Management Information System (MIS) for schools
Expert ideas for a better working life at your school or trust
Arbor Community
Category : Blog
Whether your school is just about to start using Arbor for the first time, or you’ve been using Arbor for years but need a refresh, here are four key things to remember as we get ready for the next year. – The Arbor Help Centre Arbor is consistently rated as one of the most intuitive
Whether your school is just about to start using Arbor for the first time, or you’ve been using Arbor for years but need a refresh, here are four key things to remember as we get ready for the next year.
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Arbor is consistently rated as one of the most intuitive school management information systems in the UK, but if you find yourself stuck, we have a big support team on hand to help.
One of the other ways you can find support is the Arbor Help Centre, packed with thousands of articles, how-tos, top tips and walk-through videos. You can easily search this content too, to make sure all the answers to your Arbor questions are at your fingertips, instantly.
Those who work in schools know how an MIS can help them best – that’s why we actively encourage all of our users to give feedback on how we can improve. We update Arbor fortnightly, listening closely to what you tell us.
Roadmap
Our roadmap is public, so you can upvote and comment on features that you want our team to work on
Feedback forums
We host regular feedback forums so that you can work directly with our Product and Engineering teams to implement features that will help you in your role
Webinars
Just like at ArborFest, we present our roadmap so that schools have transparency over what we’re working on
Account Managers
Our Account Managers regularly liaise with our Product Team, sharing suggestions from their termly reviews and calls with schools and trusts
Over 6,000 schools and trusts use Arbor MIS! It’s important to us that Arbor users get the most out of this community and can learn from others in the network. Make sure to join us at events like BETT and ArborFest, where we bring our community together for a day packed with roundtables, panel discussions, thought leadership tasks and networking opportunities. Here’s a sneak peak of what ArborFest is all about.
Also make sure to join us over on Arbor HQ, your space to network with fellow Arbor users, share top tips and learn best practice. Just go to this link to sign up: https://arbor-hq.circle.so/.
We also have a big community on LinkedIn and Twitter/X – follow us on here to keep up with the latest news, events and top tips.
It’s always daunting when starting to use a new system, but don’t worry! If you feel like you need a little more help with a particular area of Arbor, we have a Training Hub filled with courses and a Customer Education Team with a 99% satisfaction rating.
Access the Training Hub here or find out more information here.
Events
As always, the summer term is packed full of exciting events for schools and MATs looking to transform the way they work for the better. So, whether you’ve never heard of Arbor before or have been using our MIS for years, we’ve put together this quick guide of all the events our team will be
As always, the summer term is packed full of exciting events for schools and MATs looking to transform the way they work for the better. So, whether you’ve never heard of Arbor before or have been using our MIS for years, we’ve put together this quick guide of all the events our team will be attending so that you can meet us in person over the coming months.
When: 1 May 2024
Where: ExCel Centre, London
With over 3000 attendees, SAAS is a great opportunity to network, hear from inspirational speakers and discover exciting education suppliers like Arbor. Come by to Stand F22 to speak to our friendly team about the UK’s most popular cloud MIS. Click here to book your free spot.
When: 25 & 26 June 2024
Where: Birmingham Conference and Events Centre
This year, CST’s one day conference is all about preparing educators for the AI era. As CST’s Platinum Partner, we’ll be attending the event and would love to see you there. Book your free place at the conference here.
Plus, if you haven’t already, download our recent ebook written in partnership with CST here. All about aligning systems, people and processes, our ebook features insight from data leaders within multi-academy trusts on their top tips and learnings.
Where: Heathrow
MATPN brings together over 300 leaders from across the country to look at innovative technologies and drive change in the sector. If you’re thinking about switching MIS, have got questions about procurement or simply what to find out a bit more about Arbor, we’d love to see you there. Find out more here.
When:8 & 9 July 2024
Where: Birmingham
This is the first in-person CST’s Professional Community for Trust CEOs, focused on culture, retention and development. We’ll be there as CST’s Platinum Partner. Find out all about the event and how to join the waiting list here.
When and where: Live or on-demand – whatever suits you
If you can’t make it to any of these in-person events, don’t worry! See Arbor in action and ask any questions you might have in our free webinar series. And if those times don’t suit you, you can always watch our webinars on demand too.
Find all of our webinars here.
And for MAT leaders, join our MAT Strategy Series. This is a free programme of events and webinars exclusively for MAT leaders and medium-sized trusts exploring sustainable growth. From assessing your operating model and exploring the routes to growth, to managing change and deciding what your central team should look like, this series will give you the chance to hear from your peers, share ideas and leave with practical tips to take back to your trust. Book onto the next webinar in the series here.
ArborFest
– Catch-up on Part 1 of Jim’s talk at ArborFest here. – Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are the holy trinity of the core business of schools and MATs. Though, of course, you are the experts, I thought it would be worth tapping into each of these briefly to see the direction of travel. Curriculum: A
Catch-up on Part 1 of Jim’s talk at ArborFest here.
Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are the holy trinity of the core business of schools and MATs. Though, of course, you are the experts, I thought it would be worth tapping into each of these briefly to see the direction of travel.
Curriculum: A question I asked in Part 1, is whether the curriculum is in the service of knowledge or is it in the service of children? I think that’s a core question, and I think the answer is another question: is your curriculum inclusive by design? That doesn’t mean just being really good at SEND, it means making curriculum and qualification choices that make everyone feel included, that make them all feel like they belong.
Pedagogy: Are we making the most of PedTech? Are we really thinking about the opportunity of technology to allow us to do things that were previously inconceivable? It’s possible to conceive of project based learning, but it’s really hard to do, and it’s really hard to then do project based learning and link it back to the curriculum requirements that are set out in the national curriculum that in the end you have to test people on. But AI could really help you do that.
Assessment: Of course, assessment’s going to change. The opportunity to be able to assess very differently, to be able to move away from the anachronism of large sports halls in the summer with small desks and paper and pen, to something that relates much more to the real world and allows us to start to assess collaborations, allows us to assess critical thinking, metacognition, some of the generic core skills that we’re going to need for humans to compete effectively against machines and collaborate effectively with each other in the future.
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Belonging: Actions are louder than words. I think we should be now thinking how our schools and MATs are inclusive by design; and making this a priority, not an afterthought. This is not an easy process. How can we include every child in our school in the way that we go about things? There’s lots of good practice, there’s lots of tactics, there’s lots of good use of data and use of tech that can enable us to make a difference on attendance. But in the end, what matters most is whether your school gives you as a member of staff, as a pupil, as a parent, a sense of belonging. And there’s much more we need to think about in terms of how we nurture that.
Digital inclusivity: I’m not going to get into a debate about mobile phones, but I do think we need to ensure that all of our children are included in that digital world. Pearson are waiting for regulatory approval for the option of on screen GCSE English tests. Now, if OFQUAL gives the go ahead for that, that means children will be able to type their GCSE English exam rather than write it. That will advantage some children – but only if they have learned to type as well as to write.
Empower professionalism: As I’ve said, if we’re going to resolve the recruitment or retention crisis, we have to empower professionalism and reconnect with the culture of vocation. It’s the intrinsic motivation that makes you want to be a teacher that is way more powerful than the extrinsic one. Yes, we need to pay you properly, but intrinsic motivation really needs to work.
Nature: And a note to finish on, I work in the Houses of Parliament – there are no windows there or nature. But what we know is nature is really good, not only for your wellbeing, but for your brain development, as well as helping us connect with the sustainable future that we all want. So I would say make sure you also find time and opportunity for yourselves, your loved ones and the children that we serve to connect with nature too.
Watch Jim’s talk in full at ArborFest here.
See what else you missed from the day here.
We are living in a year that the world is holding more elections than ever before. Four billion people across the globe will go to the polls this year. My prediction is that here in the UK, our election will see a change of government. If this should happen, let’s begin by considering what might
We are living in a year that the world is holding more elections than ever before. Four billion people across the globe will go to the polls this year. My prediction is that here in the UK, our election will see a change of government. If this should happen, let’s begin by considering what might be in the in-tray should Bridget Phillipson end up being Secretary of State for Education in Sanctuary Buildings, where I spent three glorious years as Schools Minister.
As we all have, Bridget has been talking about school attendance. We have an unprecedented crisis in children’s mental health and wellbeing, the same with school staff. That feeds into the retention and recruitment issues in the workforce. I imagine this will be first and foremost on her mind.
We’ve got schools literally crumbling. We have issues at both early years, particularly around workforce, and then the 16 to 19 pathways where T levels feel overburdensome, where apprenticeship take-up is really challenging. And some universities may well go out of business before we even get to a general election. The adult skills and productivity crisis that the nation faces is something Bridget will have to worry about before she has a chance to think about anything long-term.
So there are some questions around whether you stick with what we’re doing or whether you change. How do we avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater? I’m really cognisant of the conversations that I regularly have with teachers, and the answer is both. There’s a desperate need for change, but also the sense that some can’t cope with any more change at all.
So, instead, a lot of what I ask myself is what could we stop doing?
Something that has to change is the toxicity around Ofsted. I chaired an inquiry into the future of school inspections and this is what we heard back from the teaching workforce. The single word judgement, the terrible events around the death of Ruth Perry. If we’re serious about teacher retention, then having a system that inculcates a culture of fear in our system is something that we have to change, and change urgently. I would advocate that we need to put much more emphasis on governance, particularly MAT governance, as being the first line of defence around teacher quality, and one that can be part of generating a more positive, supportive culture, rather than one of fear.
I was talking to Andreas Sleicher, Director of Education for the OECD, and he used the phrase “the cost of mistrust.” I think we can liberate huge amounts of time and money if we don’t manmark teachers all the time. Instead, we should lean into their professionalism and continue to support through professional development in a rapidly changing environment.
Related to this is data transparency. We should lean into the potential of data and AI to give us new insights, accountability and regulation. We should move from inspecting inputs to challenging outcomes.
That might be the short-term, and whilst that’s a lot to think about, what about some of the bigger things that are going on in education? It comes down to the question, what is school for? And what will it look like?
Multiple and longer careers: The 100-Year Life by Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton worked on the idea that children born today are much more likely to live into the next century and have a 60-year working life, therefore cycling through multiple careers. That’s the world we’re preparing our children for now.
Societal change: And then we’ve got the opportunity of technology, perhaps meaning that we can be more productive. It might mean that we could afford a universal, basic income. It might mean that we could afford a four day week.
Green jobs: Thirdly, the other big change that has to happen is we have to move to a more sustainable economy. We have to nurture green skills around the notion that every job will have to be a green job if we’re going to stop exploiting the world’s resources. And yet, at the moment, in our curriculum, there’s some room for it in Science and Geography. But I’m not persuaded that we are equipping and empowering our young people with the tools and the mindset to make the change personally, to lead the change in and beyond their communities.
Tech evolution: I’m really excited about the potential of artificial intelligence to augment us, but I’m terrified if all of the data is held by just a few people. The fact that Elon Musk owns so much of the world’s sentiment data through X, and so much of the world’s transportation data through Tesla, and so much of the world’s communication data through his satellite company that owns more than half the satellites orbiting the planet, that’s pretty terrifying in terms of that monopolistic position that he has in terms of the data and ability to then train the tech the way that he wants it.
Big technology changes come along periodically, cause social pain and then they deliver prosperity. I would anticipate that we’re going to go through a slightly painful period before we move into a more prosperous period. But I am hopeful that we will realise the opportunity and work out how to build the safeguards.
This all ties back into the fundamental question of what school is really for. Is it really for a knowledge rich-curriculum or is it preparing children for a future in a rapidly changing world?
Read Part 2 of Jim’s talk here.
Product release | Product updates
As the days draw out and the frost starts to melt, let’s look back at some of the amazing features we released to Arbor MIS and MAT MIS this spring term! In the spring term our improvements and new releases continued to focus on three key themes: Maximise success for schools and trusts Further differentiate
As the days draw out and the frost starts to melt, let’s look back at some of the amazing features we released to Arbor MIS and MAT MIS this spring term!
In the spring term our improvements and new releases continued to focus on three key themes:
Here’s a summary of some of my favourite releases from the spring term for schools and MAT central teams that you may have missed.
1. Send comms from Trips
Perfect for sending last-minute updates or reminders to parents. Send your SMS and in-app messages specific to a trip, directly from the Trips module. Learn more here
2. Programmes of study and courses
Now when you withdraw individual students from programmes, you have the option to withdraw them from courses linked to the programme instance. This is a great time saver and removes repetitiveness. Learn more here
3. Enhanced BI Connector
We have launched our enhanced BI Connector, with double the amount of data sets and over 1,000 data fields. New data views include Lesson Attendance, Detentions, Interventions, Student SEN Needs and Clubs. Learn more here
4. Favourites on your homepage
Personalise your Arbor homepage with our new favourites menu! Save the pages and actions you use most often, so you can get to them quickly and easily every day. Learn more here
1. Parental Engagement in MAT MIS
Track and analyse your schools’ parental engagement levels from one central place. See exactly how many emails, SMS, and in-app messages your schools are sending – and how many are being read by parents. Learn more here
2. Integration with SAMpeople
While Arbor already acts as an HR platform for individual schools, we know that MATs require people software specifically suited to their needs to help them grow and scale effectively. That’s why we’re thrilled to have partnered with SAMpeople so that Arbor MATs can bring a best-of-breed HRIS into their ecosystem. Learn more here
3. Custom Data Warehouse
Centralise your data in Arbor’s Custom Data Warehouse – your trust’s own data warehouse. Load external data into our managed infrastructure to enable reporting from all your sources in one place. Learn more here
4. National Data Connector
Access national data from Ofsted and IDACI via the BI Connector and connect all your MAT data together. Learn more here
To get the latest feature news and releases visit our Change Log, and don’t forget to view what we’re working on via our Product Roadmap.
We just held our largest customer conference to date! Over 800 schools joined us at this year’s ArborFest, which took place at the Repertory Theatre in Birmingham and on livestream. Couldn’t make the event and want to know what ArborFest is all about? We’ve put together a small roundup of the day, stage by stage
We just held our largest customer conference to date! Over 800 schools joined us at this year’s ArborFest, which took place at the Repertory Theatre in Birmingham and on livestream.
Couldn’t make the event and want to know what ArborFest is all about? We’ve put together a small roundup of the day, stage by stage below. If you were able to join us, remember to keep sharing your experiences of the event using #ArborFest.
James and Sonia opened the day on The Main Stage, which was followed by a fascinating talk on AI by Professor Rose Luckin, a showcase of all Arbor’s new features, and a panel of Arbor users sharing how they’ve improved attendance and parental engagement at their schools.
Plus, our keynote speaker Lord Jim Knight, former Minister of Schools, gave an insightful keynote on the challenges facing schools, and what change a new government could bring to the sector. In his own words, speaking on the numbers leaving teaching: “We have to empower the professionalism of school staff and reconnect with a culture of vocation if we want to be serious about retention.”
We finished up the day with our annual Customer Awards – from the customer we can’t wait to hear from, through to the Yoda of Arbor.
Over on The Data Stage, Arbor customers shared their practical takeaways on how to change the culture within schools and trusts to one of foresight, rather than hindsight. This was followed by Rob Wall, Data and MIS Lead at Danes Educational Trust and Stephen Schwartz, Trust EdTeach Lead at Inspire Partnership Academy Trust shared their top tips on how to make the most out of data in Arbor.
Phil Le-Brun, a director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS (ArborFest’s lead sponsor) and former Corporate VP at McDonald’s Corporation, then gave a talk on patterns that can help schools to innovate around data, whilst bringing your staff along on the journey too.
Back by popular demand, our MAT Stage brought trust leaders together to discuss strategy, growth and collaboration.
Amanda Hodder, Chief Finance and Operations Officer at Emmaus Catholic Multi Academy, opened the stage with her insights on how, why and when her trust centralised.
This was followed by an inspiring panel from three trust leaders on navigating retention and wellbeing as a trust leader. One piece of advice that stuck with many delegates, from Nicola Noble, Co-Headteacher at Surrey Square Primary School and Big Education Trust was “Everyone is following their own map of the world. Don’t impose yours on your team.”
Our last panel of the day, with Louise Cooper, COO at Education for the 21st Century, and Stephen Barrat-Kinsley, COO at Diocese of Chichester Academy Trust, followed a discussion on how they advanced their trusts’ aims using Arbor’s MAT MIS.
If you’d like to hear more from MAT leaders, but couldn’t make the event, download our recent report. Made in collaboration with Confederation of School Trusts, five MAT leaders share their insights on alignment at their trusts. Download for free here.
The Demo Stage was the go-to place to see Arbor in action. Aiden, Arbor’s Product Manager for Assessments, was joined by Kate Harris (Customer Education Specialist at Arbor) and Dewan Chowdhury (Head of Data at Co-op Academies Trust) to give two live demos plus Q&A of how to get the best out of Assessments in Arbor. If you missed the demo, but want to know more, download our free Customer Education Guide here.
Next up on The Demo Stage was an in-depth demo of Arbor Finance, the top-rated finance system for LA maintained primary schools, powered by the team behind Arbor MIS. Find out more here.
At Arbor, we love to see customers coming together to share best practice.
Throughout #ArborFest, we ran Roundtables for school and trust leaders in our community. These peer-to-peer conversations encouraged schools to network with others in their roles and share best practice.
Not yet in our online community? Join Arbor HQ to hear from schools like yours on how they’re making the most out of Arbor and sharing advice.
Events like ArborFest are the perfect place for the schools in our community to meet the Arbor team and ask any questions they might have. Our Ask an Arbor Expert and Meet your Account Manager rooms provided a space for exactly that. We loved meeting so many of you in-person!
As well as our bustling Partner Marketplace, there was plenty of time for networking, chatting and meeting more of the team at breakfast, lunch and post-ArborFest drinks.
We’re already looking forward to next year!
MATs | Product updates
Today we’re excited to launch the next evolution of MAT MIS for trust central teams. Brilliant individually, MAT MIS, School MIS and Data Warehouse from Arbor work even better together – giving your trust one, joined-up mission control. Give your schools the tools they need to manage their day-to-day, give your central team the ability
Today we’re excited to launch the next evolution of MAT MIS for trust central teams.
Brilliant individually, MAT MIS, School MIS and Data Warehouse from Arbor work even better together – giving your trust one, joined-up mission control. Give your schools the tools they need to manage their day-to-day, give your central team the ability to drive efficiency and standardise workflows, and empower your leaders to make data-informed decisions as your trust grows.
With Arbor as the operating system for your trust, you’ll get centralised functionality, actionable data, and customisable data warehouse views. Our goal is to give you all your data and action-taking in one place, reducing time and complexity for your teams.
We have listened to your feedback and added even more features to our MAT packages to make sure your central teams have the tools they need. All of our MAT MIS packages work seamlessly with Arbor MIS and have been designed to flex as your trust matures and you need additional functionality.
Our starter tier gives you a central, easy-to-use home for all your schools’ data. Get rid of your spreadsheets, and say goodbye to individual logins for every MIS in your trust. Essentials starts to take manual workarounds and reporting off you at last – perfect for small teams
Our Plus tier gives you a full, central MIS for your Trust team. Get market-leading tools to align and manage your trust – from defining policies at a central level, to centralised comms, and a built-in BI Connector
Our brand new Enterprise tier gives trusts an out-of-the-box data warehouse for the first time. Reduce your system complexity and data-collection headaches by bringing all your datasets together in your own Data Warehouse, managed by Arbor. Analyse, spot trends and make strategic data-driven decisions in a whole new way
“In terms of what we can do at a trust level, having MAT MIS has been game-changing. I couldn’t do my job without it. It’s the fact there is an aggregated view of all your staff and students in one place online.” Rob Wall, Data and MIS Lead at Danes Educational Trust
We’re excited to launch the next evolution of MAT MIS, and hope it’s a real game changer when it comes to managing your trust and collaborating with your schools. If you don’t yet use Arbor, we’d love to speak to you: email hello@arbor-education.com and one of our lovely team will be in contact.
Already using our MIS and want to get started? You can do so by reading our Help Centre articles or speak to your Account Manager.
We look forward to hearing your feedback.
We’re proud that Arbor, ScholarPack and Integris share the top spot as England’s most-loved MIS, according to a recent survey by The Key. But what is it about our MIS that schools and trusts alike enjoy? This Valentine’s Day, we thought it would be nice to share a handful of the lovely things that have
We’re proud that Arbor, ScholarPack and Integris share the top spot as England’s most-loved MIS, according to a recent survey by The Key.
But what is it about our MIS that schools and trusts alike enjoy? This Valentine’s Day, we thought it would be nice to share a handful of the lovely things that have been said about us by individuals in the Arbor community.
Win a box of our famous brownies by sharing what you love about our MIS on Twitter and LinkedIn – make sure to tag us so we can see your entry!
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Not yet using Arbor but want an MIS that all your staff can fall in love with? Get in touch with us at hello@arbor-education.com
Training
What is Arbor’s Customer Education Programme? At Arbor we know that life in schools and MATs can be busy and fast-paced, and changing MIS requires a commitment to learn not just the MIS but often adapting to new ways of working as well. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce our Customer Education Programme – a
At Arbor we know that life in schools and MATs can be busy and fast-paced, and changing MIS requires a commitment to learn not just the MIS but often adapting to new ways of working as well. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce our Customer Education Programme – a transformative initiative designed to empower you with the knowledge and skills needed to make sure you’re getting the most out of your MIS.
Our Customer Education Programme recognises that every role in school can be unique to the organisation, and what’s done in one school isn’t necessarily the way that it should be done in all schools. Our learning paths are tailored to cater to your specific needs and goals.
Whether you’re a beginner looking to build a solid foundation or an experienced user aiming to refine your skills, our programme has something for everyone. Plus, to make it easier to find the right courses for you and your staff we have split the programme into three stages: Foundation, Intermediate, and Pro.
Our team of Customer Education Specialists are not just experts in Arbor – they also have a combined 130 years of school experience covering roles such as Headteacher, Trust Data Manager, Primary Office Manager and Exams Officer. You’ll be learning from people who understand first-hand the challenges faced in schools and trusts today.
We understand that your time is valuable. Our programme is designed with flexibility in mind, offering a variety of formats including on-demand courses, webinars, and live sessions. Our training is booked, scheduled, and delivered online via the Arbor Training Hub, which means you’re able to fit your learning into your schedule without compromising on the quality of education.
We’re passionate about educating our customers on how to get the most value out of Arbor, and our consultative approach is focused on equipping you with the skills and knowledge to make a strategic impact in your school or trust. Our Customer Education Programme will guide you on your journey to becoming an Arbor expert, and most importantly, make sure you’re getting the most value out of your MIS.
To view our full range of training services, download our brochure.
To all SIMS customers, You may have heard that SIMS has suddenly announced you can no longer send a database backup file to your new MIS supplier when you want to switch systems. Sending a database backup file has been industry standard practice for the past 10 years, and has been used over 5,000 times
To all SIMS customers,
You may have heard that SIMS has suddenly announced you can no longer send a database backup file to your new MIS supplier when you want to switch systems. Sending a database backup file has been industry standard practice for the past 10 years, and has been used over 5,000 times by Arbor. Since SIMS suddenly announced this in December we’ve heard many schools feel unable to switch MIS, as they’re unsure about how they can transfer their data safely and efficiently to their new supplier.
