why they have decided to collect whatever assessment data they collect, what they are drawing from their data and how that informs their curriculum and teaching.” 

Objectives of tracking pupil progress 

• Establish what pupils do and do not know, and check pupils are on track for end of Key Stage assessments
• Identify where pupils need more support, plan future curriculum content to meet the needs of the pupils
• Monitor the effectiveness of school initiatives and interventions to improve pupils’ learning
• Identify priorities for staff development, resources or changes to teaching approaches
• Make judgements on value for money of provision and consider effective and purposeful use of staff time
• Report to Governors, Trusts or Directors

Current challenges for primary schools

Since the introduction of the “Assessment Without Levels” approach in 2014, there has been little guidance for primary schools on how they should assess. As a result, many schools have a sense of working in isolation without measures of best practice. The ways that schools are held accountable has also changed, with less intervention from Local Authorities and many schools transitioning to academies within a MAT. 

For many primary schools, “Life without Levels” has prompted them to rethink the methods and systems they use for tracking pupil progress, and whether they’re suited to their needs. 

High staff workload

The stages of a school’s yearly assessment cycle – setting up, collecting, adding and analysing data, as well as actioning interventions – increase staff workload, whilst they’re juggling lots of competing responsibilities across school.

With admin tasks taking up a shockingly large amount of time for Teachers and Middle Leaders (4.2 and 5.7 hours a week respectively*), many find they don’t have time for formative assessments at all.

*GSR Teacher workload survey 2016.

Check out our tips for saving hours a week on admin here.

Progress trackers create extra work

The majority of primary schools tend to rely on manual methods of tracking progress, such as spreadsheets or even paper! These methods may have been used for years, but are very time-consuming to enter, check and analyse data. They’re also much more prone to human error and bias. 

Some schools subscribe to online progress trackers which give them a wide range of frameworks to choose from, and crunch the data for them. The downside of this method is that schools’ data is not linked to all the other data that they hold about each pupil in their MIS (Management Information System), which makes it difficult to understand the wider context of factors behind pupils’ attainment.

See our guide to finding the right system for tracking pupil progress below. 

The Covid-19 attainment gap

The pandemic and the restrictions that have come with it, have not only put an added strain on staff time, they’ve also raised new concerns for pupils’ wellbeing and set some pupils back in their academic progress. Staff and pupils have had to adapt to online or blended teaching and learning – which will be here to stay for many classrooms going forward.

Covid also made schools re-evaluate and reflect on how they measure and track pupil progress, with questions such as:

• • What should we do about the missing period of statutory assessment data in 2020?
  • How can a test be standardised when pupils have only covered a portion of the intended curriculum?
  • How will we set targets that are meaningful going forward?
  • How do we effectively establish where each child is after time away from traditional classroom teaching?
  • Have pupils only lost learning or have they gained anything from lockdown?
  • How should we be thinking about “lost learning?” Is that the right language to use?
  • Should we be measuring other non-“academic” skills alongside the curriculum?
  • When should we return to testing as part of the assessment picture?
  • How can I report a “robust” and “honest” reflection of progress to my Governors or Board?

How to manage assessments effectively at your primary school

When the assessment cycle goes smoothly, staff at all levels have quick and easy access to the data they need to really understand which pupils are on track, and take the right action straight away to support those who are struggling. 

When planning your next year’s assessment cycle, here are some of the most important things to remember, put together by former Arbor Assessment Trainers Jackie Gazeley and Patricia Beechey. Check out their bios below.

1. Choose the right assessment system 

It might seem like you’ve always done assessments in the same way – either using trusty spreadsheets or a subscription to an online tracker. But have you ever thought about how much time it takes to input or upload assessment data manually every cycle?

The analysis reports might be just what you need, but do they give you the fullest picture of how pupils are doing across their whole life at school – including pastorally, in behaviour and attendance?

Using the Assessment feature within your MIS might well be the answer. Here’s our comparison of assessment solutions so you can see what we mean:

	Spreadsheets	Online pupil tracker	MIS
Advantages	Customisable	Lots of options Online access	Only enter data in one place Analyse assessment data with other key pupil data Take action in same system MAT overview (some MIS)
Disadvantages	Time-consuming to collect and collate data Risk of human error You can’t take action Relies on data savvy staff	Expensive subscription Data must be manually imported Not connected to your MIS Doesn’t show MAT overview You can’t take action	Some MIS providers charge for Assessment module (although this could be offset if you can cancel your subscription to an online tracker) Some MIS providers have only basic assessment analytics

It’s also worth bearing in mind the benefits of a cloud-based system (rather than a system that stores your school data on a server). Check out our blog for more info.

2. Choose the right assessment framework

When choosing the framework you’re going to use to track pupil attainment, you should gear it to the way you visualise progress at your school. There’s no right or wrong way to track, but watch out – some assessment tracker products give you tons of choice which can leave you not knowing where to start.