At Arbor we believe passionately that switching MIS is a real opportunity to change the way your school works for the better. And to switch successfully you need a complete, efficient, and tested way of transferring all your data across. Switching MIS is even more important than switching your bank account – so it should feel as seamless as that! Currently the only proven way of doing so is via a database backup.
That’s why we’re launching the Arbor Switching Guarantee today:
– Arbor will take legal responsibility when you transfer your school data to us via backup file: The Arbor Switching Guarantee means that you will not carry any risk for transferring your school data to us using a backup file
– Arbor will cover the cost of your MIS license until your SIMS contract ends in March 2025: If you feel locked into a contract with SIMS until March 2025, but want to move sooner, we’ll cover your core Arbor license until your SIMS contract ends. This means you won’t double-pay for your MIS
– Arbor will move your school or trust using our tried, tested, and loved onboarding process: We’ll use our experience of switching over 5,000 schools and 450 MATs to make your switch as successful as possible (see how we do this for primary schools, secondary schools, and trusts)
– If you ever want to leave, Arbor commits to giving you a full and complete backup file. This has always been our commitment to schools, because you should never be blocked from switching by your supplier
Our Switching Guarantee makes it easier than ever to switch MIS, so you don’t have to wait to get the benefits of a cloud MIS like Arbor. If you are curious to see why more schools have chosen to switch to Arbor than all other MIS combined, why not join one of our webinars this term?
No school or trust should feel discouraged from switching because they think it will be too difficult. We want our four commitments under the Arbor Switching Guarantee to give you reassurance, peace of mind, and the freedom to make the best MIS decision for your school. Because it’s just the right thing to do.
James
James Weatherill, CEO at Arbor
Please note: Terms and Conditions apply to the Arbor Switching Guarantee. Please contact us for more information
Arbor Community | ArborFest
Join us at ArborFest 2024 – our biggest in-person customer conference to date! This year’s ArborFest explores the theme “Transforming the way schools workBig ideas for the future.” Now, more than ever, we’re seeing rapid changes in technology having a big impact in education. But, at the same time, schools and trusts face continued budget
Join us at ArborFest 2024 – our biggest in-person customer conference to date!
This year’s ArborFest explores the theme “Transforming the way schools workBig ideas for the future.” Now, more than ever, we’re seeing rapid changes in technology having a big impact in education. But, at the same time, schools and trusts face continued budget cuts, staff shortages and ever changing policies. In this landscape of change and challenges, it’s important to explore the different ways schools can innovate to support students, staff, and their wider communities.
ArborFest will bring 800 Arbor customers together at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 13th March 2024 to do just that. Our exciting programme will look at the ways schools can drive positive change by using Arbor and in their broader day-to-day.
Plus, it’s all completely free! Sign up for your free spot here.
The day will be packed with inspiring talks from both experts within the education sector and school staff using Arbor. Explore everything we have on stage by stage.
Plus, Jim Knight, former Minister for Schools under Gordon Brown member of the House of Lords, and Chair of E-Act Multi Academy Trust, will end ArborFest with a specially commissioned talk to wrap up the day.
By popular demand, we’ve combined our best-selling MAT Conference series with ArborFest with a dedicated MAT stage full of thought leadership talks from experienced MAT leaders from across the country.
You’ll leave with clear, actionable insights you can bring back to your trust and implement, all focused on growth, sustainability, and creating a cohesive MAT.
We’re excited to announce that our customer roundtables are back by popular demand! Join 10 fellow Arbor users to discuss your experience using different modules in Arbor, the impact on your students and staff, and your top tips for other staff using Arbor.
In each slot, we’ll run four different roundtables – all you need to do is choose the topic you’re most interested in. We’ll be covering:
You’ll leave with new ideas to take back to your school, based on other Arbor schools’ tips and advice. Perfect for schools looking to share best practice, or who want to learn from others.
Join us for an interactive assessment sessions, one for primary schools and one for secondaries, designed for those interested in our Assessments module. Hosted by the Customer Education Team, join other Arbor users to learn how to get started with school assessments.
The workshop will include:
Arbor customers will receive their ticket in their email inbox! Or you can book here.
Can’t make it in-person? We’re live streaming the day too – keep your eyes peeled for the first release of our virtual tickets.
We can’t wait to see you there! Look out for updates across our Twitter and LinkedIn, and share your experience using #ArborFest.
Integrations
We’re excited to be partnering with SAMpeople and launching our new integration to trusts and their schools. While Arbor already acts as an HR platform for individual schools, we know that MATs require people software specifically suited to their needs to help them grow and scale effectively. With our new integration, MATs can seamlessly join
We’re excited to be partnering with SAMpeople and launching our new integration to trusts and their schools. While Arbor already acts as an HR platform for individual schools, we know that MATs require people software specifically suited to their needs to help them grow and scale effectively. With our new integration, MATs can seamlessly join up their key staff data and workflows at last.
Already used by 1,400 schools and trusts, SAMpeople is the leading HR system for MATs today. Designed by HR experts with deep experience in education, SAMpeople includes everything you need to manage your staff effectively – from Staff Profiles to absence management, contracts to HR casework, an employee portal, and much more. You can even add on a recruitment module to complete the full HR journey from application to onboarding.
Schools and trusts deserve best-in-class systems that integrate effortlessly, and this partnership will finally unlock the ability for schools and MATs to see their applicant, staff and student data in one place. Trusts can now seamlessly onboard new hires, track absences and manage cover with one end-to-end workflow, removing any unnecessary admin and friction that gets in the way of teaching and learning.
For Arbor customers, you can be confident your staff data is kept in sync, and your analytics are both accurate and visible in both systems. Our integration with SAMpeople means your staff can enter and update HR data in just one place, and it will automatically flow into Arbor. With your MIS and HRIS synced, you’re another step closer to streamlined and centralised processes in your trust.
Want to learn more about SAMpeople? If you’re already an Arbor customer, simply fill out this form and a member of the SAMpeople team will be in touch.
Want to find out more about Arbor? Get in touch with us at hello@arbor-education.com
Arbor Community | Arbor Updates
We’re thrilled to invite you to join us at BETT 2024. Taking place from the 24th-26th January at the ExCel Centre, we’re excited to be back and can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on at Arbor. Plus, we’re delighted to be sharing our stand (Stand SE31) with our sister companies, ScholarPack and
We’re thrilled to invite you to join us at BETT 2024. Taking place from the 24th-26th January at the ExCel Centre, we’re excited to be back and can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on at Arbor.
Plus, we’re delighted to be sharing our stand (Stand SE31) with our sister companies, ScholarPack and Integris, so make sure to come by and say hello.
As usual, there are several ways you can meet us:
We’re pleased to share that our Leaders’ Lounge is back by popular demand. We’ll be at Tapa Tapa (outside the ExCeL Centre) from Wednesday until Friday. Open to everyone, no matter how much or little you know about us – look out for an invite in your email inbox! If you haven’t received an invite, make sure to get in touch at hello@arbor-education.com
Can’t make it to lunch? We have dedicated drinks sessions for schools not using Arbor, customers and partners towards the end of each day. Details coming soon!
This is the perfect chance to find out how Arbor is helping schools and MATs to transform the way they work. Hear directly from several of over 5,000 schools that have already switched to using our MIS.
If you’re more of a morning person, you’re welcome to join us for a pastry and tea or coffee at our Breakfast Briefings in the Leaders’ Lounge to kickstart each day of the event. Keep an eye out for details soon!
We’ll also be at stand SE31 in the main BETT arena. Come by for a demo, chat to our friendly team, or join our Arbor classroom where we’ll be showcasing Arbor’s features.
Want to see how Arbor could transform the way you work? Join us at the Tech in Action theatre on Wednesday 24th, at 14:45, to see our very own Tim Ward will be presenting five ways that Arbor can make a measurable difference to your school or trust.
Last year, we were very proud to win the Company of the Year Award!
This time around, we’re excited to be shortlisted for the AI in Education Award. Find out more about Ask Arbor, our AI Assistant, here.
Looking forward to seeing you there! Any questions? Get in touch with us at hello@arbor-education.com
Migration | School Improvement
Over 10,000 UK schools have already made the move to a cloud MIS, with hundreds more set to move away from legacy software this year. If you’re one of the many schools who is thinking about buying a new school MIS, you might also be feeling the anticipation that comes with any kind of change.
Over 10,000 UK schools have already made the move to a cloud MIS, with hundreds more set to move away from legacy software this year. If you’re one of the many schools who is thinking about buying a new school MIS, you might also be feeling the anticipation that comes with any kind of change. Sometimes it can be hard to know where to start!
As with any software, research is a key part of the buying process. Whether you’re a Primary, Secondary, MAT or Special School, it’s important that you take the time to look at all your options to make sure you get the best fit for you.
You can do this initial research by:
But what comes next? The process of moving from one system to another can feel daunting, so we’ve put together short guides for Primaries, Secondaries and MATs to help guide you through the process. The step-by-step guides give you an easy overview of what to expect, from research through to the signing of contracts.
Download the guide relevant to your school or trust for free below:
Arbor Updates
We’re aware that SIMS is encouraging schools to sign a new 3 year contract now, ahead of your 2025 renewal. I wanted to take the chance to do some myth-busting before you make your decision! – Don’t feel rushed into re-signing without seeing what’s out there – schools save 30% by switching rather than sticking!
We’re aware that SIMS is encouraging schools to sign a new 3 year contract now, ahead of your 2025 renewal. I wanted to take the chance to do some myth-busting before you make your decision!
As a next step, why not join our special demos for SIMS users this month to see if Arbor is a fit, find out how much you could save compared to today, and ask any questions you have? Find all the links you need to join your free session below. You can also join us for a free, delicious lunch at Bett (book in here), or just give us a call!
I’m happy to answer any questions too – just contact us and we’ll get straight back to you.
Book your free spot on our special demos for SIMS users below:
As the nights draw in, it’s getting chilly outside and we start thinking about the festive break, let’s take a look back at some of the amazing features we released to Arbor MIS and MAT MIS this Autumn Term! In the Autumn Term our improvements and new releases focused on three key themes: Maximise success
As the nights draw in, it’s getting chilly outside and we start thinking about the festive break, let’s take a look back at some of the amazing features we released to Arbor MIS and MAT MIS this Autumn Term!
In the Autumn Term our improvements and new releases focused on three key themes:
To get the latest feature news and releases visit our Change Log, and don’t forget to view what we’re working on via our product roadmap.
Arbor Finance
Are you a Local Authority looking to switch your schools’ MIS and Finance systems? We’re excited to announce that Arbor Finance (formerly RM Finance) is now part of the Arbor family. Which means if you’re an LA with schools stuck in a legacy Finance and MIS contract, you can move to the cloud and get
Are you a Local Authority looking to switch your schools’ MIS and Finance systems? We’re excited to announce that Arbor Finance (formerly RM Finance) is now part of the Arbor family. Which means if you’re an LA with schools stuck in a legacy Finance and MIS contract, you can move to the cloud and get the benefits of Arbor’s top-rated products – at last.
Already used and loved by over 1,250 Local Authority maintained schools, Arbor Finance is a cash book accounting system that makes day-to-day school accounting simple, paperless and affordable. We acquired RM Finance and brought it into the Arbor brand to expand our offering to LAs.
Both Arbor MIS and Finance are cloud-based, meaning you can work completely flexibly, from home or anywhere, with no server bulk, costs, or complications. Plus, work with just one team for both MIS and Finance.
Arbor MIS is chosen by more schools that switch than any other UK MIS, and we’re proud to be the UK’s most popular cloud-MIS. We’ve designed Arbor with features tailored to office staff, teachers and SLT – so you can work together in one, shared system.
With features just right for your schools, including built-in statutory reporting, online invoicing and electronic approvals, your schools will love our simple and easy-to-use interface. Arbor Finance makes accounting straightforward and paperless, with no accounting background needed.
We’ll make sure you’re accredited to support your schools on Arbor MIS and Arbor Finance. Plus, we’ll work with you to define the right set of finance reports for your schools, tailored to your authority’s needs.
We’ve migrated more schools (over 4,500!) from legacy, server-based systems to the cloud than any other MIS provider. Together with your MIS team and support partner, we’ll map out a phased onboarding of Arbor MIS and Arbor Finance across your Local Authority – with you in the driver’s seat.
We already work with over 20 Local Authorities and over 50 local support teams to ensure schools have the tools they need to make day-to-day accounting simple and straightforward, and an MIS that will measurably improve the way you work.
If you’re an LA team or or a Partner that works closely with LA schools reviewing your schools’ MIS and Finance options, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch at hello@arbor-education.com
Want to hear from LAs who have worked with us before? Read our report with HFL Education (Hertfordshire) and Hampshire County Council on their experience of working with Arbor.
Are you an individual school or a current Arbor MIS customer? Speak to your Local Authority team about their plans for MIS and Finance.
Mental Health and Wellbeing
In a recent survey by TeacherTapp, 46% of respondents said that teacher workload was the biggest problem facing their school. At the same time, teacher vacancies are at an all time high, as record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession. According to Gov.uk, 32.7 hours a week are lost to non-teaching tasks in schools.
In a recent survey by TeacherTapp, 46% of respondents said that teacher workload was the biggest problem facing their school.
At the same time, teacher vacancies are at an all time high, as record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession.
According to Gov.uk, 32.7 hours a week are lost to non-teaching tasks in schools. At Arbor, we believe that your Management Information System (MIS) should do the heavy lifting when it comes to administrative tasks so that you can spend more time where it matters most – in the classroom.
Though this by no means entirely removes the problem of workload in schools, we believe that by reducing time spent on busywork and giving teachers an MIS they actually enjoy using, an MIS can have a positive impact on teacher wellbeing.
But what does this really look like?
Simply put, there are some tasks that your MIS can, and should, do for you. Whether this is scheduling reports to other staff members, or having automatic communications driven by specific behaviour types when you log a behaviour incident. You can also have a bank of ‘snippets’ in Arbor, which are forms of written feedback and comments. This means you don’t have to write them out each time.
Of course, not everything can be automated. When this isn’t a possibility, it’s important that the systems your school is using are intuitive. This way, tasks not only take less time, but staff are more likely to adopt all areas of the MIS. Plus, a more intuitive system means you can stress less. There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing what you want to achieve but not knowing how to get there!
In Arbor, all the key information teachers need is in one place, from student profiles to seating plans. Teachers particularly like how easy it is to contact parents and guardians from our MIS.
Collaboration is often talked about as one of the key elements of a successful school. But legacy MIS and processes can make it hard for teams to work together seamlessly. Accessing data is difficult, reporting is complex and over-customisable, and student data is spread across multiple systems instead of being in one place. All of this leads to high workload and unnecessary stress, with roles becoming isolated, and staff singing from different hymn sheets. Crucially that means important information about students falls between the cracks.
Having a shared workspace with everyone in your team makes sharing information easier, more efficient and more accurate. This means your team can break bottlenecks and support each other where needed. No more sending spreadsheets back and forth, waiting for the right data from another member of staff, or delivering information on paper.
Want to find out more? Get in touch with us here to learn how Arbor could help your school.
Or, click here to read our report on how much time and money Arbor is saving schools and trusts.
As we pass the halfway mark of the Autumn Term, let’s look back at some of the exciting releases and improvements that we’ve made to Arbor in the last few months and also look forward to what’s coming next. – Maximise success for schools and trusts Through improvements to our user experience, we want to
As we pass the halfway mark of the Autumn Term, let’s look back at some of the exciting releases and improvements that we’ve made to Arbor in the last few months and also look forward to what’s coming next.
Through improvements to our user experience, we want to make exploring Arbor easier and make sure you’re seeing and using everything our MIS has to offer. In the first half of the Autumn Term, we’ve made some great improvements to tables in Arbor:
Arbor also now have an exclusive integration with NFER’s free online analysis tool which lets you see NFER assessment data in Arbor MIS and MAT MIS, giving you the full picture of student progress across your trust. Learn more here
As part of our ongoing secondary school enhancements to give you time back and increase admin efficiency, we’ve made some great improvements to our exam and assessment modules. Did you know you can now:
To help trusts with the challenge of how to grow sustainably and efficiently we’re building more tools that help MATs centralise more processes and workflows:
Innovation | School Operations
AI is astounding, controversial, and here to stay. In this blog, I look at how it is already being used by schools, and what it might mean in the longer term. AI in the classroom Teachers have proven to be early adopters of ChatGPT as a tool for generating lesson resources. English teachers quickly spotted
AI is astounding, controversial, and here to stay. In this blog, I look at how it is already being used by schools, and what it might mean in the longer term.
Teachers have proven to be early adopters of ChatGPT as a tool for generating lesson resources.
English teachers quickly spotted the opportunity to create model texts. One of the earliest examples was using ChatGPT to draft similar content in various styles – like three versions of the same news story, one written by a journalist, one by Shakespeare, and one in the style of a song lyric.
Another of my favourite examples was hearing from a teacher who uses ChatGPT to generate distractors (wrong answers) for their multiple-choice quizzes. It turns out this is very useful as it can be surprisingly tricky to come up with convincing but incorrect answers.
AI can also be used to create a more personalised experience for students – even if that’s just including a student’s name in an example text, or quickly generating a quiz that specifically suits a group of pupils or a topic.
These approaches save time for teachers and allow them to be creative, using AI in a relatively low-risk way.
As soon as ChatGPT arrived there was a debate about whether it should be allowed in schools. Some schools and trusts took the cautious approach, and banned it from their networks.
This is similar to the debate about mobile phones, and before that calculators – and the truth is it’s too early to know which of those technologies AI is more akin to when it comes to the impact and use in the classroom.
But whatever you do in school, you can’t stop students from having access to ChatGPT and other AI tools at home.
One idea I liked is telling students that they have to use ChatGPT for a piece of homework. This gives them the opportunity to try it, and see the pros and cons. That’s a great way of engaging with a new technology, and having a productive and open conversation about it. The truth is there are lots of things that ChatGPT is not great at, and students need to learn about that too.
ChatGPT can also be an excellent research tool for students. There’s a lot of benefit to learning through conversation (as we know from teaching and learning in the classroom). I’ve personally found it really useful when I’ve got a specific question about a topic. It can be much more useful than reading through a wikipedia article or searching for answers via Google. Of course you have to be mindful of AI hallucinations and bias, and think carefully about the types of topics to use it for.
My daughter has learnt a lot at her primary school about using Google search effectively and safely. I’d love to hear from schools that have taught similar skills for ChatGPT, as part of encouraging students to then use it for research.
School leaders and administrators have also seen the potential of AI.
Tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Office Co-pilot and Copy.ai are a great way to create a first draft of something – like a letter to parents or a piece of newsletter content. Schools have to produce a lot of writing – for lessons, for stakeholders, for their community, for governors… the list never ends.
Another example is student reports. Lots of schools use comment banks for this, and that exercise can be quite a copy-paste process. With AI the teacher can enter a summary set of bullets about the student, and get the system to draft a full report which they can then edit.
It’s very hard to write well at pace, so these tools can really help.
We’re also seeing these features added to the tools that schools already use – with Ask Arbor being a great example. It allows schools to draft communications and student reports, based on their input and the data already held in the MIS.
I like these smart and pragmatic examples, where the generated text is time-saving and very useful, and where there is always a person reviewing and adapting the output.
It is very early days for tools like ChatGPT, and over the coming months and years we’re going to see rapid improvement in the technology itself, along with better understanding and regulation.
We’re also going to see lots of new AI-powered products and features across all areas of education and work. We’ll probably look back nostalgically at the simpler days when all we spoke of was “ChatGPT”.
What might that future look like? A few idea that interest me are:
Duolingo already offers an AI chatbot that helps learners by discussing incorrect answers and doing roleplays. And teachers are already experimenting with tools that allow students to have a conversation with an AI version of a subject expert or a historical figure.
How sophisticated could this become? It’s going to be fascinating to see. Imagine a student being able to have a 1-to-1 conversation with Albert Einstein about GCSE Physics. Being able to bring learning to life is exciting for both students and teachers.
Almost all of the focus over the last year has been on ChatGPT and the use of AI to understand and generate writing. But the same technology can also be applied to other content. Indeed, ChatGPT itself has just been updated so that it can both understand and generate images. AI is also already being used to generate music, and edit photographs, So while lots of the early use cases have been for subjects like English and the humanities, it is worth remembering that all the same opportunities and questions will come along for the other subjects too.
I think some of the most exciting opportunities for AI lie in the back office and in the operational running of schools and trusts. This technology is going to revolutionise the ways schools work with data, complete administrative tasks, and communicate. Schools will see lots of really useful features coming to their existing platforms like Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. And this is exactly what we’re thinking about across The Key Group too – in Arbor, GovernorHub, The Key, and beyond.
Arbor Community | MATs
The cost-of-living crisis has had a huge impact on schools and trusts. It’s left budgets squeezed and puts even more pressure on schools to divert their resources to where it matters most. While the government gave an additional 2.3 billion to schools in England for each of the next two years (in Dec 2022), the
The cost-of-living crisis has had a huge impact on schools and trusts. It’s left budgets squeezed and puts even more pressure on schools to divert their resources to where it matters most.
While the government gave an additional 2.3 billion to schools in England for each of the next two years (in Dec 2022), the extra funding takes spending in 2024 back to the same level as in 2010. It follows real-term cuts of 9% per pupil between 2009 and 2019, the steepest reduction in more than 40 years.
And while the share of total spending on education has been falling, the proportion of the UK population in full-time education has risen from 18% in the early 1980s to an all-time high of 20% during the 2000s, where it remains today. This is undoubtedly an incredibly tough climate for schools to operate in.
With that in mind, we’ve brought together the expertise of three trust leaders on how they’re approaching the cost-of-living crisis.
In our trust, we have a lot of families who we would refer to as just about managing. As is typical in a faith MAT, a lot of the families are not eligible for Free School Meals, they’re not eligible for Pupil Premium, but they are living really close to the edge, so it’s making sure that those families are supported.
I know the government is very keen on economies of scale. Our focus is on actual school improvement, making sure our schools are excellent and that there are development opportunities for our staff, so that we become an attractive employer through training, through developing our own teachers. This means looking into offering teacher training programmes and apprenticeships for our support staff, for the staff on fractionalised hours, term time only. We want to work with our schools to talk about innovative approaches like annualised hours. TAs may only be earning 13,000 or 14,000 pounds a year with little opportunity to do work in the time when they’re not employed. So looking at whether they can work a longer week but earn a full time salary so that their salary is more liveable. So there’s loads of strands that are going on in terms of how we manage budget pressures.
We’re fortunate in that our schools have all had good reserves and we have managed to maintain those reserves and increase them over the past two years. What we’re now looking to do is use some of those reserves to do things like employ therapeutic staff or specialist staff, partly to support those pupils, but also to make sure we can lever as much funding from local authorities as we should be getting.