From our work with schools, we’ve actually found that the foundation of most approaches are either a Flat or Rising grade scale. Find out how to work out which is right for your school with our handy quiz. Here’s a quick comparison to get you thinking:

	Rising (or Progress) Scale	Flat Scale
Is it right for my school?	If in your school you like to think of progress as “moving through the grades” – i.e. you use numbered standards that all pupils should achieve after each year, then Rising (or Progress) Scale would suit you	If you track pupils’ progress on an individual basis – i.e how each pupil is performing in relation to the expected standard at their age, then the Flat scale would suit you
Advantages	You can see a child moving from grade to grade Underperforming pupils can be tracked precisely against year group expectations Terminology similar to previous National Curriculum which helps parents understand Track SEN progress on same framework	Focuses on maintaining or improving attainment Whole school benchmarks Easy to identify underperforming pupils across the school Terminology is easy to explain to parents
Disadvantages	Analysis is more complex because of large grade scale Benchmarks are year group specific	More difficult to track SEN progress

New EYFS Statutory Framework 2021

From September 2021, the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) framework and Development Matters guidance are changing. Find out more from the DfE here.

Find out how Arbor can help with the new framework, whether you’re an early adopter of the new framework or will change over in September.

3. Build your assessment process around staff workload

It’s important to make sure you establish a way of working in assessment that makes it as easy as possible for staff to input and access the data they need, and to cut down on the number of steps it takes to act on the results (e.g. to follow up with parents, or to set up an intervention).

Here’s a few more tips to cut down staff workload:

• Space out data drops to allow time for pupil progress to be visible
• Record all assessments centrally to remove the need for paper and pencil records
• Record data that will enable you to track pupil performance and moderate teacher judgements, such as Reading Bands or Standardised Scores 
• Make sure all staff have access to the data that’s most relevant to their role, without having to request a report from the office

4. Draw conclusions and take action to support pupils

When it comes to analysing your assessment data, it’s good practice to make sure there’s a closed feedback loop which makes clear how you’ll adapt provision, teaching methods or whole school initiatives based on the findings of your results.

As Ofsted states, its “Inspectors will be interested in the conclusions drawn and actions taken from any internal assessment information, but they will not examine or verify that information first hand.”

Make sure it’s clear to key members of the school community the next steps you’re putting in place to support pupils and groups of pupils, staff and whole school development. Everyone has a role to play:

• Teachers – Monitor and report on pupil and class level progress, update parents and set up interventions
• Subject Leaders – Identify strengths and weaknesses in pupil knowledge and curriculum delivery across the school
• SLT – Track the impact of school improvement initiatives within and between pupil groups and across the school. 
• Governors/Trustees – Review headline data based on strategic key performance indicators
• Parents – Ideally receive automated reports through a Parent App, with personal comments or contact from their child’s Teacher 

Jackie Gazeley

Jackie has been working with schools as an Arbor Trainer since Autumn 2017 specialising in assessment. Before Arbor, she was a Teacher for 32 years in a range of schools, a SENCO and Behaviour Lead in three different schools, and then a Headteacher for 12 years in two inner-city Primaries.

Patricia Beechey

Patricia has more than 40 years of experience in education. As a teacher she has both taught in and worked with, a wide range of schools across the UK and internationally. Her roles within schools have been varied, but include 17 years as a Headteacher, leading an outstanding primary school. Since leaving Headship, Patricia has continued to work as a freelance Education Consultant for both the International Values Education Trust and Arbor Education.

How Arbor can help

Arbor Assessments for Primary Schools is more than a tracker – it’s an integral part of your MIS. Capture pupil progress alongside attendance and behaviour, and build a rounded view of your pupils from Early Years to Year 6 – at last. 

Understand your data using familiar Arbor tools, and create interventions or follow up straight from your Assessment data. Plus, because Arbor has in-built communications, it’s easy to keep colleagues and parents in the loop. 

Top benefits of managing assessments in Arbor MIS:

• Track pupil progress across all areas – Compare attainment, behaviour, and attendance to fully understand how your pupils are doing
• Engage parents in their child’s learning – Easily share updates on pupil progress through the Parent Portal and the Arbor App
• You don’t have to be an expert – Use our handy guide to choose one of our two assessment approaches, and get going straight away with guided setup. Learn from your data straight away with simple, visual analysis screens
• The only MIS for managing trust-wide assessments – Finally, the tools you need to roll out assessments across all your schools 

“It is both clear and detailed. Arbor assessment has completely changed how we report to both children and parents as they are able to see what progress has been made both in a granular way and in broader terms.”

– Anthony David, Executive Headteacher, St Paul’s Church of England Primary School and Monken Hadley School

Find out more or get started

Already using Arbor? Find out how easy it is to set up and use our built-in Assessments feature – including ready-to-go assessment approaches. Get in touch with your Account Manager today at: account.management@arbor-education.com. 

New to Arbor? We’d love to show you how Arbor could not only transform the way you manage assessments, but could make a measurable improvement to the way your primary or secondary school works more widely. Get in touch to book a personalised demo today.