In terms of taking a sector wide view, we’ve seen real term per pupil cuts over the decade. And I think what’s made that worse is, as well as actual school funding being cut, we’ve seen a 20% cut in real terms per child in wider children’s services. I fully 100% support the idea that in the public sector we should be looking at every single pound that we spend, but this idea of doing more with less is fairytale. You wouldn’t go to a supermarket and ask to pay less for the same amount of goods as the previous week.
In schools, two thirds of spending goes on teachers and support staff. So if you’re looking at doing more wiht less, essentially you’re saying that your teachers and support staff have to work harder, faster, longer. And is that really what we want for one of the most imporant parts of the public sector? I don’t think so. Theres going to come a point where, and many would argue that we’re there already, there’s literally no fat to get rid of.
And we’re also operating within a context where teacher retention, or lack of it, is at a critical point as well – ultimately as a result of pay and workload. At the Education Policy Institute, we believe two things should be looked at further: differentiated pay and flexible working. It feels to me that there are some easy wins there, when operating in such a challenging context.
At our trust, we’ve seen a significant increase in those who are able to claim free school meals. The funding for PPG will not come through until later, so there will be a lag. As a result, we’re focused on making sure our planning is on a one, two and three year basis. In terms of our staff, we operate and signpost a number of food banks across the trust and we’re seeing in a trust of 900 staff, 6% of our staff are accessing food banks.
Of course, we focus on our pupils, but our own staff are suffering from a cost of living crisis that plays out strategically in recruitment and retention issues. But it also plays out in a rural trust such as mine – a member of staff recently told me that the cost of fuel is a barrier to coming into work. That’s just one of the things that we are facing in our wider ecosystem that we possibly haven’t come across in decades. There needs to be a reconceptualisation, therefore, of our role in being there to safeguard and support our staff across the trust.
We’re also looking at what we’re able to do with the third sector. I think in our country, what is incredible is the amount of work that goes on in the charity space and first sector space. What is sometimes less effective is bringing that together into a real network so that everyone makes sure that we understand where the gaps and overlaps of provision are. So truthfully, I think as a multi academy trust, where we find ourselves in a budget position, this isn’t about us stepping into a breach financially because we’re just trying to pay our own bills. We need to better direct some of that focus in terms of strategic planning and look at it through the lens of what our pupils need, what our staff need, and how we engage in a wider community space.
This article is an excerpt from a panel at ArborFest, Arbor’s annual conference where we bring our community of schools and trusts together. Find out more about ArborFest here.
Want to see how your MIS could save your trust money and time? Our recent report takes a look at the return on investment that schools and trusts can get from Arbor. Download it for free here.
School Improvement | Vulnerable Students
Having a successful Pupil Premium strategy is key in any school, especially in a post-Covid world. With remote learning having a big impact on pupils across the country, schools are now not only trying to close the attainment gap academically, but on a wellbeing level too. There are many creative and successful Pupil Premium strategies
Having a successful Pupil Premium strategy is key in any school, especially in a post-Covid world. With remote learning having a big impact on pupils across the country, schools are now not only trying to close the attainment gap academically, but on a wellbeing level too.
There are many creative and successful Pupil Premium strategies out there, which help to hone in on each Pupil Premium Eligible student in a school and help to narrow the gap with their peers. In today’s blog, we wanted to show you a few ways Arbor can help with some of the heavy lifting when it comes to making sure these strategies are effective.
Arbor automatically calculates PP Eligibility for current pupils and applicants, based on Free School Meals, In Care and Service Child Status, meaning staff don’t have to enter this data manually. You can also import Pupil Premium Recipient data from the DfE; Pupil Premium Recipients are marked with a clear tag in the MIS, so that staff can spot and organise their information with ease.
In addition, wherever you search for students, staff can immediately see and organise by each student’s demographic, including Pupil Premium and not Pupil Premium. This includes being built into our homepage analysis, so it’s easily accessible for all the right people in your school, meaning you don’t have to rely on others to make the reports for you. We wanted to make sure that Pupil Premium students were really easy to identify, so that nothing slips between the cracks.
With shared data, workflows, comms and information, it’s easy for your staff to work together and spot patterns, solve issues and plan ahead. Our custom reports are designed to help you spot these patterns, such as between Free School Meal eligible students and low attendance.
Once these are set up, with any configuration of data that your school wants to track, Arbor helps you take immediate action by automatically adding students that join the group into an intervention of your choice. This means that your school can take a proactive approach and make sure that no child is left behind.
Our custom group alerts also help to join up people and processes. When setting up a custom group, staff can create membership criteria, such as ‘students who are Pupil Premium, with low attainment and attendance.’ Arbor users can then set up alerts for any staff member, including by relationship to a student (e.g. their Form Tutor), when said student joins or leaves a custom group, based on the criteria. These can be communicated by email or as an alert on the homepage.
When it comes to Pupil Premium funding, we make this process easier by integrating with SBS Budgets. Using SBS, you can upload and tag the official PP recipients each financial year, taken from the Official DfE files received from Key to Success.
As Pupil Premium status is allocated from the DfE after each Census, the Key 2 Success Report is correct. If any changes are made, you can reimport the report from them or await the new data from the DfE after your next Census. This will allow you to see the “Pupil Premium Recipient” badge against a pupil on their student profile.
If you’d like to find out other ways Arbor could transform your school, book a call with one of our friendly team.
Already an Arbor customer? You can find lots more information about the contents of this article on our help centre.
Popular | School Operations
A school MIS, or management information system, is a piece of software which brings together data into one place. An MIS helps organisations make decisions, from daily tasks through to top-level strategy. Every school in the UK has to have an MIS. As a school MIS manages data around all aspects of school life, it’s
A school MIS, or management information system, is a piece of software which brings together data into one place. An MIS helps organisations make decisions, from daily tasks through to top-level strategy. Every school in the UK has to have an MIS.
As a school MIS manages data around all aspects of school life, it’s used by lots of different people. By teachers to take the register or log behaviour incidents, the headteacher to see cross-school statistics, and the office staff/data team to analyse information and contact parents.
At Arbor, we believe that a moving MIS is a real chance to change the way you work for the better – but more on that later…
Over the past five years, more and more schools are moving away from legacy, server-based MIS and are instead choosing to move to a cloud-based MIS. As of October 2023, this number stands at over 9,000 schools. And, according to the latest DfE census data, 3 out of 4 schools who make the switch choose Arbor.
A recent survey of over 1,000 schools by The Key showed that these trends are set to continue:
Arbor MIS helps schools of all sizes work better, with intuitive tools designed to make a difference. Chosen by over 5,500 schools and 450 trusts, we’re proud to be the UK’s most popular cloud MIS.
Given the impact that switching can have on everything from workload, to staff happiness, parental engagement and school collaboration, we believe that choosing the right MIS is a real opportunity to change the way you work for the better.
But just don’t take it from us, hear below from one Assistant Principal sharing his experience after choosing Arbor MIS for his secondary school of over 2,000 students.
We know that switching MIS can be a daunting process. If you’re thinking about moving MIS, but aren’t sure where to start, there are a couple of ways you can find out if Arbor is a good fit for your school:
Exciting news – we’ve just published our first ever ArborFest round-up! The new ebook is designed to showcase everything that went on at our biggest customer conference to date. Explore the Roundup for free here. But what exactly is ArborFest and why do we have it? At Arbor, we believe that your school Management Information
Exciting news – we’ve just published our first ever ArborFest round-up! The new ebook is designed to showcase everything that went on at our biggest customer conference to date. Explore the Roundup for free here.
But what exactly is ArborFest and why do we have it?
At Arbor, we believe that your school Management Information System is much more than just a piece of software. Our philosophy is that an MIS should be built to create a culture of collaboration and transformation. That way, your school or trust can constantly be seeking to change the way you work for the better.
And who better to learn from than a community of schools, trusts and staff all looking to achieve the same thing?
That’s why we hold ArborFest, back in-person this year for the first time post-pandemic. 300 schools from the Arbor community joined us at King’s Place, and a further 300 online, for what was our biggest customer conference to date!
This year’s ArborFest explored different facets of the theme “Transforming the way schools work.” With schools and trusts facing squeezed budgets, the challenge of Covid catch-up, and rapidly evolving policies, there has never been a more important time to explore the different ways schools can innovate to support students, staff, and their wider communities.
We’ve put together this Roundup to share some of the day’s main takeaways from across the event. Plus, we’ve added in extra insights and MIS top tips so you can start to put best practices into action straight away.
I hope you enjoy seeing these insights from our community – and are already looking forward to the next ArborFest as much as we are.
You can keep up to date with all things ArborFest by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.
Data and Insight
At Arbor, we take data security very seriously – it’s at the heart of what we do. We’re proud to go above and beyond the MIS industry standard when it comes to protecting MAT and school data. We’ve put together this short blog to explain what we do in a little more detail. – 1)
At Arbor, we take data security very seriously – it’s at the heart of what we do. We’re proud to go above and beyond the MIS industry standard when it comes to protecting MAT and school data. We’ve put together this short blog to explain what we do in a little more detail.
The security of every Arbor office is maintained by formal security inspections and risk assessments. Access to our offices is restricted with secure keys, CCTV, 24/7 security personnel and secure perimeter doors.
When protecting your school data, it’s important that you follow data security best practice to make sure data does not fall into the wrong hands.
Here are some key things you can keep in mind:
If you’d like to find out more about how our cloud-based MIS could help you transform the way your school works, we’d love to hear from you.
Or, if you’d like to find out more about how we look after school data, you can do so here.
Product updates
As the new school year kicks off let’s take a look back at some of the amazing features we released to Arbor MIS and MAT MIS in the past year! – Rotating meal menus and Parent Portal meal choices. Create menus that rotate on a periodic basis, and allow parents to make meal choices for
As the new school year kicks off let’s take a look back at some of the amazing features we released to Arbor MIS and MAT MIS in the past year!
– Rotating meal menus and Parent Portal meal choices. Create menus that rotate on a periodic basis, and allow parents to make meal choices for their children via the Parent Portal. Learn more here
– Emergency Alert. Get help with the click of a button by sending an instant notification or email to staff who are on call. Plus, report on past alerts and view them on the student profile. Learn more here
– Cohort and Mark Level Analysis. Collate information on every summative assessment mark all from within MAT MIS! Learn more here
– Post-16 Census report. Generate a quick summary report of your Post-16 data to ensure you receive all your funding from the School Census, either for yourself or to send to a third party. Learn more here
– CRB Cunninghams Cashless Catering integration. Integrate with your cashless catering system. Arbor now integrates with CRB Cunninghams, this integration lets you manage cashless catering payments directly from your MIS. Arbor integrates with three cashless catering systems; Civica Cashless Catering, Live Register and CRB Cunninghams. Learn more here
– PowerBI Datasets. Connect more data to your BI tool. New datasets added to our PowerBI connector, including Student Academic Year Enrolments, User Defined Fields (created at both MAT and school level), and User Defined Records. Learn more here
– Live National Benchmarks. See live national data from other Arbor schools in your MIS. See real-time National Average and National Percentile data for attendance data, letting you compare yourself to similar schools and see where you sit. Learn more here
– Calendar update on the Arbor App. Parents and guardians can see exactly where their child is at any point in the current day by viewing their child’s calendar for the whole day on the Arbor App. Learn more here
– Import Assessment Marks in MAT MIS. Roll out assessments to the schools in your trust. Instead of logging into individual school sites or sending assessment data to your school data managers, you can use an import spreadsheet in MAT MIS to input the school data yourself. Learn more here
– Random Student Picker. Engage your students and choose them fairly using the Random Student Picker. The student picker spins to select a random student from your class – perfect for projecting on your board. Learn more here
– School Staff Absence Reporting in MAT MIS. Report on school staff absences from in your MAT MIS, eliminating the need to make a custom report. You can also use bonus fields like Bradford Factor reporting and the option to include only workforce census-eligible staff. Learn more here
– Apple Pay and Google Pay. Give parents the flexibility to pay the way that suits them, with pay by Apple Pay and Google Pay! No more re-entering card details every time on the Arbor App. Learn more here
– School Shop Orders dashboard. See an overview of all your orders, payments and refunds without needing to go into each item individually with our School Shop Dashboard. 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
– Bulk Add Assessment Columns. Add columns for Summative or Ad Hoc assessments to a Student Custom Report Writer in one go. Plus, add different components for Summative assessments, such as Baseline, Predicted Mark, and Year Target. Learn more here
– New layout and tools for tables. Introducing our new tabling tool which lets you; rearrange and hide columns, search for data quickly, navigate and enter data using only the keyboard, and much more. Learn more here
– Single Central Record in MAT MIS. Quickly and easily keep staff details up to date across your trust with our updated Single Central Record (SCR) in MAT MIS. Choose which columns you want to see in your SCR, and email staff members directly. Learn more here
– Scheduling Comms. Choose when to send out your emails, SMS and in-app messages with our scheduling comms feature. No more logging in out of hours – you can draft as usual, then just click send later to pick the date and time. Learn more here
– Automated Capita One exports. Automate your Capita One Export. We 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. Send SMS with our new annual SMS tariff, that makes it simpler to keep parents in the loop. Pay yearly and get the benefits of an ongoing subscription. Learn more here
– Updates to the sex and gender fields. To align with the DfE, we’ve made some changes to the gender field in Arbor. We’ve relabelled the Gender field in Arbor to Sex to reflect its existing use in the census, and we’ve added a new field on student, guardian and staff profiles for Gender Identity. Learn more here
– KS4 Assessment Analysis. Use the KS4 Assessment Analysis page to track student progress in more detail, plus get a Progress 8 estimate based on last year’s Attainment Band data. Learn more here
– Communications Designer. Format your emails and text exactly the way you want to. Our communications designer tool gives you the flexibility to set your own fonts and colours, undo and redo, and add in tables and merge fields. Plus, it’s all controllable from your keyboard. Learn more here
– DfE Assessments in report cards. Share DfE Assessment results easily with your parents and students. You can add DfE Assessments from any academic year to both long and short report cards. Learn more here
– EYFS Analysis in MAT MIS. See your EYFS DfE Assessments in MAT MIS. Just like on the School MIS, you can now analyse your EYFS DfE Assessments, as well as KS1 and KS2 results all from MAT MIS. Learn more here
– Custom Report Cards. Build report cards tailored to your school’s needs. You can now build a completely customised report card that looks and feels like your school, and pull in the exact data you want, directly from Arbor MIS. Learn more here
– DfE Primary Assessment Benchmarks. See where you sit nationally, where you’re excelling, identify areas for improvement and look back at previous academic years. Arbor shows you the national average and the percentile your school is in for:
Learn more here
– New School Year Setup Audit. Track your school’s new school year setup from your MAT MIS with New School Year Setup Audit. Easily see how all of your schools are progressing with their preparation for the new year, and find out which steps schools have completed and which are outstanding, directly from your MAT MIS. Learn more here
– Custom Behaviour Workflows. Create and assign custom workflows to behaviour types, in addition to the existing automatic workflows based on severity levels. Giving you that extra flexibility to create behaviour workflows bespoke to your needs. Learn more here
– Biometric Login for the Arbor App. Parents can use face, fingerprint recognition, or their device’s pin code to log in without needing to enter their password every time. Learn more here
– Report on Club Attendance. Get better visibility of your attendance data for the clubs that you’re running with our two new ways to report on clubs in the Custom Report Writer. Learn more here
– Ask Arbor. Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Ask Arbor is your new collaborator and assistant. It’s built seamlessly into Arbor MIS and is designed to turn your words into actions. The first two features, free to all schools that we have released in this suite include:
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.
Teaching & Learning
According to the latest data (Ipsos 2023), there are approximately 3.09 billion active video gamers worldwide, meaning over 40% of our population actively play games That figure has risen by over 1 billion in just seven years. You might also be surprised to learn that 63% of those gamers report playing casual games, think Candy
According to the latest data (Ipsos 2023), there are approximately 3.09 billion active video gamers worldwide, meaning over 40% of our population actively play games That figure has risen by over 1 billion in just seven years. You might also be surprised to learn that 63% of those gamers report playing casual games, think Candy Crush or Homescapes – the kind you pick up to pass the time while you’re waiting for dinner to cook or your partner to finally finish getting ready for the pub.
The global video game industry is worth an estimated $197.11 billion and there is a reason for that. It’s not necessarily that video games are addictive (although some people do struggle) but that getting lost in a good game is both thoroughly enjoyable and uniquely rewarding to the human brain. They offer an expertly crafted difficulty arc that allows you to learn all of the skills required to get you to the end without ever noticing you’re learning. Games place you in a flow state, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines as a state in which all worldly matters other than the activity you’re doing seem to dissipate: you are fully in the present. During flow, you pay less attention to outside negative anxieties and stressors as your consciousness is filled entirely with the current activity.
So what is gamified learning? In short, gamified learning is the process of using game elements in non-game contexts, using flow states and familiar gaming strategies to increase intrinsic learner motivation levels, improve knowledge retention and increase engagement through social mechanisms such as leaderboards, badges and points.
Whilst game-based learning has been around in education for an age, this differs from gamification in education. Game-based learning is an active learning technique that uses the games themselves to improve learning. Think card and board games to improve maths skills or typing games to improve keyboard skills. Gamification in learning is different however, by overlaying game mechanics to everyday teaching it has the potential to swap a fear of failure with the feeling that failure is fun and part of the learning process. Levelling up to the next stage of knowledge!
If you’ve ever watched a child playing a video game, you’ll be familiar with their lack of concern at failing at a level, getting wiped out on a tight corner or coming last in an online battle. You can hit start and try again. Contrast that to the child in tears, beating themselves up for being ‘terrible’ at maths because they just ‘don’t get’ long division and it’s easy to see why educators would love to harness that same resilience exhibited during gaming in the classroom. Gamified learning creates a risk-free environment where children not only learn how to apply the skills they have learned, but develop skills such as resilience and an understanding that those same skills take effort to master.
One of the main benefits of gamification is engagement. By shifting the control to the student and adding game-related elements there is a sense of agency alongside an excitement for learning.
When gamification takes place in a digital environment, the continuous feedback offered allows students to see their progress. They know exactly how they are doing and what they need to improve and advance. Everyone wants to know that they are making progress and getting better at what they are learning. This shifts motivation from extrinsic (externally rewarded) to intrinsic (I’m doing this because I want to improve) and improves engagement along the way.
When learners are more engaged and motivated they will naturally retain more information. The use of game-based mechanics such as leaderboards or points taps into the natural human desire for recognition and competition. When people are incentivised like this they tend to engage more and process the information deeply, resulting in better retention. Knowing the information has a purpose and their ongoing success is their reward.
When we think of gamified learning in the classroom, most peoples’ minds will inevitably jump to apps and games we find in the digital universe. Quiz games like ‘Kahoot’ are an excellent way of not only testing knowledge and introducing an element of competition (either in teams or solo) but can also be set up with learning pathways to easily gamify and scaffold learning for students. They also have added features enabling the download of results so educators can identify trends and knowledge gaps.
But gamification doesn’t only exist in the digital environment. In 2009, Quest to Learn was opened in New York City, a public school with a gamified curriculum where learning happens through the motivation of play. Students are organised into ‘guilds’ or ‘leagues’, choosing their own party members based on the unique skills needed to succeed in ‘quests’ and complete games.
Whilst not every classroom can become fully gamified like Quest to Learn there are lots of applications that can be integrated into the every day curriculum. Introducing digital learning apps that mimic the game mechanics that children know and love is a quick and easy win. Like Quest to Learn, creating teams and adding a structural narrative can increase motivation and retention. Perhaps groups of research mathematicians could investigate and report back on the different methods used around the world for solving mathematical problems (grid method, lattice etc). Adapting the grading structure is another way of adding game mechanics to the classroom. Instead of letters or statements as grades, using a ladder of experience points (XP) shows learners their progress as they climb.
The takeaway is that you don’t need to understand video games or be a gamer to integrate gamification into the classroom. It doesn’t matter if you’re not sure who Mario is or would rather watch paint dry than discuss Fortnite. Thinking about what it is that makes games so successful, enjoyable and engaging and then applying those principles to the classroom is Gamification in its essence.
Although Arbor is consistently rated as the UK’s most-loved and intuitive MIS, we know that learning a whole new system can be daunting. That’s why we thought we’d tap into gamification principles when thinking about how we can make sure our community of schools and partners can get to grips with Arbor as quickly as possible.
The Arbor Training Hub features badges, levels and progress tracking for all of Arbor’s modules. So whether you’re a Data Manager, member of SLT, one of Arbor’s partners looking to get accredited or a member of your school’s back-office, the Training Hub is designed to help you learn everything you need in your role.
If you’re a school or trust using Arbor, click here to get started with the Hub.
Or, if you’re a partner, get in touch with our Partner Success Team at partner-success-team@arbor-education.com
Arbor MIS | Product release
You should Ask Arbor that We’re super excited to introduce Ask Arbor, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI. Following a successful beta programme, we’ve launched our first two Ask Arbor features. Ask Arbor is built seamlessly into Arbor MIS, and is designed to turn your words into actions wherever you see it pop up. Need to
We’re super excited to introduce Ask Arbor, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI.
Following a successful beta programme, we’ve launched our first two Ask Arbor features. Ask Arbor is built seamlessly into Arbor MIS, and is designed to turn your words into actions wherever you see it pop up.
Need to draft a new school year email to parents and guardians? Arbor can help. Looking for a quick way to summarise students’ progress? a student report? Arbor can help with that too.
You can Ask Arbor wherever you see the icon below in Arbor MIS.
Visit our Ask Arbor hub to find out more
As Arbor’s Head of Product, I thought I’d share our vision for Ask Arbor and all things AI.
Here are the top three reasons we’ve introduced AI to Arbor MIS:
Ultimately, my aim with Ask Arbor is to help you complete admin tasks quicker. We want Ask Arbor to be an extra pair of hands and support you to get more out of your data, letting you take action quicker. Imagine being able to get better summary-level information for democratising data: Ask Arbor and AI can make that happen.
Plus, this isn’t the end state of Ask Arbor. This is an ongoing project that we will be working on. Watch this space for more updates – we can’t wait to hear what you think.
IT Support | School Operations
With the pressures on schools and trusts across the country, it goes without saying how important it is that School IT Managers are able to save time and drive efficiency across their organisation. Based on our years of experience and conversations with IT Managers at EduLife, we’ve put together some top tips on efficient school
With the pressures on schools and trusts across the country, it goes without saying how important it is that School IT Managers are able to save time and drive efficiency across their organisation. Based on our years of experience and conversations with IT Managers at EduLife, we’ve put together some top tips on efficient school IT administration and how you can save time in your role.
There are many reasons why efficient school IT administration is the backbone of a well-functioning school or multi-academy trust:
Smooth operations: Efficient school IT administration keeps everything running smoothly, from network connectivity to software applications. It means fewer interruptions and more focus on teaching and learning.
Enhanced productivity: Being able to rely on smooth-running systems, means that students can access resources seamlessly and teachers can focus solely on their role in the classroom, thus boosting productivity for everyone involved.
Optimal resource allocation: Efficient IT administration makes sure that resources are used effectively, preventing wasteful spending and allowing for strategic investments in technology infrastructure.
Seamless communication and collaboration: With efficient IT administration, communication channels work seamlessly. Teachers, administrators, students, and parents can connect, collaborate, and share information effortlessly, creating a supportive learning environment.
Data Security and privacy: Efficient IT administration prioritises data security and privacy by implementing robust security measures, updating systems and educating users to protect sensitive information. This means that trust is maintained and compliance with privacy regulations is upheld.
Despite the great importance put on the output of IT Administrators, we know it’s not always plain sailing:
Spinning many plates: From managing networks and systems to troubleshooting tech issues, there’s always a lot to manage in schools.
Keeping up with technological Advancements: Technology moves at lightning speed, and as IT Managers, it can be tough to keep up! New devices, software updates, and emerging trends require continuous learning.
Limited resources and budget: As is often the case in schools, budgets can be tight, meaning teams have to be creative with their investments to make sure they’re as effective as possible.
Balancing security and accessibility: Striking the right balance between security and accessibility is a challenge IT managers know all too well. You want to protect sensitive data and keep networks secure, but you also need to give seamless access to educational resources for students and staff.
User support and training: With varying degrees of technological ability in schools, it can be a challenge to address differing tech skill levels and ensure everyone feels supported.
With all that in mind, here are some strategies and technology-driven solutions to help you overcome those challenges and boost productivity at your school.
Automated provisioning: Invest in tools that integrate various administrative functions like student records, scheduling, communication and classroom set-up. Tools like EduLife’s data synchronisation feature simplify processes and eliminate the need for manual data entry across multiple systems.
Master digital communication: Use instant messaging, collaboration platforms, and email automation to streamline communication among staff, parents, and students. These tools make information sharing quick, reduce delays, and enhance collaboration.
Go cloud-based: Storing your documents and information in the cloudgives you easy access, real-time collaboration, and seamless file sharing – plus, it’s a step closer to going paperless!
Give Users the Power: Empower your users with self-service password reset solutions like LastPass or Azure Password Reset. They can reset their passwords independently, freeing you up for more exciting IT projects.
Let the machines do the heavy lifting: Find those repetitive tasks that zap all your time and automate them. Whether it’s updating software, backing up systems, or managing user accounts, use nifty tools such as EduLife to save yourself some serious time when trying to simplify school management.
Make best use of your MIS: Use data analytics and reporting in Arbor to generate insightful reports and analyse trends in student performance, attendance, or resource allocation. These tools provide quick access to data-driven insights, making decision-making easier and reducing the effort spent on manual data collection.
Keep it organised with a ticketing system: Say goodbye to chaos! Get yourself a cool ticketing system like Zendesk to manage all those support requests. It’ll help you stay on top of things, prioritise tasks, and get stuff done faster. Plus, no more lost sticky notes!
Say goodbye to the mystery of missing equipment: Asset management solutions like Fleet Management are your superhero helpers. They’ll keep track of your Chromebooks. You can easily know what’s where, schedule maintenance tasks, and stay on top of warranties. It’s like having a trusty sidekick that keeps things organised and saves you from endless searching.
Embrace your inner tech wizard: Take advantage of remote management tools like TeamViewer. They’ll give you the power to access and fix devices from afar. No need to teleport to every corner of the school or multi-academy trust for routine tasks or minor issues.
Efficient school administration is the key to optimising resources, boosting productivity, and creating a fantastic learning environment. As an IT manager, you have the power to implement time-saving strategies that empower your team and educators. By embracing technology solutions you can make your school or multi-academy trust more productive and efficient for everyone involved.
About EduLife
Edulife is a dynamic synchronisation engine that automates and maintains user management across Google Workspace for Education, Microsoft Active Directory and Apple School Manager by harmonising and provisioning data from your school MIS.
Culture | Popular
The Arbor team, now over 200 strong, is a diverse mix of of experienced specialists, ex-teachers and Edtech engineers passionate about making a difference to the sector. Ultimately, we’re here to help schools and trusts stress a little less and focus on what matters most – improving the lives of teachers and outcomes of students everywhere.
We sat down with eight ex-teachers who chose to make this move to the technology space and asked them how they found the transition, what top tips they’d give to others looking to change career and their experience of working at Arbor.
Suzanna: My previous job had been quite focussed on Higher Education and I missed working more closely with schools. I was also very aware of the pain of using legacy software as a teacher and so Arbor’s mission and product are important to me too.
Sue: I wanted to work in a product role that would allow me to use what I knew about working in a primary school to make life better for teachers.
Ana: One thing that attracted me to Arbor was their commitment to employee wellbeing and career development, since joining I can definitely see that this is a genuine priority for the company!
Ceara: I used Arbor in my previous school during my last term there. From this, I noticed the impact on workload this was already making and enjoyed how I could use this system with ease.
Robin: I genuinely loved teaching, it was all I wanted to be when I was little, but I just couldn’t love the impact it had on my family. I found that I was using all my “sparkle”, energy and patience during the school day, and had none left at the end for my own kids! I started to look for something with more flexibility and that would give me more headspace to focus on my family, but still made me feel like I was making an impact and had a purpose. When I read into Arbor, I was so excited because it ticked those boxes, without making me feel like I was starting a completely new career where all my years of experience in education would’ve been wasted.
Ashleigh: I love that they really care about their staff and can offer progression within the company as well as support people with CPD.
Suzanna: It was brilliant – one of the best recruitment experiences I’ve had. Sophie and Santino were great at keeping me in-the-loop throughout the process and it always felt friendly and clear.
Ana: The recruitment and onboarding process was incredibly efficient and transparent! I was kept in the loop throughout the recruitment and pre-employment process and was seriously impressed with my onboarding experience! My equipment was sent to my home address prior to my start date with everything set up so that I was ready to go!
Ceara: I was very nervous about venturing into the world outside of the classroom but the recruitment and onboarding process at Arbor was so supportive and I really felt heard. All of my worries were supported and any training I needed for the role was provided. It couldn’t have gone any better!
Juliet: From day one at Arbor, I had such a warm reception and constant support throughout my first few months. I was never made to feel stupid, even when I asked what an acronym stood for a third time…
Ashleigh: Really informative. I felt that questions that I had could be answered. I first applied for a role and was told about an even better suited role coming soon which showed that I had been listened to and recruiting staff cared about my needs and the opportunities for me to be a successful employee.
Jamie: Fantastic – there was always someone there to help and guide, as well as point in the right direction to further develop my learning!
Suzanna: Yes. I often talk with schools about how Arbor has changed the way they work. I’m proud that I can support our customers in making sure they get the most from Arbor, so they can get time back for students and for themselves.
Ana: Absolutely! The data that school staff need to use and analyse is ever increasing, alongside many other parts of their workload! Helping somebody with a task they were really worried about or showing them a more efficient way to do something is something I find incredibly rewarding!
Sue: Yes! Knowing that the work I do is useful to thousands of schools, and the hundreds of thousands of staff and students (not to mention their parents) still blows my mind.
Juliet: Knowing I work for a social impact company, which prioritises students and staff when developing the product means I don’t have the guilt of leaving the classroom. With poor work-life balance being a huge factor in my quitting teaching, I love knowing that we’re improving this for current teachers with our MIS.
Ana: I love that I am still working in a fast paced environment! I really enjoy this aspect of my job and love that I am challenged and learning something new every day!
Robin: Schools are such fast-paced environments, so this is something that I have been accustomed to, but it is fast paced in a different way, so it can take a bit of getting used to. However there are lots of genuinely helpful wellbeing initiatives within Arbor, and when the whole company has such a “mental health friendly” approach, it really does feed into all aspects of the job.
Ashleigh: I love the challenge and look forward to learning from others and keeping up to date with changes. It keeps me engaged in my job role, helps me to learn more and provides a healthy amount of challenge to my days.
Jamie: It suits me perfectly! I like to have priorities, and strive to achieve them in the most efficient way possible.
Suzanna: When you work remotely, make sure you have clear boundaries between home and work. If you have a dedicated working space, that’s ideal, but even just having a good routine can help. For example, I often go for a walk after work to help decompress from the day. When you’re in the office, try to make the most of the in-person time you have with people.
Ana: My top tip is to separate your work and relaxing space if you can, even if it is just a “zone” of a room! I taught from home during the pandemic but did not have a proper set-up for this and working from home feels totally different now that I do.
Juliet: Routine routine routine! Switching from a totally inflexible, rigid timetable as a secondary teacher, it was a huge change for me to manage my own time. By planning out my day every morning, I find my WFH days are much more productive, and I cherish the opportunity to go for a long walk every lunch time rather than stand in the school canteen!
Suzanna: Flexibility. When I first left teaching, the biggest difference was that I mostly chose how to structure my own work for the day. Even with a deadline, I can choose to do big blocks of a particular task or work on a couple of things at once. That’s very different from teaching, when your day is often planned out for you.
Sue: I also continue to be amazed at how much others in the company really value my experiences from the classroom – I’ve been able to offer my perspective on so many different projects (learning packs from The Key, how schools set up, use and share items of IT equipment, dealing with specific situations in a school environment etc.
Ceara: Adapting to new systems and improving my technical knowledge were my biggest challenges but coming from a fast-paced working environment allowed me to be a quick learner and adapt quickly and with ease. The support I received and continue to receive here is excellent! Every day really is like a school day and I am always learning something new and developing my own professional skills.
Robin: Not feeling bad for asking questions or clarification! Schools can be a little isolating at times in terms of speaking to other adults, as it can feel like nobody has any time. Asking questions during a staff meeting or training often felt like a faux pax! At Arbor, I think I apologised at least 50 times within my first week. This is still something I am working on, but my line manager is so patient with me and is always reassuring me when I need it!
Juliet: The biggest surprise to me was the regular words of encouragement, recognition and thanks from colleagues. Teaching was often a thankless job, albeit rewarding, whereas I now feel valued for my efforts!
Jamie: The level of trust put in you at every level. It encourages you to repay that faith and belief by working to the best of your ability, day in, day out.
Suzanna: Absolutely! You’ll have the opportunity to work with interesting people on important projects for a company that really cares about you.
Ana: Absolutely!
Sue: Yes, definitely! The Arbor team are great colleagues to work with, and I love that the ethos of the whole company is about ensuring schools have the best tools in place to help them focus on the best outcomes for their students.
Ceara: Absolutely – I tell friends/family all of the time what a positive impact Arbor has had as I stepped away from the classroom. They have always been surprised at how many different ways I have used my skills from teaching every single day as an advanced support analyst!
Robin: Without a doubt – I actually already have, multiple times!
Juliet: 100%!
Ashleigh: 100% 🙂
Jamie: Absolutely… Arbor has transformed my belief and mindset in the working landscape outside of education as I knew it in the past. And for that, I will forever be grateful.
Are you a teacher looking for a new career but aren’t sure where to start? We’d love to hear from you – check out our careers page to see which roles we’re hiring for.
If you enjoyed this article, we have also sat down with the school governors in our team – read it here!
Case Studies | MATs
Diocese of Chichester Academy Trust (DCAT) is a 19 school mixed phase trust in the South of England with 18 primary schools and one secondary school, with plans to add six more schools by 2025. Founded in 2014, the trust is now home to nearly 6000 students. The trust decided to move all of their
Diocese of Chichester Academy Trust (DCAT) is a 19 school mixed phase trust in the South of England with 18 primary schools and one secondary school, with plans to add six more schools by 2025. Founded in 2014, the trust is now home to nearly 6000 students.
The trust decided to move all of their schools to Arbor MIS and started onboarding in summer 2022. They started using MAT MIS for their Central Team at the same time, making it easier and quicker to work with their schools as one organisation, not many.
Stephen Barrett-Kinsley, COO at DCAT, says that growth is at the heart of the trust’s vision for 2025 and wider strategy, and they are constantly thinking about how to achieve this sustainably without compromising value for their existing schools.
DCAT currently has schools in East Sussex, West Sussex, Bournemouth, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Stephen says that “one of the interesting challenges we have is creating that sense of connectivity and family for what is a remarkably geographically spread group of schools.”
As they expand to 25 schools, it’s increasingly important to be “match-fit” for growth. For DCAT, Stephen describes being match-fit as having a good handle on the trust’s data: “With our old systems, it would have been impossible to intimately know the data or information of 25 schools. Our focus now is on changing the back-end software, systems and processes so that it enables seamless transfer of information and data.”
In 2021, the trust decided to choose a single MIS for all their schools – at the time, three schools were already using Arbor. There were four key things that DCAT wanted from an MIS:
The Central Team felt that Arbor met all of these requirements and also liked that the system is always being updated with new features: “You can demonstrably see a consistent effort to improve.”
When new schools join DCAT, they need to switch to Arbor within their first term. Although the trust isn’t prescriptive when it comes to most software, Stephen highlighted how important it was that all schools in their trust use the same MIS; it means that they can connect with other key trust systems including finance, payroll, safeguarding and assessment. Without joining up these systems, DCAT says that it’s difficult to “integrate [schools] properly into how we’re operating as a trust.”
Another benefit of using Arbor across the trust is ease of reporting. Before moving to Arbor, DCAT’s schools shared data with the Central Team via spreadsheets each term. As well as being a time-consuming process, it left room for human error and inconsistent reporting.
As DCAT grew, it became more important to have “seamless transfer of data, seamless access to data.” With their schools using Arbor MIS, it was a natural choice to use Arbor’s MAT MIS to make reporting more efficient and effective for schools and the Central Team. Data from each school feeds automatically and instantaneously into MAT MIS so that the trust can support their schools in real time, rather than waiting for termly reports.
Stephen recalls introducing Senior Leaders to MAT MIS and showing them, for example, how to see attendance at all their schools in one click. He says: “it was genuinely a life-changing moment” for staff who were used to legacy systems and lengthy workarounds.
Arbor helps DCAT to work together as one organisation as they grow. Despite the distance between schools, standardised reporting helps DCAT to be consistent with how they treat their schools. MAT MIS also gives DCAT the insight to be able to create links between schools with similar demographics. For example, they noticed that two schools had high numbers of looked-after children and were able to make the connection between them so they could share best practices.
DCAT makes the most of using MAT MIS both to drill down into individual school data and look at broader trends. In particular, Stephen feels “the quick dashboards are just exceptionally useful. And being able to quickly drill down into a school’s data by clicking a few buttons.” If they want to find out more, staff “have the ability to log into a school’s MIS so that we can just quickly jump in and find out what’s happening.” A recent example is that a review of staff absence highlighted, on closer inspection, inconsistencies in the use of attendance codes. The trust was able to turn this into a training exercise to support office staff in recording attendance consistently.
Quick access to data is key when working across a growing organisation. Senior Education Leaders regularly meet to review data from across the trust and talk about the best way to improve school performance. They no longer have to wait for information from the school as they can access and analyse data before meeting with the Headteachers. This means that the time they have with them is much more productive and focussed on improvement. What’s more, comparisons can be drawn across schools and connections made to share ideas.
A particular focus at DCAT is attendance and they find it very useful to draw comparisons and set benchmarks for their schools so that they know where to focus. “We can quickly access that data seamlessly, have the conversation, create the links and move forward.”
School Operations
Today’s guest blog is another from our very own Digital Customer Operations Analyst, Chelsea Hopkins, who was previously an school Attendance Officer. You can read more from Chelsea here, but in this blog, she looks into her top reports she thinks all Attendance Officers will find useful. Now as we know every single staff member
Today’s guest blog is another from our very own Digital Customer Operations Analyst, Chelsea Hopkins, who was previously an school Attendance Officer. You can read more from Chelsea here, but in this blog, she looks into her top reports she thinks all Attendance Officers will find useful.
Now as we know every single staff member that works in a school, only do so for the perks, the salary, job satisfaction, good work-life balance.
I’m smiling as I write that, but apparently, those people exist?!
Joking aside, I think I can confidently say that we all work in a school because for some crazy reason we want to make a real difference in this world and mould the future generation.
I’ve worked alongside many incredible people, who work their magic and are just incredible but they can’t work their magic on those that are simply not there. That’s why keeping an eye on your student’s attendance is crucial in improving the outcomes for our young people!
Now you will be glad to hear that Arbor is full of wonderful built-in Attendance reporting tools and I’m going to explain some really useful ones that can be used on a daily basis and reports that can be shared with others.
So we’ve all taken part in staff meetings, where we sit and learn that Year 11’s have decided that what they are wearing to prom, is far more important than focusing on their GCSEs.
….Or that the Year 8s think that harmlessly flipping bottles onto tables is no longer fun and have now started throwing them from balconies….
In a strange way, I looked forward to the meetings. It was a nice change speaking to actual human beings older than 16 after your day of having conversations with Year 9 students that turning up to school 15 minute late, just really isn’t acceptable.
(Spoiler! They obviously listened and decided to make a change, that change being turning up 30 minutes late instead.)
As an attendance officer, you can sometimes feel like a one-man band, so it’s useful to have an opportunity to share your data/concerns with other members of staff such as Head of Years, Senior Leadership Team, Pastoral staff etc…
I found it useful during my time as an attendance officer, to run reports and distribute the data. I have created an article on our help centre that details all the reports I liked to use, you can find the article here – Common Attendance Reports
Below I have listed the top 4 reports that I found most useful and why:
Attendance breakdown for the week
You can use attendance statistics to get this information. In the article above take a look at the Percentage Attendance Report with steps on how to do this. You will need to amend the dates to show a Monday, then re-run the report with dates for Tuesday etc…
I find this particularly useful as you begin to see if there are any days in which attendance drops.
Students that have been absent this week
You can view this information by the Absentees by date page in Arbor, take a look at the Session absences report in the article above.
As attendance officers our sole purpose is to monitor attendance. Whereas this is not the focus for other members of staff, it is useful for them to be reminded of students that were absent.
Students that have been late to school this week
In the attendance reporting article, take a look at the Minutes Late Report section.
Now ten minutes late here and there, we can overlook and forgive. However if a student is late every school day by 30 minutes, that’s 2.5 hours a week. if this was to continue for a month, that would amount to 10 hours, equivalent to 2 school days. It is useful to monitor this as minutes late, that build up, can amount to a significant amount of missed learning.
List of students that are currently a persistent absentee
To view a list of students that are currently persistent absentees, head to Students > Attendance > Absentees (on the left) > Persistent Absentees
It’s good practice to constantly be familiar with our students that are persistently absent. Even though teachers are incredible at their jobs, ultimately they can’t teach those that are absent. Sharing this data with other members of staff allows you to put in place interventions in a bid to improve attendance.
Arbor Community | School Operations
Today’s guest blog is from Chelsea Hopkins, Arbor’s Digital Customer Operations Analyst and former Attendance Officer, sharing her experience of working in schools. Everybody who has worked in a school knows that no two days are the same. However, my experience of being an Attendance Officer is that we will tend to have a routine/structure
Today’s guest blog is from Chelsea Hopkins, Arbor’s Digital Customer Operations Analyst and former Attendance Officer, sharing her experience of working in schools.
Everybody who has worked in a school knows that no two days are the same. However, my experience of being an Attendance Officer is that we will tend to have a routine/structure to our morning that we try to stick to.
I thought it would be fun to share my experience of being an Attendance Officer and how that would look whilst using Arbor. So here goes…
Let’s set the scene, it’s a dark gloomy winter morning. I’m already late as I didn’t factor in the extra ten minutes to defrost my car. I roll up to the empty car park, usually I was always the first person in!
I unlock my office door and turn on the lights and can see the phone blinking red with the voicemails from my parents. My first port of call – turn the kettle on!
Now armed with caffeine, I start my day.
The majority of Parents & Guardians would contact the school prior to the school day starting. They would get in touch via email, telephone, SMS. I would always add these reasons onto the system. There are a couple of ways you can do this.
First Method – Bulk Edit Marks
This is useful for one-off absences such as a headache or other minor ailments.
Second Method – Record a Planned Absence
This is useful for documenting long-term absences such as an injury where they won’t be back for a week. Or future absences such as a medical appointment or a holiday.
I would then refresh my memory from the day before and see who was absent and who I need to keep an eye on today. You can do this using the Absentee’s by Date page:
Then the school day starts and there is a buzz of chatter that fills the hallway. There is a year 11 student in the corner that is crying because they’ve broken up for the twelfth time this week with their significant other (it’s Tuesday).
Amongst the crowd, you see a student that is radiating a pale green colour and is making a beeline to your office to tell you they do not feel well. You ask the student, “Who’s sent you?”, to which they reply “Miss Smith”. You make a mental note to thank Miss Smith later for sending a student to your shoebox office.
You call home for this student, someone’s on their way to collect them and you ask the student to wait in main reception. You say, “hope you feel better soon” as they are leaving, before lunging for the disinfectant.
Then all went quiet, the students are in lessons, time for the dreaded late duty!
I make a note of all the students coming in late and what time they arrive. I would like to tell you that I was kept entertained by an array of elaborate excuses. Unfortunately, when working in a secondary all you get is “slept in” or “you should be glad I even came” and well, we can’t argue with their honesty!
I then add the late marks via Bulk Edit Marks and I can then monitor/report on these students via Latecomers!
Now that the late duty has been done, time to see who is in and who isn’t!
Of course, Mr Andrews is yet to complete his register, let’s send him his first reminder of the day. (Sending reminders to complete registers or completing them for teachers)
Now to chase all the students that have been marked absent and we don’t know why. In Arbor you can do this on the Absentee’s by Date page:
I tick all the students and then use the Blue Pencil tool and select Follow-up with Guardians.
For most, receiving an SMS/Email will prompt them to call the school and explain the absence. For others, I need to initiate that phone call, so I look back at my list of absent students and identify who will need that phone call.
I can see that Lucy is off today, something is ringing a bell with this student. So, I go to her profile and look at her attendance record. You can do this by:
Looking at the Marks (by Date) section I can see clearly that Lucy has had the last 5 Tuesdays off and that a pattern is forming, I can also see she has double science on a Tuesday afternoon… interesting.
I called home and was told Lucy had a headache, but I also explained my concerns. Feeling rumbled, Lucy made a sudden recovery and will be coming in this afternoon! I also log this telephone call along with all the other calls I made this morning.
Once I’ve followed up with all my guardians, I then like to have a quick skim over my absent students from today regardless of what absence code they have. I can see this overview via the Absentees by date page:
I do this just to ensure that I always have a clear idea of who is absent and make sure I have accounted for everyone. I also like to check my students that are accumulating consecutive days of absence. I can view this from the Continuous Absence page. This will then allow me to identify those who may benefit from a home visit.
Oh and of course, one of the students that lives 5 miles from the school is off today and we have chased a reason for absence, but no joy! Home visit it is.
So, there it is, a morning as an Arbor Attendance Officer! Let me know what you think and what other Attendance topics you would like me to cover.
IT Support
In recent years, the National Cyber Security Centre has reported an increase in the number of cyber attacks targeting the UK education sector. These attacks target data which they encrypt so that users can no longer access it. Sometimes cyber attackers demand a ransom in exchange for restoring access to the data, which is where
In recent years, the National Cyber Security Centre has reported an increase in the number of cyber attacks targeting the UK education sector. These attacks target data which they encrypt so that users can no longer access it. Sometimes cyber attackers demand a ransom in exchange for restoring access to the data, which is where the term ‘ransomware’ comes from.
Ransomware attacks happen most often through emails which contain malicious links or attached files. They can also happen through ‘phishing’ emails where senders pretend to be an organisation or a person you know. In both cases hackers are trying to steal user credentials, or gain entry to IT systems.
Ransomware typically encrypts data files, then demands payment of a ransom in exchange for the decryption key. There is never any guarantee that the key will work and you only find this out after payment has been made.
The best advice is to stay alert. If an email or advert looks suspicious, don’t click on any links or attachments, and always report it to your IT team or Data Protection Officer. Having strong passwords is also important. Remember that the length of passwords is the single most important factor. Any password less than 10 characters long can be hacked by brute force in under a minute!
Tip: You can edit your school’s password rules in Arbor to make sure your users have strong passwords, and set the frequency that staff need to change them.
Here at Arbor we’re proud to exceed the MIS industry standard when it comes to keeping your data safe. We are accredited by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) – an independent, non-governmental international organisation that ensures the quality and safety of software like Arbor around the world. We are accredited under ISO27001 – the international benchmark for data security.
We also store data on our central cloud-based system rather than on any individual device or server, which means if there’s a security breach at your school, your data is less likely to be lost or compromised. Your data is also backed up daily so we can quickly and easily restore access should you have a security incident. You can read more about how we protect your data in our blog here.
Whilst cyber attacks are very rare, it’s always good to be prepared. Your school or MAT Data Protection Officer should have a wider plan in place for what to do if you get a ransomware attack, but here are some quick and simple steps you can take in Arbor:
The first step we’d recommend is recycling your login information. This will help to make sure that any passwords that have been compromised as part of the ransomware attack no longer work. In Arbor you can either:
If your Data Protection Officer recommends disabling access to systems until the issue is resolved, there are a couple of options in Arbor:
As part of your continuity plans, make sure you’ve developed an internal and external communication strategy. It’s important that the right information reaches the right people at the right time, so that your team knows what’s happening and what they should do next. For steps on sending communications using Arbor, check out our help materials here.
Whilst we hope you never have to deal with a cyber attack, if you do we’ll be here to support you with anything related to accessing your Arbor data.
Today’s blog is an interview with Kirsten Beaven, the School Business Leader at Vaughan Primary School (674) since 2018. The interview was part of a wider research project into how Arbor saves schools money and time. Part of the project involved surveying over 300 SBMs and COOs about how they’re making sure their MIS is
Today’s blog is an interview with Kirsten Beaven, the School Business Leader at Vaughan Primary School (674) since 2018.
The interview was part of a wider research project into how Arbor saves schools money and time. Part of the project involved surveying over 300 SBMs and COOs about how they’re making sure their MIS is doing exactly that – you can download the report for free and hear from more SBMs here.
Arbor’s new report investigating the ROI schools and trusts get from our MIS.
During lockdown, our school realised the underinvestment we’d made into our ICT systems – we were reliant on legacy systems and antiquated manual processes. I was asked to lead a digital transformation project, creating a strategy that overhauled our systems from a core teaching and learning point of view, from an internal systems perspective and how we interface with stakeholders. All of those things that we need to do effectively to continue the popularity of our school, filling our pan and being funded appropriately.
In February 2022, we kickstarted this project and began to do away with the legacy systems and on prem solutions that we had. Servers were taking up lots of room, consuming lots of energy (particularly as kept air conditioned) and didn’t give staff flexibility – I lost count of the number of times I had to come onsite to get access to something stored beyond the system. We carried out detailed system analysis and realised we were buying into an unnecessary amount of additional systems, simply because our previous MIS didn’t support those functions that were necessary to school life: things like assessment of children’s progress, school meals, receiving payments from parents, school club provision etc. Back in February 2022, we were having to interface all these additional apps into our MIS, sometimes having to export and import continually to allow for the most up-to-date information. Not only were the additional subscriptions and applications costly, but also labour intensive from an administrative and organisational point of view.
Another significant cost was the MIS maintenance and support costs which we had to buy into from our Local Authority, when our previous MIS had to be upgraded or tweaked in the form of rolling out patches and updates, in order to support the specialist support team there.
When we looked at what we currently bought into, there was almost £19,000 worth of additional subscriptions and costs that we could effectively eliminate by moving to Arbor.
We did thorough market research, looking at other cloud providers to make sure we found the right fit for our school. What we liked about Arbor was the deep functionality – and that it joined up our processes across the school. Just having those elements talking to each other and connecting the dots is what makes the difference to the efficiency and effectiveness of the school as a whole. It’s logical thinking, and it seems evident, at least to me, that those building the system really understand education in terms of the administrative functions around it and the impact it will have on staff and students.
One good example was a previous pain point of ours, which was parents pre-ordering school meals for their children, but if the student was absent on the day, the kitchen wouldn’t be informed – this led to parents still wanting a refund and food waste, as well as the manual work this creates in order to smooth these external relationships. In Arbor, because the system is interconnected and all the different elements speak to each other, this updates automatically.
We used to spend almost £1000 a year on generating booklets to manage admissions, with parents expected to fill them out, and then our admin team manually inputting this information into the MIS. That process of transposing that information took our office team two weeks in the summer, and had an impact on data accuracy where things weren’t clearly written down. And when September would come around, there would be a mad rush of trying to correct these details when the office is already busy dealing with lots of queries that the new academic year brings.
Not only that, but I previously had to bring in an agency temp to help my office team with a volume of paperwork that was received on the admissions side. We hadn’t received everything we needed, resulting in phonecalls and chasing outstanding paperwork. Now we just click a button and send automatic reminders.
Having the Parent Portal is a massive step forward for us, then, in terms of both cost and time-saving. You’re improving data not only data accuracy, saving paper and the environment, reducing cost and relieving administrative burden on the office staff. The team then has more time to give a more personalised approach for those that do need it that way, e.g. for parents with less digital capability or those with EASL.
Having an MIS with deeper functionality, and connecting those dots across the system, relieves the administrative burden on school staff, which in my opinion, gives staff the capacity to concentrate on those higher value activities. Those things you might not always have the day-to-day bandwidth to support.
For instance, last term, we had an external organisation come in to run some financial management workshops for parents, as we wanted to recognise that some of our families are facing challenges in today’s economic climate and work with them to develop skills which help them back into the workforce or to manage their day-to-day home finances better. In the past, we wouldn’t have necessarily had the time or bandwidth to organise that in terms of administration, marketing, facilitation etc, but now that is a real example where we can say we have made a difference by and added value
We can put more of our energy into doing those kinds of things that benefit our wider community, help our families, or even simple things, like increasing our tours and marketing to make sure we receive the maximum amount of funding that we are eligible for. Because if your numbers are below pan, you’ve still got to staff the same classrooms, which puts the students at a disadvantage. So for me, marketing and lettings and generating additional income to supplement the school budget is critical, because it impacts student outcomes. With the right MIS, you should be able to free up some of the administrative capacity to manage that.
And that’s not only good for budgeting reasons – you also want to keep things interesting for people, which supports staff engagement too. Certain things have to happen at certain times in schools, and some of the more labour intensive work can be more monotonous, which causes peaks and troughs in terms of individual workload, particularly when we were dependent on lots of manual processes. Arbor is helping us to level off those peaks effectively. Of course, we’re still busy, but not to the point where people are completely overwhelmed and where work is more interesting that supports staff development, recruitment and retention.
Third party applications and support contracts: £19,638 annually
Server, warranties and maintenance: £4,000 annually
Other savings e.g. admission booklets: £1,000 annually
Don’t yet use Arbor? Find out more about our school MIS here.
We are excited to announce that Arbor Finance, formerly RM Finance, has recently been chosen by East Sussex Local Authority as the new accounting system for its 111 schools. Arbor Finance was recently brought into the Arbor Education family, home to the UK’s most-loved school software. This fantastic opportunity in East Sussex represents the first
We are excited to announce that Arbor Finance, formerly RM Finance, has recently been chosen by East Sussex Local Authority as the new accounting system for its 111 schools.
Arbor Finance was recently brought into the Arbor Education family, home to the UK’s most-loved school software.
This fantastic opportunity in East Sussex represents the first success of our team working together in the group. We’re looking forward to working with East Sussex Local Authority and rolling this out across their schools, who join the other 1,250 schools across the UK already using Arbor Finance.
Arbor Finance provides simple and affordable cloud-based accounting software designed for maintained schools, with easy-to-use features:
Plus, Arbor Finance has the highest customer satisfaction (CSAT) score amongst Local Authority Maintained schools, as shown by a 2021 survey done on behalf of The Key.
Looking for a new school budgeting and accounting system for your maintained school? Find out more about Arbor Finance here.
How is it the end of June already?! With summer break fast approaching, we’ve been working hard to deliver a host of updates and improvements to get ready for the new school year. What’s new in Arbor MIS At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. Here are
How is it the end of June already?! With summer break fast approaching, we’ve been working hard to deliver a host of updates and improvements to get ready for the new school year.
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:
Custom Report Cards
Build report cards tailored to your school’s needs. You can now build a completely customised report card that looks and feels like your school, and pull in the exact data you want, directly from Arbor MIS.
DfE Primary Assessment Benchmarks
See where you sit nationally, where you’re excelling, identify areas for improvement and look back at previous academic years. Arbor shows you the national average and the percentile your school is in for:
Statutory Attendance for Schools and MATs
New Statutory Attendance KPI added to your MIS homepage KPIs. You can now see Statutory Attendance for students aged 5-15 who are not enrolled as Guest pupils.
New fields available in Custom Report Writer
We’ve added some great new fields to the Custom Report Writer in the past month, making it easier for you to see and analyse the data you need.
MAT MIS is custom-built for better collaboration across your trust, with tools that make it easy to work together as one organisation.
New School Year Setup Audit
Keep track of your school’s new school year setup from your MAT MIS with New School Year Setup Audit. You can easily see how all of your schools are progressing with their preparation for the new year, and find out which steps schools have completed and which are outstanding, directly from your MAT MIS.
DfE Primary Assessment Benchmarks in MAT MIS
See where your schools sit nationally, where they’re excelling, identify areas for improvement and look back at previous academic years. Arbor shows you the national average for your schools for:
Staff List
Do you need to look up a specific staff member but can’t remember exactly what school they work in? You can now see a list of all your staff from across your trust, their school and their job role. Click directly through to their staff record from MAT MIS, saving you time and effort.
User List
Across your trust, you want to make sure all your staff are getting the most out of your MIS. In MAT MIS you can now get insight into key user information. Identify staff who are regularly engaging in Arbor MIS, those who may need a gentle reminder to login and any staff who no longer work at your trust and need removing.
Data and Insight | Product release
We’re so excited to announce that we have launched benchmarks for DfE Primary Assessments in Arbor MIS and MAT MIS! No more waiting months to see how your school performed compared to the rest of the country, Arbor’s benchmarks update live as new results get added! With over 3,000 Primary Schools using Arbor, we’ve built
We’re so excited to announce that we have launched benchmarks for DfE Primary Assessments in Arbor MIS and MAT MIS!
No more waiting months to see how your school performed compared to the rest of the country, Arbor’s benchmarks update live as new results get added! With over 3,000 Primary Schools using Arbor, we’ve built a unique, live dataset to help you benchmark your DfE Primary Assessment results today.
Arbor shows you the national average and the percentile your school is in for EYFS Level of development, KS1 Year 1 Phonics Screening Check, KS1 Reading, Writing, Maths, KS2 Reading, Writing, Maths and KS2 Multiplication. See where you sit nationally, where you’re excelling, identify areas for improvement and look back at previous academic years
Give your staff the insight to understand the effectiveness of their teaching, learning and interventions before the next academic year
At Arbor, we pride ourselves on using the latest technology and data available to deliver you the information you need as soon as it’s ready
Primary Assessment Benchmarks are available in the DfE Assessments section of Arbor MIS and in the Assessments – Attainment & Progress section of MAT MIS. Visit our Help Centre for more information.
Arbor’s Live National Benchmarks gives you both a national average and national percentile.
National averages offer you a standardised measure of performance across Arbor Schools. By comparing your students’ achievements to the national average, you gain valuable insights into their overall progress.
National percentiles offer you the context behind the numbers and a powerful tool for self-comparison. By examining a your performance relative to other schools performances, you gain a comprehensive understanding of your strengths and weaknesses.
Using both national averages and percentiles, you can pinpoint specific subjects or topics in which your students excel or struggle compared to the wider student population.
Did you know that Arbor also has Live National Benchmarks for Attendance? Arbor’s Live National Attendance Benchmarks give you a snapshot of what is happening across all Arbor schools on that exact day, helping you respond faster and take action straight away.
For more information on our Live National Attendance Benchmarks visit our Help Centre today.
Arbor’s benchmarks use data from Arbor MIS schools only. As the largest cloud MIS provider at Arbor, we’re able to provide nationally representative benchmarks for DfE Primary Assessments. We have validated the quality of our benchmarks against figures published by the DfE for 2021/22 and found that we differ by at most a couple of %. Arbor’s national benchmarks will update in real-time once there is a large enough sample size; over 100 schools with over 100 pupils.
Welcome to Arbor’s Data Drop. Our philosophy at Arbor is that staff should have direct, easy access to their data – and be able to do something meaningful with it. Our MIS is built on a world-class data platform, which allows us to deliver things like national-level benchmarking to schools and trusts within seconds, rather
Welcome to Arbor’s Data Drop. Our philosophy at Arbor is that staff should have direct, easy access to their data – and be able to do something meaningful with it. Our MIS is built on a world-class data platform, which allows us to deliver things like national-level benchmarking to schools and trusts within seconds, rather than hours or days. And allows schools to make real-time, data-driven decisions.
This series is designed to share insights from our data warehouse (containing the data of c.4000 schools), to shed light on the wider patterns emerging across the education sector.
In this edition of The Data Drop, we’re looking at attendance, specifically for Pupil Premium eligible and SEN students – the data we’re presenting is from 1/09/2022 to 19/05/2023.
Before we look more closely at these categories, it’s worth noting the general trends across Primary and Secondary Schools in this time frame. Overall, attendance is lower in Secondary than in Primary Schools year to date – 90.4% compared to 93.7%. Plus, persistent absenteeism (students with less than 90% attendance) is far higher, with 30.6% of students in Secondary Schools identified as Persistent Absentees, compared with 19.4% in Primary Schools.
We wanted to take a closer look at how attendance patterns varied when separating out the data for Pupil Premium eligible students. In Primary Schools, the percentage of Pupil Premium eligible students who are persistently absent (30.1%) was nearly double that of those students who were not Pupil Premium eligible (15.4%). A similar trend can be seen in Secondary Schools, with 42.2% of Pupil Premium eligible identified as persistent absentees, compared with 23.3% of non-Pupil Premium eligible students.
Overall attendance was also significantly lower for Pupil Premium eligible students across both phases:
Primary Schools: 91.4% vs. 94.6%
Secondary Schools: 86.3% vs 92.3%
Similar patterns also emerged when looking at the data of SEN vs. non-SEN students across both phases (not including Special Schools). In Primary Schools, 28.1% of SEN students are persistently absent, compared with 17.5% amongst non-SEN students. In Secondary Schools, 40% of SEN students are identified as persistent absentees, compared with 25.9% of non-SEN students. Though the difference is not as stark as with Pupil Premium eligible students, there is still a significant gap
The same can be said about overall attendance of SEN students vs. non-SEN students:
Primary Schools: 91.5% for SEN students vs. 94.2% for non-SEN students
Secondary Schools: 86.1% for SEN students vs 91.7% for non-SEN students
Data is taken from 01/09/2022 – 19/05/2023
This data is taken from Arbor’s data warehouse – statistically accurate within 0.01% of the data from the Department of Education.
Present: Percentage of ‘present’ records out of all ‘possible’ records. This conforms to the DfE methodology for calculating attendance in the performance tables. Examples of ‘impossible’ sessions include those where the student is not of compulsory school age or where the school is closed (including for strikes).
Persistent Absenteeism: A student is considered persistently absent if their attendance is under 90%.
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to help schools make the most out of their data. Want to see how your school’s attendance data compares with other schools in the country? Find out more about Arbor’s Live National Benchmarks, built into your school MIS.
What is operational efficiency? Operational efficiency can sometimes feel like a bit of a dirty word. It smacks of budget cuts, of the prioritisation of KPIs over people and of poor quality. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, I argue many of the associations above come from people not taking into
Operational efficiency can sometimes feel like a bit of a dirty word. It smacks of budget cuts, of the prioritisation of KPIs over people and of poor quality.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, I argue many of the associations above come from people not taking into account actual efficiency when making their decisions. If carried out thoughtfully and carefully, a strive for true operational efficiency should result in a happier workforce and a reduced workload.
For me, operation efficiency is defined by the amount of administrative overhead required to carry out your work. In an ideal world, everyone would spend most of their time on their core role, with a small amount of time dedicated to the admin around that. This might seem obvious, but how many of us could truthfully say that we spend less than 10% of our time on admin?
Going from an inefficient workplace to an efficient workplace takes time, investment and people, all of which are usually already earmarked for work that relates more directly to what your workplace does. If you’re a school, that might be teaching, for a company like Arbor, that’s the work of delivering a reliable platform to our customers. Taking time and people away from that work feels incredibly counter-intuitive – after all, it’s already hard enough to get everything done without giving away a load of time to some work on systems and processes.
I love working through systems and reviewing processes to find areas where they’re overcomplicated, but even I’ll admit that most people don’t find that thrilling. That can make it even harder to choose to give your (already stretched) attention to the work needed for a more efficient workplace, when there are so many exciting and new things to be looking at.
I’ve been working in this area for most of my career and I have never considered the time invested in improving efficiency wasted. From halving the workload of an analytics team, thus allowing them to carry out more complex and bespoke analyses, to reducing the errors in school migrations onto our platform by 90%, the results speak for themselves. But the benefits of increased efficiency go beyond simply improving the work produced. I’ve seen happier, more productive teams, better relationships between departments and improved flexibility, as people are able to step away from mundane, repetitive tasks and truly focus on their work.
Before diving into creating a new system or process, it’s always worth a quick sense check to make sure it’s worth the time. Will you be doing this task on a regular basis? How long does it take? How long will it take to automate/create a system? For instance, if the task takes two hours and automating it takes six hours, it’s only worth it if you know you’ll be doing that task at least four times.
A colleague of mine used to say he aimed for ‘minimum viable bureaucracy’ and that’s stuck with me ever since. It can be really tempting to try to address all possible scenarios once you’ve decided to commit to making a large-scale change, but that can slow you up more than it’s worth. While some systems will be difficult to change after the fact (and it’s always worth checking that with the provider), many will be easy to adjust as new circumstances come up.
So many people in my role come in with the view that they know more than the rest of the business about managing their workload. I don’t believe that should ever be the case. At the end of the day, no one knows your workplace better than the people who work there. Before getting into any large change, I do my best to speak to representatives from all areas of the company, so that I can make sure my perception reflects the actual experience of the people working there.
Even bearing all of this in mind, it can feel quite daunting to start a project like this. To help, there are a few exercises I like to go through. Firstly, you’ll need to decide how much resource (time or money) you’re willing to invest. This will help you keep everything on track and on budget as you go. Next, decide on the single biggest outcome you’re hoping for. Once you have that, you can work backwards to understand everything you need to allow you to achieve that outcome. If any external systems are involved in your work, it can be a good idea to speak directly with the providers, as they may be able to help you find the most efficient way to achieve your goals.
Most importantly, don’t forget to keep reminding yourself on why it’s worth it. Keep going back to those key points of why you started your project in the first place, celebrate the small wins, and look forward to a (hopefully!) reduced workload and happier workforce.
At Arbor, we believe your MIS should be doing the heavy lifting for you when it comes to laborious and manual admin. Find out more about our time-saving cloud MIS here so that you can spend your time on what matters most.
I’m thrilled to welcome the schools, platforms and teams behind RM Integris, RM Finance and RM Accounts to The Key Group today. There has been a lot going on in the world of Management Information Systems over the past year; schools have realised that cloud-based systems can open up an entirely new way of more
I’m thrilled to welcome the schools, platforms and teams behind RM Integris, RM Finance and RM Accounts to The Key Group today.
There has been a lot going on in the world of Management Information Systems over the past year; schools have realised that cloud-based systems can open up an entirely new way of more flexible working, and thousands have switched away from legacy systems en masse. It is our belief that this new way of working will be transformational for the sector, allowing schools greater efficiency and flexibility in how they work, giving instant insight into student performance and automating repetitive administrative tasks, all of which will allow teachers to focus on what they do best, teaching.
I’m super excited to welcome a new group of people who share this vision onto the team, as RM Integris, RM Finance and RM Accounts join The Key Group as part of the MIS Division. I thought I’d give a bit more background about how this has come about and what it means for schools.
Combining RM Integris with Arbor and ScholarPack means we now serve over 7,000 schools, and can further increase our investment into product and service to provide outstanding value to our schools. For example, given our scale we can provide live, nationally representative, hyper-personalised benchmarking to the sector. This will allow schools and Trusts to understand their performance in context without having to wait until national data is released on an annual basis.
We have been really impressed when meeting with the team to see how much we’re aligned about wanting to make a lasting, positive impact on the sector. Doing the right thing for customers is absolutely ingrained in what we do, and I’m delighted to be working with such genuinely mission-driven people. You should see this in your interactions with them and us.
RM Integris and RM Finance have one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the sector, second only to Arbor and ScholarPack. There are no current plans to merge or migrate platforms – indeed we will now be able to offer our LA maintained customers RM Finance to bring the same high levels of user experience and flexibility to finance that they currently experience with their MIS.
We will use our increased size and scale to focus on improving product innovation and support across all brands, and customers should see a marked increase in value as they get additional features as part of their existing package.
If you’re an RM Integris, RM Finance, RM Accounts, Arbor or ScholarPack school you don’t need to do anything, but if you have any questions or want to find out more information then please speak with your Account Manager.
Product release
Have you Asked Arbor that? Today I’m super excited to introduce Ask Arbor – your new collaborator and assistant in Arbor, powered by OpenAI. Ask Arbor is built seamlessly into Arbor MIS, and is designed to turn your words into actions wherever you see it pop up. Want to know how attendance compares across year
Today I’m super excited to introduce Ask Arbor – your new collaborator and assistant in Arbor, powered by OpenAI.
Ask Arbor is built seamlessly into Arbor MIS, and is designed to turn your words into actions wherever you see it pop up.
Want to know how attendance compares across year groups this term? Ask Arbor. Need to draft a difficult letter to parents and guardians this morning? Ask Arbor. Looking for a quick way to create a student report? You can Ask Arbor that too.
Ask Arbor is designed to reduce busywork, make it simpler to get the data you need, and bring ideas to life. All of which should give you back your time for more strategic work, more time spent making use of your data, and more time with students and staff.
Here’s a sneak preview of what Ask Arbor can do:
Ask Arbor a question, and it will come back with an answer in plain English. Ask Arbor will also show you the data informing its answer as a custom report which you can edit, download, and share with colleagues.
✔ Become a data superuser – Ask Arbor makes it simpler to create reports and find the information you need, especially for staff members who feel less confident with data
✔ Permissioning built-in by default – Because Ask Arbor creates reports in the Custom Report Writer, your Arbor permissions are automatically applied – making sure staff can only see the data they’re allowed to
Tell us the topic you want to write about, or provide a few prompts. Ask Arbor will then create a draft for you to review and send.
✔ Make Arbor into a copywriter! – Not sure how to phrase something? Need some time back this morning? Let Arbor know what your email, letter or SMS is about, tell it the tone of voice you want to adopt, and Ask Arbor will produce a draft in seconds
Ask Arbor to use data in the Student Profile, and your own comments, to make a speedy report card for parents
✔ Save time, without compromising on detail – Ask Arbor will summarise key data points about your students, and combine it with written comments from you, to produce a quick report for parents. It will even add in comments to address your students directly!
I wanted to end by giving some insight into the way we’ve gone about designing and building Ask Arbor. Together with our parent company, The Key Group, we’ve been reflecting on the social and ethical implications of AI, and studying the work of organisations like The Institute for Ethical AI in Education and the Council of Europe.
From this, we have developed five core principles that will underpin our upcoming AI development. Through working closely with our colleagues at The Key Group, our goal is to lead the way in taking an ethical, transparent and school-first approach to implementing AI in our platforms. You can read more about our five core principles here.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that Ask Arbor is an experiment and, like all AI tools, may give inaccurate or inappropriate responses. We’ll be rolling it out (and adding more actions to its repertoire) very soon – your feedback will be critical in helping to make it as useful as possible. Watch this space (and catch our demo at Bett!) – we can’t wait to hear what you think.
On 9th June 2023, 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
On 9th June 2023, 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:
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!
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
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
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.
Case Studies | Migration
Our blog today is an interview with Tim Moore, Data Manager at The Hyndburn Academy. Read a longer version of this interview and hear from more Data Managers in the Arbor community in our free ebook – download your copy here. – How did you become a Data Manager? I started out as a Network
Our blog today is an interview with Tim Moore, Data Manager at The Hyndburn Academy. Read a longer version of this interview and hear from more Data Managers in the Arbor community in our free ebook – download your copy here.
I started out as a Network Manager in a secondary school, and then became a teacher. The Data Manager at one of the schools where I taught left quite suddenly, so I stepped in to help. Over time, I realised I really enjoyed being in and amongst the school data. I’m lucky enough, in my current school, to still have fingers in both pies: I am both the Data Manager and a Computing Teacher, so it’s an unusual one!
We actually used the move as an opportunity to look at our behaviour systems and assessment structures. What we didn’t do, and I think is a pitfall of some, is try to replicate everything that we did in our previous MIS in Arbor. We helped to set the expectation that this was going to be a change for the better, rather than doing exactly the same thing we had done before but in the cloud. It meant we could use the new system to the best of our ability.
The same things that come up in school life will always come up whichever MIS you use: moving children from Set A to B, making timetable changes and setting up mock exams. It’s about having the tools to do those things efficiently and effectively. Census is the best example. In the old days, I would have had a big notice on my door that read, ‘Census – do not disturb’ and spent days sitting through endless lists of problems, frantically searching forums for answers about patches and workarounds. I don’t have to do that anymore. I can just do my job as it’s supposed to be done. Now, much less of my time is spent doing manual tasks, and none of my time is spent worrying about a server. It’s freed up time to focus on more complex data analysis for SLT so that we can actually drill down into issues.
I build trackers for different departments so that our data is healthy as a school, and then I can provide this clean data to SLT so they can make data-driven decisions. Because the data is visible, it means we can have a holistic view of the school and use our data more strategically, so we can better ascertain our impact and plan ahead.
It all comes back to problem-solving. I enjoy solving other people’s problems through data tools that I’ve built and trying to make people’s lives easier, showing them all the cool stuff they can do.
For more interviews, features and insights from Arbor users, read our Data Manager’s Guide to Arbor – download for free here.
Or discover more of our content for Data Managers here.
Culture
We know there’s always pressures on schools and trusts to grow, retain staff and improve staff wellbeing and culture. But creating and executing a good people and culture strategy is no mean feat to achieve in the context of the great resignation, cost-of-living crisis and other challenges that schools and trusts face daily. Last year,
We know there’s always pressures on schools and trusts to grow, retain staff and improve staff wellbeing and culture. But creating and executing a good people and culture strategy is no mean feat to achieve in the context of the great resignation, cost-of-living crisis and other challenges that schools and trusts face daily.
Last year, in the context of taking on hundreds of new schools and trusts, we hired 100 new people at Arbor. At the same time, we managed to exceed our retention goal of 80%, maintain our ENPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) at above 40 and sustain a strong company culture! I thought it might therefore be interesting to share my learnings from the past year as Arbor’s Head of People and Culture, to see if any insights might be useful to those also going through rapid growth or taking on new schools.
This first point is the easiest to talk about. A good people plan or strategy is critical, because people are the most important part of any organisation.
What’s slightly harder to answer is what makes a ‘good’ people and culture strategy. I think we have to go back to basics here and make sure every people strategy is people-focused, which sounds obvious, but it can easily be overlooked. There’s a reason at Arbor that we call ourselves the People and Culture team (rather than HR) and it’s because we are always human-first. It’s important that this gets buy-in from the wider team, as a people strategy should align with the general business strategy.
As well as this, a good people strategy will unlock the full potential of our people. I think this is summed up quite well by our unofficial mantra in the People and Culture team: giving people the tools to do their best work, in an engaged and inclusive culture where they can bring their full selves to work.
As much as having your finger on the pulse of things is important just by the ‘feel’ of the company, I really believe in using data to understand where we are as a business and to inform our future strategy. We do this in several ways:
This helps us to anonymously monitor employee engagement, employee feeling, and employee sentiment. Anything above 0 is considered good, but our target is to have our ENPS at about 40, where we have averaged over the past 12 months – which makes me really proud.
We measure ourselves against time to hire, diversity of our recruitment pipeline and the quality of hire (e.g. if individuals make it through their probation period and tracking that everyone is progressing as we would expect them to.)
Last year (2022), over 30% of our employees were either moved or were promoted into a new role, which is way above anything I’ve seen in businesses that I’ve worked in before. Rightfully so, people want to be in roles that they enjoy and where they have a sense of value and self-worth. We’re lucky that by working for Arbor we get to demonstrate real value by improving the education sector, but it’s my job to create an environment where people can feel self worth internally and how they progress. This is reflected in the roles of school staff who do a very ‘rewarding’ job, but it’s important that individuals working in schools feel that their role is fulfilling and that they are progressing. We have a dedicated person who owns learning and development within our teams.
We also encourage employees to use our dedicated tool for anonymous feedback, which goes directly to senior management. We make sure once a week that, as a senior management team, we take the time to respond to these, both privately but also where appropriate in a public setting such as a company-wide town hall. I would recommend setting up monitored and transparent feedback loops and to take them seriously as an organisation. This gives employees a voice and shows that we listen and act, but also gives the space for senior management to respond and explain.
Culture can be actually quite tough to quantify as a lot of it’s quite intangible. It’s the things that you know are there but can’t necessarily explain. Having said that, I do think a good school or company culture should be easy to describe.
At Arbor, we do pulse surveys, welcome interviews and stay interviews, as it’s important to get a measure on how the culture feels to someone who’s just onboarded, as well as someone who has been in the organisation for many years. More importantly, it’s acting on the feedback you receive, especially where you start to see trends.
We do more thorough surveys annually where we encourage every employee to go into detail on areas surrounding leadership, communication, wellness and general culture. Importantly, we have a team of people with the word ‘culture’ in their titles – this shows how much weight we give this in the business. It’s why it’s important to me that my title is ‘Head of People and Culture’, because it comes back to my original point of a people strategy being personal and human-first.
It’s also important to me that CEO, James, is so passionate about our people strategy as he becomes almost an extension of our team. He’s a real driver for people and culture as well, meaning the people agenda is heavily prioritised. Having this buy-in from the business, as well as clear lines of communication, action and accountability, means that our people and culture strategy can be more impactful.
Your people strategy will change based on the phase of the journey that you’re on. So having an organisation in a zero to 50 employee range is going to be very different to when you’re 250 plus. The answer is not to just continue to increase headcount and increase the size of your team.
We’ve obviously scaled massively in the last year and flexibility in our approach has been crucial. You have to drop things and pick things up as and when. But how can you make sure you’re not losing sight of what you’re trying to do but also still tackle some of the more urgent business needs?
A starting point is to clearly define roles and responsibilities within your organisation, as well as assigning clear goals and using a prioritisation framework within that as well. Setting out non-negotiables. Having this framework helps teams to focus on things that are going to continue pushing the business forward, without compromising on business need.
It’s also important to have the right processes and systems in place. These can’t break as you scale, as it’s really difficult to retrospectively fix and mend when your organisation is moving at such a fast pace. To make sure of this, we commit to continuous review of our systems and processes. Typically every process or policy will be reviewed on at least an annual basis – and this review cycle includes getting feedback and input from employees to make sure they continue to be impactful. If you’re able to streamline, then your processes and systems should reduce the amount of manual and administrative work done by your teams, so they have more time to deliver genuine impact.
Because people are the most important part of any organisation, having a clearly defined people and culture strategy is critical. And, hand-in-hand with this, recognising that a people strategy is a vital organisational function.
At Arbor, I’m really proud of the people that we have working for us. I think all of those people are so driven around our mission and focused on improving education that it makes me really energised and really happy to come to work every day.
Whilst I know that Arbor as a business will function inherently differently, I hope some of these insights or principles are useful to those working on HR in schools or trusts. If nothing else, remember to be people-first, always!
With summer fast approaching, we’ve been working hard to deliver a host of updates and improvements before the holidays begin. What’s new in Arbor MIS 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: Communications Designer Format
With summer fast approaching, we’ve been working hard to deliver a host of updates and improvements before the holidays begin.
Communications Designer Format your emails and text exactly the way you want to. Our new designer tool gives you the flexibility to set your own fonts and colours, undo and redo, and add in tables and merge fields. Plus, it’s all controllable from your keyboard.
DfE Assessments in report cards
We’ve made it much easier to share DfE Assessment results with parents and students! No more manual sends, you can now add DfE Assessments from any academic year to both long and short report cards.
Invoice status for parents
Our update to the invoice status on Parent Portal and the Arbor App gives your parents more visibility on the exact status of their invoices, either ‘Paid’, ‘Issued’ or ‘Cancelled’.
Check staff member user access Want to check which areas of Arbor your staff can access? Now you can easily see whether staff can access a page and the required permissions using the page URL.
Updates to our Exam module
With exam season in full swing, we’ve made some improvements to our Exam module we hope you’ll love from being able to download exam seating plans in all available formats to updates to access arrangements. Visit our Exams section of the Help Centre for more information.
EYFS Analysis in MAT MIS
EYFS DfE Assessments is now in MAT MIS. Just like on the School MIS, you can now analyse your EYFS DfE Assessments, as well as KS1 and KS2 results all from MAT MIS.
Shared Teaching
Need to bulk copy your setup from the previous year? You can now do this in MAT MIS! We’ve made setting up and copying your Shared Teaching courses and timetable slots much easier, with bulk copy setup.
New BI Connector Datasets
As part of our plan to continue to evolve our BI Connector, we’ve added Ad Hoc Assessments dataset.
cloud | Migration
Over 9,000 schools have already moved to the cloud, with more than 2 in 3 who switch choosing Arbor. But some Data Managers still have concerns about what using a cloud MIS will mean for them and their school. We recently released a guide for School Data Managers who are thinking about moving to a
Over 9,000 schools have already moved to the cloud, with more than 2 in 3 who switch choosing Arbor. But some Data Managers still have concerns about what using a cloud MIS will mean for them and their school.
We recently released a guide for School Data Managers who are thinking about moving to a cloud MIS. Hear from Data Managers who are part of the Arbor Community speaking about their experience of moving MIS and their learnings from switching to the cloud. You can download the ebook for free here.
In the meantime, we’ve put together the top five benefits of the cloud for Data Managers in schools.
Get quick, secure access to all your student and staff data wherever you’re working – all you need is a browser. No need to rely on servers!
If the DfE releases new guidance, Arbor can deploy features to help you within days (sometimes just 24 hours!). We also update Arbor fortnightly with new features and improvements, which you can access as soon as they’re released.
All your data across your MIS is stored in the cloud, so the information you see is a real-time reflection of the students in your school.
Arbor brings key tasks under one roof, including reporting, comms, and managing rotas, timetables and sickness.
Arbor connects to leading secondary school apps like 4Matrix, Edval, Timetabler, CPOMS and Civica. Or you can replace the tools that aren’t working for you with our built-in functionality – we’ve got everything from Cover and Exam Management to Seating Plans.
Thinking about moving MIS but not where to start? We’ve put together a guide to Arbor for Data Managers which you can download for free here. Hear from Data Managers who use Arbor, learn about the features in Arbor designed specifically for your role and discover our community of Data Managers who come together to help us build the best school MIS on the market.
Data and Insight | The Data Drop
Welcome to The Data Drop. Our philosophy at Arbor is that staff should have direct, easy access to their data – and be able to do something meaningful with it. Our MIS is built on a world-class data platform, which allows us to deliver things like national-level benchmarking to schools and trusts within seconds, rather
Welcome to The Data Drop. Our philosophy at Arbor is that staff should have direct, easy access to their data – and be able to do something meaningful with it. Our MIS is built on a world-class data platform, which allows us to deliver things like national-level benchmarking to schools and trusts within seconds, rather than hours or days. And allows schools to make real-time, data-driven decisions.
This new series is designed to share insights from our data warehouse (containing the data of c.4,000 schools), to shed light on the wider patterns emerging across the education sector.
In a post-Covid world, and also in a year marked by strikes and an emphasis on staff wellbeing, we thought we’d use our first blog in our Data Drop series to take a look at staff absence data.
When looking at staff absence data based on the last five academic years between 1st September – 24th April (in order to be comparable to the 22/3 dataset at time of publication), there’s a significant downward trend in regards to sickness-related absences in school staff – but only when it comes to absences that have not been certified.
Only 26.8% of recorded staff absences in the academic year 2022-3 were as a result of sickness (certification unknown), dropping from 37.8% the previous year. This is a further jump from pre-Covid; in the academic year 2018-19, the proportion of working days lost attributed to sickness (certification unknown) was 46.7%.
By contrast, there has been a rise in other types of sickness absence since 2018. This is the case where absence has been medically certified as well as self-certified.
The other absence category which is seeing an unsurprising spike this academic year is absences related to strike action. In 22/23, 2.3% of working days missed were related to strikes. The proportion of working days missed by strikes has sat below 0.1% across the previous four years.
This equates to 41,193 days lost so far (to 24/04/2023) in 22/23 (across 3,631 many schools from where we drew this dataset), compared with a combined total of 260.5 days across the previous four years. Whilst these stats must also take into account the change in number of Arbor’s schools which make up the data, the difference is still notable. You can see more of Arbor’s data around the strikes in our work with SchoolsWeek here.
Periods covered – we’ve chosen to use these dates so that we have a comparable dataset to the 22/23 year at time of writing (May 2023).
22-23: 01/09/2022 – 24/04/2023
21-22: 01/09/2021 – 24/04/2022
20-21: 01/09/2020 – 24/04/2021
19-20: 01/09/2019 – 24/04/2020
18-19: 01/09/2018 – 24/04/2019
Staff absence is recorded using startdate, enddate and working days lost in between. Due to school holidays this is difficult to split days into the correct periods for long-term absence. Startdate has been used as an approximation for the academic year of the absence. The calculations attribute all working days lost to the period the startdate falls into.
The number of schools in our dataset varies year on year, which is why we have drawn on the percentage of days lost rather than number. Below you will find the number of schools in each year’s dataset.
18/19 – 3,385
19/20 – 3,424
20/21 – 3,503
21/22 – 3,611
22/3 – 3,631
This represents approximately 10% of the schools in the UK.
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to help schools make the most out of their data. Not yet using our MIS? Find out more here.
Summer Term is in full swing and the sunshine has started to make an appearance. April saw us make some exciting releases into Arbor MIS and MAT MIS that will help support you, your school and your students. What’s new in Arbor MIS At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work
Summer Term is in full swing and the sunshine has started to make an appearance. April saw us make some exciting releases into Arbor MIS and MAT MIS that will help support you, your school and your students.
Updates to the sex and gender fields To align with the DfE, we’ve made some changes to the gender field in Arbor. We’ve relabelled the Gender field in Arbor to Sex to reflect its existing use in the census, and we’ve added a new field on student, guardian and staff profiles for Gender Identity.
KS4 Assessment Analysis
Use our new KS4 Assessment Analysis page to track student progress in more detail, plus get a Progress 8 estimate based on last year’s Attainment Band data.
The latest features added to tables
We’ve made some exciting updates in the past month and will continue to make improvements throughout Summer Term.
What’s new in April for tables:
School Staff Absence Reporting improvements
We made some great updates to School Staff Absence Reporting in April following your feedback.
MAT Operations | MATs
We all know the Heraclitus phrase that ‘the only constant in life is change,’ and yet change is also the thing we fear and put off until necessary. The world of education has sometimes been slow to pick up on the great and sweeping changes that we’ve seen in the rest of the public sector,
We all know the Heraclitus phrase that ‘the only constant in life is change,’ and yet change is also the thing we fear and put off until necessary. The world of education has sometimes been slow to pick up on the great and sweeping changes that we’ve seen in the rest of the public sector, particularly when it comes to embracing cloud technology. The reasons for this are understandable: budgets are tight, retention is challenging, and the landscape seems to be constantly shifting. 2022 seemed to epitomise this landscape of change, both politically and also in the sheer numbers of schools who moved to the cloud: in one term alone nearly 1,500 schools alone moved away from legacy software.
Day-to-day, I speak to many MATs who are thinking about moving to the cloud and trying to align their systems, particularly as they look to grow. And what I’ve found is, whether I’m speaking to a newly formed MAT who doesn’t really know why they’re moving to the cloud, or a long-standing MAT with tens of schools, the common pitfalls remain the same, meaning trusts are setting themselves up for a far more challenging journey into cloud-based life than it ought to be.
It all comes down to change management and communication. In Lewin’s original change management model from the 1940s, communication sits as one of the steps in the first phase – long before any kind of implementation or decision-making. Skipping this step is hazardous, but it’s something I see time and time again. From the second your team starts to think about change, be this of an MIS or something entirely different, it needs to be communicated to all those it affects. It needs to be communicated why you are thinking about change, what the impetus was, what benefits you’re aiming for and what the long-term goal is. It’s also worth mentioning that this communication piece doesn’t sit within a single email; it should be an invitation for others to be involved in the conversation.
I’d always recommend starting with a document which clearly defines: what is being changed, who it is going to affect short-term (decision-makers), and who it will affect long-term. I’d also recommend putting together a working party, who are consulted throughout the entire process. Said working party shouldn’t just include directors and the CEO, but should be representative of stakeholders, including a headteacher, perhaps teachers or office managers.
The misconception made here is that communicating a decision is a tickbox exercise of letting those who will be affected, know about the change. Instead, it should be formative and beneficial to the decision-making process itself. The working party should be a broad spectrum of what your trust is all about so that you get different viewpoints and skillsets feeding into the conversation. And, the likelihood is, if you turn to those invested in the ‘old way’, and say, we’re thinking of moving forward with something new, people will come out of the woodwork with crucial expertise on what it is they need to do their jobs well.
What I see far too often are well-meaning and well-researched project leads, who have spanned the entire procurement process, done their research and likely chosen the best system for their trust. And yet, there’s an assumption that all those other stakeholders will automatically reach the same conclusion without the months of context. Instead, it feels like a decision has been made and isn’t to be questioned. Those stakeholders are still at the beginning of the journey, meaning that whilst the project lead is trying to implement the project, they’re simultaneously having to justify and reconvince the trust that this was the right move. Of course, this means implementation itself suffers, training lacks buy-in, and engagement/uptake is low, meaning that even if the system were the perfect fit, nobody is bought in enough to realise the benefits. Day one of the new system becomes a rush to make up for the lack of previous dialogue.
With growth leading as the goal for many trusts, strategic management of such changes becomes increasingly important. It goes without saying that those schools who are yet to academise are increasingly the most reluctant to do so, with a loss of autonomy most often quoted as the biggest reasoning. If MATs are set on growing and retaining schools, in a gradually more competitive landscape, they must caveat these fears with clear communication and an openness of conversation, regardless of whatever change they are making.
The other side of change and moving systems, for example, is not so much managing expectations as to creating expectations. Speaking strictly to MIS, it’s interesting that most trusts (though this will change), have never had to move before and have always used the same system. As a result, the question is often: this is how we did it before, how do we achieve the same thing, but in the cloud? The question should be: how can we do this better, with the support of cloud systems?
‘Cloud’ has been a buzzword for a while; there’s an idea that schools and trusts need to simply shift everything they currently do into the cloud. I would ask those that still buy into this philosophy why they want to directly replicate something which they are actively moving away from? Instead, why not acknowledge you want change and pick strategic tools that can make a measurable difference to the way your organisation runs? Improve your workflows, improve your processes, let the technology be part of your culture and vision rather than a tickbox, consider how it can be part of your school improvement plan, think how you could reduce workload or boost wellbeing. A change of this kind should be exactly that… a change.
What it all comes back to is that initial impetus to change, when the decision is made to think about something new. That’s when the real change starts to happen, and in order for it to be successful, central teams must have their change management and communication piece secure from the beginning, so that everybody knows exactly where you are going, why you’re going there, and how it’s going to transform the way you work for the better.
Since we started with a quote, it seems like a good idea to end on one too, this time from author and thought leader Lisa Bodell:
“”Change cannot be put on people. The best way to instill change is to do it with them. Create it with them.”
Matt’s article appears in our free ebook for MAT leaders, all about creating a cohesive trust, which you can download here.
Or, discover more of our content for MATs here.
Parents & Guardians
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. – But how exactly can using text messages improve your parent engagement strategy? Reduce admin –
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.
Read here for some top tips on how to make your parent communication strategy even more effective across all mediums.
If you use Arbor MIS, your school will also be able to use our built-in SMS service for parent comms, making parent engagement:
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:
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.
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. – What’s new for schools At
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.
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:
Learn more here.
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:
MATs
Arbor Education is today launching a new partnership with the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) to help schools and trusts transform the way they work, maximise the power of data, and ultimately help to improve education. The Confederation of School Trusts (CST) is the national organisation and sector body for school trusts in England advocating
Arbor Education is today launching a new partnership with the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) to help schools and trusts transform the way they work, maximise the power of data, and ultimately help to improve education.
The Confederation of School Trusts (CST) is the national organisation and sector body for school trusts in England advocating for, connecting and supporting executive and governance leaders.
The new partnership is part of the Confederation’s Platinum Partner scheme, which brings together leading companies within the industry and CST’s members, who together are responsible for the education of more than three million young people.
Arbor chief executive James Weatherill said: “We’re thrilled to be announcing our partnership with the Confederation of Schools Trusts today.
“At Arbor, our mission is to transform the way schools and trusts work. We’re delighted to partner with an organisation committed to doing the same, and are looking forward to working on projects and events together which show our commitment to working with trust leaders on improving operational, data and growth challenges and helping them to operate as one trust, not multiple schools.
“We’re looking forward to supporting our customers through the CST network, and to meeting other trust leaders interested in the ways that Arbor can help as you scale your data and operations.”
We will be working on exciting projects and events with CST in the months to come, so watch this space!
EdTech
As part of our focus on diversity and inclusion at Arbor, we wanted to shine a spotlight on our leadership team, which is made up of majority women, to think more about what it means to be women in tech. Sophie, Arbor’s Talent Acquisition Manager, interviews four of our female leaders at Arbor below. The
As part of our focus on diversity and inclusion at Arbor, we wanted to shine a spotlight on our leadership team, which is made up of majority women, to think more about what it means to be women in tech. Sophie, Arbor’s Talent Acquisition Manager, interviews four of our female leaders at Arbor below.
The lack of women in STEM and tech starts in education and the subjects women choose, with only 26% of STEM graduates (science, technology, engineering and maths) being women.
Although this number is increasing, not all female STEM graduates go into jobs in the industry (only 22% are women), with computer science, engineering and technology the most affected. These statistics are sparking projects and events aimed to boost female representation in the STEM and tech sectors.
I’m very proud to say that Arbor Education is leading the way – six out of ten of our Senior Leaders are women and we have a high percentage of women in line management positions across the business. Our board has a female chair too.
But what does it feel like to be a woman in leadership in the EdTech world? I recently caught up with four of our female leaders at Arbor to discuss their career and experiences.
I’ve pulled out some highlights from the interviews below.
What is your role at Arbor and what got you into the tech world in the first place?
“My team provides first and second line support, as well as training and onboarding for our customers. I’ve been working in tech for about 20 years now across a number of different sectors. I left university and didn’t know what I wanted to do… and landed in BT Group… and I’ve been in tech ever since!
The thing I love about it is that my role – Chief of Customer Success – didn’t exist 20 years ago. It’s now one of the fastest-growing roles in the industry. So it’s just a super exciting space to be in!”
What advice would you give to women thinking of exploring a career in tech?
“Making the move from teaching to tech is a hard one to make, and the advice I might give myself back then, that I’ve learnt and reflected upon now, is I think the first step is mapping your skill set and really being clear what your strengths are. I didn’t know at the time that I wanted to be a Head of Product, I think that’s something that ended up fitting me very well, but I can see now that actually a lot of my skills were really nicely correlated with the specifications for a Head of Product kind of role. Also, mentorship is huge – whether you’re a woman in tech or a young person trying to get into tech, find somebody who you think does it really well. Spend time with them. Get to know how they do things!”
Have you noticed any significant changes in the industry from when you first started?
“Despite 20 years in tech, Arbor is my first software job. I think the difference in working on an enterprise software platform (as opposed to a mainframe) is that it brings together people who care about the end user, and that tends to require a lot of sensitivity to the challenges of work, understanding different ways of solving the problem. Different ways of thinking about the humans using the tools that you build and not just being in a big, sweaty data room with increasingly powerful engines but no thought to user experience.
The age of people we work with also influences our design and approach – the demographic of our heavily-female group is much younger than the industry average, so there aren’t entrenched ideas of how to do things.”
There are a number of networking communities aimed at developing future female leaders within technology. Have you been part of any and are there any you would recommend?
“I think it’s really important for women to support each other at work through mentorship, community building, networking and coaching – in tech, but in all industries really. I’m lucky to be part of an amazing team at Arbor and to know women leaders at several other EdTech companies across the UK, who have all been really helpful for sharing advice and swapping stories. Beyond that, I go to events by DevelopHer, a nonprofit community supporting women in tech, and would recommend Code First Girls who my sister (a games developer) has mentored with before.
I’d also like to call out The Girls Network who are excellent – they work with girls from disadvantaged backgrounds in schools across England. I mentored girls interested in tech through their programme previously and would highly recommend it.”
We know that female representation in leadership positions is also behind in education, with only 38% of Headteachers are women at secondary level, and at primary men outweigh women almost 2:1. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings about these issues and how they relate to your schools you’ve worked in.
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And just like that, it’s the end of January and 2023 has officially started. No time for any January blues here, we’ve released some very exciting features that we can’t wait to share with you! What’s new for schools At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.
And just like that, it’s the end of January and 2023 has officially started. No time for any January blues here, we’ve released some very exciting features that we can’t wait to share with you!
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
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
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
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
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
Also this January, we welcomed hundreds of schools to #ArborFest, where our Head of Product, Hilary Aylesworth, took us through what was coming up next in the Arbor roadmap.
Keep an eye on our Twitter and LinkedIn for insights from the day!
We were delighted to recently welcome hundreds of school leaders to King’s Place and via livestream to our biggest in-person customer conference to date! ArborFest 2023 was a day packed with inspiring talks and workshops – all exploring the theme “Transforming the way schools work.” With schools and trusts facing squeezed budgets, the challenge of
We were delighted to recently welcome hundreds of school leaders to King’s Place and via livestream to our biggest in-person customer conference to date!
ArborFest 2023 was a day packed with inspiring talks and workshops – all exploring the theme “Transforming the way schools work.”
With schools and trusts facing squeezed budgets, the challenge of Covid catch-up, and rapidly evolving policies, there has never been a more important time to explore the different ways schools can innovate to support students, staff, and their wider communities.
Our exciting programme took a look at the ways schools can drive positive change both using Arbor and in their broader day-to-day.
We kickstarted the day with a welcome address from our CEO, James, and our Chief of Customer Success, Sonia. Our Head of Engineering, Damien, and Head of Product, Hilary, also took to the Main Stage to speak on Arbor’s vision and roadmap.
Also on the Main Stage, we welcomed David Jones, Head of Personal Development at Saracens Rugby Club, who shared how to build a resilient team in tough times. And our keynote speaker, Laura McInerney, CEO of TeacherTapp, presented her three key methods of influencing change across the education sector.
Over on our Data Stage, our Lead Sponsors HfL Education discussed the importance of democratising your data – we’ll be posting more about what they had to say on our blog, so keep this page bookmarked!
Luke Mulhall and Chris Berry of GFMAT spoke on how they have used Arbor to create a data-first culture across their trust, and the Department of Education gave an in-depth talk on the importance of national benchmarking, and the data they have available to help schools.
We had two exciting panels during ArborFest 2023. In the first, James spoke to three school leaders about how Arbor has helped to transform the way they work. In the second, Phillippa, our CRO, spoke to three MAT leaders on how they are handling the cost-of-living crisis across their trusts.
There was lots more MAT content on our dedicated MAT stage, where trust leaders gathered to watch Louisa Mason speak on how and why she centralised systems across her trust. Mark Greatrex, CEO at BPET, also gave a well-received talk on why autonomy always wins – if you missed Mark’s talk, you can download his written piece for free in the third instalment of our Cohesive Trust series.
As ever, we wanted to use ArborFest as an opportunity to encourage the Arbor Community to network, share best practices and give suggestions for the future of our MIS. We hosted feedback forums, customer roundtable discussions and a Genius Bar where school leaders and staff could meet, mingle and chat with the Arbor Team!
And most importantly, it was great to see Arbor users coming together and enjoying the day – we hope you had as much fun and learned as much as we did!
If you missed out on tickets to the event, don’t worry! We’ll be sharing highlights, insights and write-ups of lots of the talks over the coming term. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to make sure you don’t miss out.
In my role at Arbor I speak to headteachers, SLT and admin teams everyday when they’re in the early stages of exploring Arbor MIS. I’ve noticed a question that comes up time and time again in conversations: “How can we reduce workload for staff?” It’s no secret that teacher workload is high; studies have found
In my role at Arbor I speak to headteachers, SLT and admin teams everyday when they’re in the early stages of exploring Arbor MIS. I’ve noticed a question that comes up time and time again in conversations: “How can we reduce workload for staff?”
It’s no secret that teacher workload is high; studies have found that teachers experience more stress than other workers. Tes reports that almost a third of teachers leave the profession within five years of qualifying. This got me thinking about the impact of heavy workload and the difference between being busy and being burned out.
Burnout is recognised as the feeling of running out of steam at work – those days when even small tasks can feel unachievable. Psychology Today describes burnout as ‘a state of chronic stress that leads to physical and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, detachment, feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.’ It doesn’t just happen overnight, which is why it can be hard to spot, even for the person experiencing it. One of the best ways to prevent burnout is to spot the signs as early as possible so that you can make small changes to get back on track.
One of the best ways to avoid burnout is to take some time off. It’s important to have time when you don’t think about work so that you can be energised and engaged when you return. This can take the shape of a holiday, but for school staff you might find the holidays don’t fall when you need them the most. More and more schools are introducing paid wellbeing days for staff, and in many circumstances this has helped reduce staff absence, sickness and turnover rates. Read more about how Dan Morrow, CEO at Woodland Academy Trust, implemented wellbeing days and other initiatives across his schools.
It’s important to set boundaries to protect the time you have for yourself as well as being available in a work capacity. Set hours in the day where you don’t respond to work-related messages, no one should expect you to be on call 24 hours a day – even parents!
Work out some burnout prevention strategies by making a list of all the things that help you deal with stress. These can be things such as exercise, spending time outside or having a long bath. Self-care is often the first thing to slip off your to-do list when you’re busy so make sure you build time into your routine for yourself.
It’s important to tell someone when you are feeling burned out at work. Reach out to your colleagues, friends or family if you are feeling overwhelmed, sometimes just having someone to listen can make a world of difference. If your mental wellbeing is being especially impacted by burnout, it’s a good idea to speak to your GP about arranging some extra support.
Heavy workloads, constant change, admin pressure on teachers and staff at every level… sometimes it feels like this is just part and parcel of school life today. But it doesn’t have to be that way. At Arbor, we passionately believe that there’s a better way to work. And it starts by giving everyone the right tools and technology for the job.
Want to find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform the way your school works for the better? Book a free demo here or get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
If you found this blog useful, you can see more of our mental health and wellbeing content for school staff here.
To round off autumn, we’re highlighting some of the most exciting updates we’ve released this past term. We update Arbor fortnightly, listening closely and responding to what you tell us. What we released for schools Rotating meal menus and Parent Portal meal choices Payments Plus got even better this term with the ability to
To round off autumn, we’re highlighting some of the most exciting updates we’ve released this past term. We update Arbor fortnightly, listening closely and responding to what you tell us.
Rotating meal menus and Parent Portal meal choices
Payments Plus got even better this term with the ability to create menus that rotate on a periodic basis, and allow parents to make meal choices for their children via the Parent Portal. Learn more.
Emergency Alert
Get help with the click of a button by sending an instant notification or email to staff who are on call. Plus, report on past alerts and view them on the student profile. Learn more.
Calendar update on the Arbor App
Parents can now see their child’s calendar for the whole day on the Arbor App! Parents and guardians can see exactly where their child is at any point in the current day, rather than just the lesson before and after. Learn more.
CRB Cunninghams Cashless Catering integration
Arbor integrates with CRB Cunninghams! Our cashless catering integrations let you manage cashless catering payments directly from your MIS – without needing a separate payments system as well. The integration is included in our MIS Payments module, and is also part of our Arbor Perform package. Learn more.
Live National Benchmarks
See live national data from other Arbor schools in your MIS. Starting with attendance data, you can see real-time National Average and National Percentile data so you can compare yourself to similar schools and see where you sit. Learn more.
School staff are now included in Staff Absence reporting, 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.
National Arbor Average benchmark
We’ve added a new benchmark in MAT MIS to Whole School Attendance, Authorised Absence and Unauthorised Absence KPIs. It’ll show you how your schools compare with other schools using Arbor. Learn more.
New PowerBI Datasets
This term we’ve added lots of new datasets to our PowerBI connector to give you more bespoke reporting options. You can now analyse Academic Units, Timetable Slots, Student Academic Year Enrolments, User Defined Fields and more! Learn more.
Import Assessment Marks
Have you rolled out assessments to the schools in your trust? Instead of logging into individual school sites or sending assessment data to your school data managers, you can now use an import spreadsheet in MAT MIS to input the school data yourself. Learn more.
Your schools can now see live national data from other Arbor schools in their MIS. Starting with attendance data, you can see real-time National Average and National Percentile data so you can compare yourself to similar schools and see where you sit. Learn more.
Don’t forget to visit the Arbor Change Log for all things new in the MIS. Make sure to bookmark the page for easy access!
If you haven’t already, book your free ticket to join us at ArborFest 2023 – our biggest in-person customer conference to date! Meet school and trust leaders from across the Arbor Community for a day packed with inspiring talks and workshops – all exploring the theme “Transforming the way schools work.”
If you don’t yet use Arbor, we’d love to speak to you: email hello@arbor-education.com and one of our team will be in contact.
MAT Operations | School Operations
What is Search Engine Optimisation? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website appear further up the page when people search terms into Google, or another search engine. This helps to get more organic traffic through your website… for free! Your website probably ranks highly when people know what they’re looking for,
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website appear further up the page when people search terms into Google, or another search engine. This helps to get more organic traffic through your website… for free!
Your website probably ranks highly when people know what they’re looking for, such as when somebody types in your exact school name or location. But what about when prospective parents or students search for ‘best schools in my area’ or ‘top schools near me for sports’?
SEO is all about helping to boost your website so that it’s easy to find, even when people don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.
It’s not often that schools and trusts have the capacity for a marketing team, which means your website is often your main marketing tool. It’s the place people come to when they’re browsing schools in the local area and wondering which is the best fit for their child.
If your website is difficult to find, and prospective parents or students have to try harder to find out the information they need, then there’s a high chance that this will influence their decision-making process. It’s important that your school website is easily accessible and navigable.
For trusts in particular, your website also plays a key role in your brand as an organisation. A high-performing website, where all the information people need is at their fingertips, can give greater integrity to your brand and make your offer more attractive to schools and pupils.
Keywords are phrases that are commonly searched for on Google, Bing or other search engines. Despite the name, they can be single words, such as ‘school’, or phrases, like ‘schools rated good by Ofsted in London.’
Threading the keywords which are important to your school (by thinking about how you want to be found online!) is a key part of SEO. You can then build these throughout the wording across your website. You can use a keyword checker to see the popularity of the terms you choose, and what your competition is like. In an ideal world, the terms you choose would have a high search count with minimal competition.
It’s important to use these in your headings, subheadings and alt. text for pictures, as well as your main bodies of text.
Hyperlinks can help to boost your website’s performance in a number of ways and come in different forms.
All the links on your site help search engines to see you as an authority in your area, so make sure they are relevant, easy to navigate and give the user exactly what they are looking for.
Backlinks can be particularly useful in boosting your website performance, as they indicate to search engines that you are trusted and give your website authenticity. When it comes to backlinks, quality or quantity is key, look for links from websites that are closely aligned with your own and have a high authority. Don’t fall into the trap of buying backlinks! Not only can this can lead to you being penalised by the search engine, but there are plenty of organic ways to gain backlinks too. These include:
It’s super important that your website is easy to navigate, and isn’t filled with clunky, unnecessary information. This is even more significant given that the majority of internet traffic is via mobile.
The main thing to remember is to always have the user experience front of mind when thinking about SEO. You don’t want to make it difficult for users to find the information you’d like them to see!
In other words, there’s no point ranking highly if your website isn’t serving its original purpose. Whilst keywords and hyperlinks are good for boosting performance, stuffing them throughout your website in order to trick the search engine into ranking your website higher will be a short-lived win. Search engines will often penalise websites that attempt to use these ‘black hat tactics.’ Investing in a good quality website with useful content will always win in the long run.
We post our blogs weekly on Twitter and LinkedIn – follow us for more useful tips and tricks for your school or trust.
If you’re a trust thinking about your digital strategy, download our free ebook here, which features articles from MAT experts on how to perfect this in your organisation.
Not yet using Arbor? Find out more about us here.
And just like that, it’s the end of November and the holiday season is approaching. We released some very exciting features in November that we can’t wait to share with you! 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
And just like that, it’s the end of November and the holiday season is approaching. We released some very exciting features in November that we can’t wait to share with you!
Live National Benchmarks are here
You can now see live national data from other Arbor schools in your MIS. Starting with attendance data, you’ll be able to see real-time National Average and National Percentile data so you can compare yourself to similar schools and see where you sit. Learn more here
Parents can now see their child’s calendar for the whole day on the Arbor App! Parents and guardians can see exactly where their child is at any point in the current day, rather than just the lesson before and after. Learn more here
New Marksheet Analysis Fields
We’ve added new marksheet fields so you can see student progress at a glance, including:
Import Assessment Marks in MAT MIS
Roll out assessments to the schools in your trust. Instead of logging into individual school sites or sending assessment data to your school data managers, you can now use an import spreadsheet in MAT MIS to input the school data yourself. Learn more here
New Power BI Datasets
In November we added even more datasets to our Power BI connector to give you more bespoke reporting options. You can now analyse Academic Units, Academic Unit Enrolments, Timetable Slots and Timetable Slot Staff. Learn more here
Thinking about your multi-academy trust growth strategy? Read the full version of this article in our free ebook, ‘Creating a Cohesive Trust, Part 3’. In March 2022, the government released the schools white paper, which revealed plans for all schools to be part of “strong” multi-academy trusts (MATs) by 2030. Recent political change means the
Thinking about your multi-academy trust growth strategy? Read the full version of this article in our free ebook, ‘Creating a Cohesive Trust, Part 3’.
In March 2022, the government released the schools white paper, which revealed plans for all schools to be part of “strong” multi-academy trusts (MATs) by 2030. Recent political change means the bill has now taken a back seat, but with many MATs already intending to grow, the scene has been set for a critical few years in the academisation journey.
With many trusts now set on growth, we wanted to explore if the expectations of MAT leaders aligned with the sentiment of LA maintained schools.
In September 2022, we surveyed 108 trust leaders and 244 members of SLT in LA maintained schools from around the country.
We found that less than half of all LA Maintained schools expected to be part of a MAT by 2030. Many cited political uncertainty, though the majority of respondents said their negative feelings towards academisation were focused on loss of autonomy, community and identity. Schools also quoted their lack of need for support, especially when they were already ”‘economically viable and have good results.” Those that do expect to join a MAT were still largely negative about the prospect, with many simply saying “we have no choice.”
Despite this response from schools, not one respondent in our survey of MAT leaders thought that their trust would add zero schools in the next three years. Most respondents expected to grow by either 4-6 schools (33%), 7-10 schools (22%) or 1-3 schools (22%). 2% of respondents expected to grow by over 31 schools. This was matched by the general consensus that “schools joining is always positive”, with many participants referring to how growth would allow their trust to “make a difference to as many lives as possible.”
The discrepancy between the way schools and trust leaders view academisation is clear. With the majority (59%) of respondents in our survey of MAT leaders saying that their preferred method of growth was through acquiring new schools, there is work to be done on changing the perception of what joining a MAT can truly mean. This is especially pertinent for MATs who want to make sure they grow as a cohesive trust with a strong culture, rather than taking on schools simply to remain financially viable.
Political uncertainty aside, how can MAT leaders win over schools who are reluctant to academise? And, as trusts grow, how can they make sure that they do so sustainably and as one organisation, not many?
We’ve put together an ebook for MAT leaders, where we hope you will find some answers to these questions. It features the thoughts of six MAT leaders and experts on growth:
We’ve also put together some of the comments and perspectives from the respondents of both of our surveys.
Download your free copy here!
We’d love to see where you stand in this discussion – join the debate on social media using the hashtag #CohesiveMATs.
Discover more of our content for multi-academy trusts here.
Product release | School Improvement
What data can schools benchmark? Up until recently, schools have been able to compare their performance data with schools in similar circumstances, using the tables that were published annually by the Department of Education. – What are the benefits of benchmarking for schools? There are many benefits to benchmarking for schools, particularly in a post-Covid
Up until recently, schools have been able to compare their performance data with schools in similar circumstances, using the tables that were published annually by the Department of Education.
There are many benefits to benchmarking for schools, particularly in a post-Covid era, when many schools are playing catch-up and trying to return to ‘normal.’
Benchmarking against the national picture reveals to schools where they are performing well and should feel reassured in their performance, whether it be across specific demographics, like Pupil Premium students, or across whole school Assessment performance. On the flip side, it can also help schools to illuminate those areas where they are not performing at the national average, so that they can drive resources to where they are best spent.
It’s important for schools to have this information, as it means that SLT and governors can drive resources to where they are best spent – even more important when budgets are being squeezed.
With over 3,500 schools live on Arbor, we’ve built the first statistically relevant live national benchmarks for schools – giving you a unique way to compare your performance to schools across the country.
School leaders often tell us that waiting for annual performance tables makes it hard to plan proactively. Our Live National Benchmarks give you a snapshot of what is happening across all Arbor schools on that exact day, helping you respond faster and take action straight away.
Built into our MIS, these benchmarks are more than just an average and are intended to give you more meaning to your performance. See which percentile your school sits in, and set stretch goals to improve and close any gaps.
We’re launching Live National Benchmarks for Attendance data only to start with. We’ll then roll this functionality out across the MIS throughout the year.
Visit our Help Centre for more information
– At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. And it starts by giving everyone the right tools and technology for the job. We’re constantly evolving and looking at the different ways we can help support schools and MATs to thrive. In the Summer Term, we released: 42
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. And it starts by giving everyone the right tools and technology for the job.
We’re constantly evolving and looking at the different ways we can help support schools and MATs to thrive. In the Summer Term, we released:
Click here to find out exactly what these features included.
In a recent survey carried out by The Key, Arbor has the highest percentage of customers saying they are “extremely satisfied” with their MIS functionality. View full report here.
Our product vision at Arbor is to ‘Give school leaders, teachers, admin staff and parents the tools they need to work faster and smarter – together’. This vision sits across our three development themes for Autumn Term:
The data that sits in your MIS is a powerful resource. We want schools and MATs to have this data at their fingertips, so that they can make data-driven decisions quickly and easily. To do this, data needs to be consistent, efficient and actionable.
Here’s three key releases due in the coming months, which will help you make actionable decisions from your data:
It’s not worth having an MIS packed with brilliant features if they are difficult to find or use. Our second theme is all about making sure Arbor continues to be the UK’s most intuitive MIS, for both staff and parents.
Here’s my top three features to look out for which will make our MIS even easier to use:
Collaboration is key to any school or trust, whether you’re joining up processes across your team or streamlining communication with parents.
With so many exciting new features to come under this theme, I’ve given you my top five to keep an eye out for:
If you have an improvement or an idea for a new feature we should develop, we’d love to hear it. There are four ways you can share it with us:
I’m looking forward to hearing all your thoughts and suggestions so we can continue to make Arbor the best it can be for our schools! And I hope you are as excited about our Autumn Roadmap as I am.
View the recording of our Autumn Product Roadmap Reveal webinar here.
Welcome back from Half Term! We hope you had a restful break – we’ve got lots of treats for you in this month’s blog. – 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: Product
Welcome back from Half Term! We hope you had a restful break – we’ve got lots of treats for you in this month’s blog.
Product Roadmap Reveal webinar
We’re excited to share Arbor’s product roadmap for Autumn Term! On Wednesday 9th November, Hilary (Head of Product at Arbor) will take you through our vision for Arbor and the themes we’re focusing on this term for product improvements and new features. Book your free spot here
Post-16 Census report
You can now generate a quick summary report of your Post-16 data to ensure you receive all your funding from the School Census, either for yourself or to send to a third party. Learn more here
Arbor now integrates with CRB Cunninghams! Our cashless catering integrations let you manage cashless catering payments directly from your MIS – without needing a separate payments system as well. The integration is included in our MIS Payments module, and is also part of our Arbor Perform package. Learn more here
Manage school events in bulk
We’ve added two new pages to manage events more easily. Go to School > Timetable > School Events to update staff, location, and cover requirements in bulk. Learn more here
New PowerBI Datasets Another month and another group of datasets have been added to our PowerBI connector. You can now analyse Student Academic Year Enrolments, User Defined Fields (created at both MAT and school level), and User Defined Records. Learn more here
If you haven’t already, we’d love for you to join in the #WhyMySchoolSwitched campaign and share your “switch stories” with us on social media!
Before Arbor, our secondary school was already using a cloud MIS, but our MAT wanted all of their schools to be on the same system. We took it as an opportunity to make real change in the way we work, as we felt restricted by what our previous MIS could do. For context, Hinchingbrooke is
Before Arbor, our secondary school was already using a cloud MIS, but our MAT wanted all of their schools to be on the same system. We took it as an opportunity to make real change in the way we work, as we felt restricted by what our previous MIS could do.
For context, Hinchingbrooke is a large comprehensive secondary school with 2000 students. Comprehensive is the perfect word for it – we have a range of students from all socio-economic backgrounds.
As the only secondary school in the MAT, we had a big voice in the decision when it came to choosing an MIS, especially because of the frustrations our staff had felt with our previous cloud system. We were well aware how critical an MIS could be, because it underpins everything, from basics like registers through to safeguarding and interventions. It’s almost the heart of the school.
Of course, its importance means changing MIS, as with any big system change, brings with it a level of anxiety. That’s why research and communication are key to making sure the change is a long-term success. My personal experience and advice to any school thinking of moving to a new MIS would be to sit down and plan what your long-term goals are as a school and how moving MIS fits into this.
We were never bothered about the name of the MIS – but what we did know was exactly what our strategic aims of the system change would be, which in our case was to simplify our processes in order to save time. There will always be people who are resistant to change, or want as little change as possible – such as wanting to replicate everything that the school previously did, but in the cloud. Having moved from one cloud system to another, I can safely say there is much more that changing MIS can do for a school.
You’ve got to challenge those people who are adamant on sticking and ask ‘why.’ Being able to present the case for change, with school improvement at its heart, will make these conversations easier, and will get the team on one page before you decide to make the switch.
The best example I have is the fact I’ve always had an iPhone. I like Apple and I’m used to the system. But I might not know that a Samsung does everything just as well, and even has some features that might be better suited to what I use my phone for. If everyone starts moving to Samsung, you have to question why. Don’t get married to an idea or a principle of a product.
Again, it all comes back to the big picture and seeing the long-term goals, not just switching for a tickbox exercise and trying to replicate everything you did in the previous MIS. Your MIS should be a vehicle for your strategic aims rather than the other way around.
Drawing on my experience across both cloud and legacy MIS, I can’t think of an MIS that’s going to be better than Arbor. To anyone not sure about switching, I’d always say go in with an open mind and let the system and features speak for itself.
Click here to read our case study with Hinchingbrooke School and find out the features they use most.
Want to see how Arbor could transform your secondary school? Book a call with one of our friendly team here and they will walk you through the process.
Governors
How can an MIS help governors? Having a good MIS is essential for effective governance in any school or trust. To be able to challenge a school or trust’s performance, or to have a true understanding of what is going on in your organisation, having up-to-date information that can be interrogated easily is crucial. Often,
Having a good MIS is essential for effective governance in any school or trust. To be able to challenge a school or trust’s performance, or to have a true understanding of what is going on in your organisation, having up-to-date information that can be interrogated easily is crucial.
Often, governing boards have to rely on reports being manually number-crunched, meaning the data can lag behind real time events by the time their meetings take place. Without an MIS that allows you to have a live feed of data, it’s impossible to accurately understand what is going on in a school.
Cost-savings are also a critical part of moving to cloud MIS, particularly with many schools reviewing their budgets as a result of the cost of living crisis. Cloud-based MIS systems are typically 20%-30% cheaper in terms of license fees and support. They also help reduce the number of systems you need in your school, as functionality isn’t modular and comes as standard (e.g. SMS, online payments, parent evening booking etc). This is important as budgets are tight.
Hannah Stolton, CEO of governor and trustee recruitment charity ‘Governors for Schools’, sees the effective use of a MIS as important for all governors. ‘A key element of a governor’s role is to provide effective and robust challenge to school leaders. Data is a key form of evidence that governors can use to help with their questioning. From attendance, attainment, and monitoring trends, access to up-to-date information is vital to enable governors to perform this function effectively.
Arbor is a cloud-based MIS, helping schools of all sizes work more easily and collaboratively, with intuitive tools designed to make a difference. With over 3,500 schools and trusts, we are the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community.
In Arbor, governors can use tools such as Custom Report Writer to build out a report unique to their school, and live feed this report into Google or Power BI. Governors can look at this information any time and know that their live dashboard is up-to-date and truly reflects what is going on in their school. This could be for when governors want to see a statistical average for Pupil Premium attainment, or the attendance for a particular demographic in one year group – any kind of information that needs to be investigated.
Arbor are also proud to have a team made up of ex-teachers and school staff, many of whom continue to be governors. Click here to hear more from our school governors and trustees.
If you think your school or trust would benefit from reviewing their MIS, we’d be happy to talk through your options with you, to help you find the right fit. Click here to get in touch with one of our friendly team.
Integrations | School Operations
Arbor integrates with CRB Cunninghams Cashless Catering, Civica Cashless Catering and Live Register. We know that going fully cashless is a priority for many schools, and that a cashless catering system is a core part of that transition. For any school, but particularly for Secondaries, cashless catering is an essential part of improving the student
Arbor integrates with CRB Cunninghams Cashless Catering, Civica Cashless Catering and Live Register.
We know that going fully cashless is a priority for many schools, and that a cashless catering system is a core part of that transition. For any school, but particularly for Secondaries, cashless catering is an essential part of improving the student experience and becoming a modern and efficient school.
We wanted to make the cashless catering process even better for staff, students and parents, which is why we now integrate with CRB Cunnighams Cashless Catering, Civica Cashless Catering and Live Register.
Arbor’s integrations mean you’ll no longer need an additional payments system on top of your cashless catering provider. By connecting Arbor directly with your cashless catering provider, we’ve removed the need to login to multiple systems and accounts, saving you time and money. Instead, the integration means that all your payments information can be managed directly in your Arbor MIS.
It’s important for both staff and parents to be able to access payments information easily and in one central location. The integration means that meal selection and payment information automatically syncs between Arbor and your catering provider, giving parents and staff full visibility over a child’s meal activity. Parents can also top up their child’s account directly in the Arbor Parent Portal or app, making the Parent Portal a single point of access for guardians for all information on their child.
Having a cashless catering system is great, but it’s even more powerful when you can combine its insights with the data already in your MIS. By using Arbor’s built-in reporting tools, you can analyse meal preferences and spending patterns, or report on the success of health initiatives in a specific group of students. By having all payments information in one place, you get a comprehensive view of parent and student spending across all school activities.
Welcome back to another school year, and a big hello to all the new faces that have joined us this September! There’s now one central place you can visit to find out what’s new in your MIS – the Arbor Change Log. Make sure to bookmark the page for easy access! – What’s new for
Welcome back to another school year, and a big hello to all the new faces that have joined us this September!
There’s now one central place you can visit to find out what’s new in your MIS – the Arbor Change Log. Make sure to bookmark the page for easy access!
Payments Plus has just gotten even better – you can now create menus that rotate on a periodic basis, and allow parents to make meal choices for their children via the Parent Portal. Learn more here
Get help with the click of a button by sending an instant notification or email to staff who are on call. Plus, report on past alerts and view them on the student profile. Learn more here
We’ve added a new marksheet field called ‘Current vs Baseline’ so you can see student progress at a glance. The field takes the statistical value of an assessment period mark and subtracts it from the statistical value of the baseline. Learn more here
Fix timetabling clashes
With our new Clashing Lessons functionality, you can exclude certain students from certain Timetable slots without removing them from the whole course, or adding them to individual lessons. Learn more here
Cohort and Mark Level Analysis
You no longer have to get data from your individual schools, and can now collate information on every summative assessment mark all from within MAT MIS! Learn more here
We’ve added a new benchmark in MAT MIS to Whole School Attendance, Authorised Absence and Unauthorised Absence KPIs. It’ll show you how your schools compare with other schools using Arbor. Learn more here
We’ve added SEN Statuses and registration form membership data for students to our PowerBI connector. Learn more here
Arbor Community | Customer Support
We’re proud to take part in National Customer Service Week (NCSW), run by the Institute of Customer Service. NCSW is a week-long celebration of all the great things that teams across the country do in order to make the customer experience as positive as possible. At Arbor, we are committed to making sure schools thrive,
We’re proud to take part in National Customer Service Week (NCSW), run by the Institute of Customer Service. NCSW is a week-long celebration of all the great things that teams across the country do in order to make the customer experience as positive as possible.
At Arbor, we are committed to making sure schools thrive, which means providing school staff with plenty of avenues of support so that they can get the most out of our cloud MIS. To make this mission possible, we have lots of different teams in place.
Each day in National Customer Service Week is dedicated to a different aspect of customer service. We spoke to different people across Arbor’s Customer Team to see what these days mean for them in their roles, giving you an opportunity to meet some of the fantastic people behind Arbor’s top-rated support system for schools.
Our Help Centre is packed with articles, videos and how-tos, providing Arbor customers with a detailed online library for all their questions and queries.
To make sure schools are getting the best use of their MIS and to guide them along the way, we have a dedicated Account Management team.
Arbor’s ever-evolving Training Team is committed to providing top quality training to our schools and trusts. The team is always expanding their knowledge and offering, to make sure that schools and trusts can easily pick up all of Arbor’s best bits.
Whether schools are in the process of moving to Arbor, or have been using our cloud MIS for years, our MIS support and project teams are there to guide schools, help them overcome any obstacles they come across and answer all their questions.
There are now over 100 individuals in our Customer Team, made up of trainers, project and programme managers, 2nd and 1st line support staff, success analysts, administrators… and more! The whole team works hard to make sure that every school and trust is thriving with Arbor.
We’ll be celebrating Customer Service Week across our Twitter and LinkedIn – keep an eye out there for more!
If you liked hearing about who we have in our team, you might be interested in this blog, where we speak to Arbor team members about their role as school governors.
Not yet an Arbor customer? Get in touch with us here to find out how our MIS could transform the way your school or trust works.
Case Studies | Local Authorities | Migration
We sat down with Jenny Collins, MIS Programme Manager at Hampshire County Council to talk about how she and her team are helping schools with their move to a cloud-based MIS. Jenny, alongside representatives from Herts for Learning and Amazon Web Services, will be talking through Hampshire County Council’s process and answering your questions in
We sat down with Jenny Collins, MIS Programme Manager at Hampshire County Council to talk about how she and her team are helping schools with their move to a cloud-based MIS.
Jenny, alongside representatives from Herts for Learning and Amazon Web Services, will be talking through Hampshire County Council’s process and answering your questions in our fireside chat on the 18th October. Sign up for free here.
We’re always looking at how we offer the best support for the schools in our area. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a steady decline
in the number of schools using SIMS, with the majority moving to Arbor. We lost approximately 25% of our customer base, so it was no longer financially viable to carry on with our hosted environment. In March 2022, as part of the review of our service, we decided that Arbor was the leading challenger in the market and that we should offer support for their MIS as well. Schools always have a choice about which providers they use, so it was about us responding to where the volumes were moving.
The main concern from the team was around our ability to maintain quality of service while staff were taken off the support rota to undertake accreditation. Communication is key during a time of significant change – staff were briefed about the reasons for the change, and the support team leader provided encouragement on a one-to-one basis. The team were included in detailed planning activities, ensuring their buy-in. Also, the team could see the market changing, and knew that this was a good opportunity for both themselves and the schools.
Management approval was our first big blocker – but the figures spoke for themselves once the decision paper was compiled. There was also a nervousness from our team about their ability to succeed, particularly in the accreditation tests. Arbor’s partnership team was very supportive, with regular progress checkpoints to maintain focus, as well as being quick to respond to ad hoc questions.
Our measure of success is ultimately the feedback from schools. There’s no denying that it’s extra work for a small team, but schools are finding the new system far more intuitive to use. It’s easier for the teachers to get what information they want out of it. Schools like the way Arbor reacts to feedback and the way you can vote for changes or join working groups.
It’s been good for us as an organisation as we can now bring a bit more pressure to bear on things that are Hampshire-specific, such as our own assessment model; we’re working with Arbor to fine-tune this to make use of assessment material better for our schools.
Some schools have told us that the decision to choose Arbor was based on the fact that we were now providing the support service, which is great to hear. We differ from many support partners in our pricing approach, which is flat rather than per pupil. What’s been interesting is that we’ve had schools sign up to our service– even where we’re more expensive for them – because they value the personal service we provide. The schools have also understood that this is a journey for us as an organisation – there’s a recognition that we are all in this to ensure the best outcomes for the children in the county. One of my colleagues recently said, “our schools are being really nice and understanding that we are on this journey together.”
We’re still aiming to provide the same valued service, irrespective of the MIS used by schools. We provide a personal one-to-one service, talking our customers through the resolution of their queries. We have a continuous service improvement ethos, meaning we regularly review our procedures and gain feedback from our schools. We consider customer feedback crucial, and we use multiple channels to make sure our message gets out, and their responses can get back to us, be this through surveys, headteacher strategy groups or conferences.
If you’d like to read the full report, written in partnership with Socitm, click here.
Or, you can find out more about how we work with with Socitm here.
I’ve always believed in leading with a strong moral purpose, supported by the idea of servant leadership. The simple values that we learn in everyday life, like treating others how you like to be treated, are ones that should be brought into your organisation. And I take that with me when thinking about culture. Whether
I’ve always believed in leading with a strong moral purpose, supported by the idea of servant leadership. The simple values that we learn in everyday life, like treating others how you like to be treated, are ones that should be brought into your organisation.
And I take that with me when thinking about culture. Whether it be in a classroom, a corridor or on the playground, I’m always thinking, would I be happy for my child to be involved in an interaction like that? Once you start viewing things through this lens, you can be guided by your moral purpose.
A great deal of our work as a trust has been around schools in special measures. When I get asked why I focus on vulnerable schools, I often reply, ‘Why not?’ It’s who we are and what we do. Many teachers get into the profession to make a difference, and I’m no exception. Certainly in the early years, it wasn’t even a consideration to turn down a school who would ask for help. You learn along the way about pinch points within your own organisation and the risk, then, that comes with this approach. Over time, you find the balance of helping others without negatively impacting what you’ve already established. However, I certainly don’t think trusts should have a blanket approach of not taking on vulnerable schools. It’s got to be an informed choice.
It’s also key to acknowledge when thinking about this choice, that taking on a vulnerable school can be brutal, both physically and emotionally. You have to unearth the challenges which have led that school to where it currently stands, which can mean uprooting safeguarding policies and having to look face-on at the harm that the previous ineffectiveness of the policy may have caused to children. That’s difficult, even when you know you are there to fix it. At the same time, there will be people who aren’t yet onboard with their school joining the trust, which can lead to further difficult conversations. Not to mention that trusts aren’t awash with extra capacity given the challenges of funding over the last ten years. You’ve got to have a really good process for identifying what that capacity is going to be, so that you can get that transfer of resource right.
That’s why due diligence is absolutely essential. You need to make sure that the infrastructure is there, so that teachers are able to get on with their job. You can’t have out-of-date servers or significant HR issues – you need to set up the conditions for them to succeed first. Often, people are drawn immediately to focus on the quality of education, particularly in schools that Ofsted would define as ‘failing’, though I’m never comfortable with the term ‘failing school’. That’s undoubtedly important, but you have to get the infrastructure of the school right first. HR, finance, safeguarding… all of those structural things that enable you to focus on education. If you don’t fix those, they’ll keep coming back and knocking you off course. In that sense, the due diligence in those areas is far more important than what’s going on in the classroom.
When it comes to changing the culture, the way I like to think of it is that we are all there for the same ‘why’, as dubbed by Simon Sinek. What people begin to understand is the reason they’re in the school is exactly the same as yours – to provide the best possible education for the students in that school. It’s important to communicate that, especially when talking to those who have been through the emotional toll of going into special measures. This way, you can be sure that, whatever comes next, your moral purpose and values are aligned. The next step is convincing them that they’re part of the solution, and not part of the problem. For a long time, staff would have been told they’re part of the problem. Their understanding of the weight of responsibility they take is disproportionate to the impact they’ve had. Often they’re the people who have tried everything to help that school, but the conditions haven’t been there for them to have the impact they want to have.
When we take on a new school, we do this by getting everybody together. Every single member of staff, be that the caretaker, office manager, through to the head, comes together so we tell them exactly why we’re there. More importantly, we show that we’re there to listen and to stay for the long-term. It’s an open-door policy. We’ve done it quite formally too, where in some cases I’ve met with every single member of staff individually. I would ask them what they feel are the problems and what they think is to come, unpicking how they feel about their situation. That’s really good intelligence to unlock.
The same goes for parents, as creating that external culture is important too, especially where they’ve lost confidence in the school. If parents are angry or uncertain, the answer is also an open-door policy – let’s get them into the school and allow them to get it all off their chest. Let’s convince them that we’re in this together.
What it comes back to is that acid test of, would this be good enough for my own child? That’s the ultimate measure of success, in my opinion. It’s an indescribable feeling when you are walking through a school that was a huge challenge, and teachers are teaching, children are learning. Or even seeing a particular child who has had some real difficulty making progress, however small the steps are.
A longer version of Sajid’s article appears in our free ebook, alongside four articles from other key MAT leaders. Download your copy here.
Discover more of our content for groups and trusts here.
Over the past year, we’ve added lots of exciting new features and integrations into our cloud MIS! We update Arbor fortnightly, listening closely and responding to what you tell us. Below are just some of our top picks of everything our team have been working hard on for the past year. Advanced Report Calculations Approve
Over the past year, we’ve added lots of exciting new features and integrations into our cloud MIS!
We update Arbor fortnightly, listening closely and responding to what you tell us. Below are just some of our top picks of everything our team have been working hard on for the past year.
Advanced Report Calculations
Approve and lock assessment marks in bulk
Improved keyboard accessibility
Wraparound Care Clubs
Bulk copy Assessment marks
New MAT MIS homepage
Improvements to Contributing EEP Hours
Attainment Over Time in MAT MIS
Prevent Attendance from being overwritten
Bulk update Core Learning Aims
Share report cards with students
User Defined Fields (UDFs)
School-led tutoring hours
External report cards
Guardians of applicants can access Parent Portal
Clickable hyperlinks in In-App Messages
Custom Group Alerts
Attendance KPIs in MAT MIS
Pay by childcare voucher
Show RANK order on Marksheets
Track Learner Engagement
Suspend lessons
Send emails via bulk action in MAT MIS
Civica cashless catering integration
School Shop
Census Audit in MAT MIS
New Marksheets
Creating templates for In-App Messages
Live Register cashless catering integration
Automatic Assessment target-setting
Ad Hoc permissions in MAT MIS
Options import from TimeTabler
Have your say in where we go next and help us shape the UK’s most-loved school MIS by adding to our roadmap.
Want to stay in the loop of all our new features? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn where we post the link to our monthly updates.
Governance | School Operations
Many individuals in the Arbor team have a background in education, be it as a MAT leader, school teacher or even as a free school founder. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that we also have many school governors in our midst. We sat down with four of our team to ask them about the role
Many individuals in the Arbor team have a background in education, be it as a MAT leader, school teacher or even as a free school founder. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that we also have many school governors in our midst. We sat down with four of our team to ask them about the role of school governors, how they became governors, and why they decided to commit to taking on the responsibilities of this important position.
Rebecca: I wanted to give back to my local community, especially during a time when I knew schools were struggling during Covid. I love the area I live in North West London and wanted to feel more involved in what’s happening around me. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to gain board experience at a young age.
Andrew: I initially became a Parent Governor initially because I wanted to make sure that my child was getting the best education possible. I’ve now matured in that view and realised that this was a very one-dimensional approach. What I like about my role as a governor now is that I’m helping to shape the opportunities and life chances of young people that I’ll likely never meet.
Dan: Prior to working for Arbor, I was a teacher and senior leader in secondary schools for 13 years. The insights I gained from working on the front line of education for so long have helped to shape the work I have done with Arbor ever since. My understanding of school life in 2016 only helps so much though, and keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of education is extremely important in order to fully understand all of the challenges schools face. Becoming a governor provided the perfect opportunity for me to continue to learn in this way. To start with, I chaired the Teaching and Learning Committee for a federation of special schools and then after a few years made the transition to my current role as a trustee in a MAT, where I chair the Pay, Performance and Personnel Committee. This is a step away from my previous expertise, and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to learn new skills.
Beth: At first, I thought I might be too young, or have too little experience and expertise to be a governor, but a colleague encouraged me to think about it. I made myself a profile on Inspiring Governance, which links people who want to be governors with schools that need them. I had a chat with the Head and had a virtual tour of the school, and after a few months, they needed a new Chair. So it was a bit of a baptism of fire. What I learned is that it’s not about expertise as such; it’s more important to be present and have the right attitude. If you’re passionate about education and have the time to offer, then that’s brilliant.
Rebecca: I’m a co-opted governor, which means I’m somebody from the local community that the governing board chooses. I applied to three governing recruitment websites, which have lots of resources about what it means to be a governor and where you can upload your application and be found by schools looking for governors. Someone reached out to me, I had an initial screening with the Chair of Governors and then was invited to go to the school to meet the Headteacher and SLT.
Beth: As Chair, I manage the meetings, try to keep things to time and make sure that everybody has the chance to input. I also have a fortnightly catch-up with the Head, which could be about safeguarding issues, a school trip that’s gone well or something that she needs approval from the governors. Governors are also there as an alternative point of contact for parents.
Rebecca: My role as a Co-opted Governor is to read the data and information packs that the SLT provides each month, which include everything from attendance and attainment statistics to safeguarding issues, budgets and anything noteworthy that’s happened in the school. We then ask questions to ensure the headteacher and SLT have thought about different options and that they know how they will monitor progress. We push them to think about all the decisions they’re making and give them advice. We’re also a sounding board for anything that arises in the school, which could be anything to do with the staff, pupils, parents and guardians or building and maintenance.
Andrew: The responsibilities of a school governor are very nuanced, because every time you look upon the student body, you realise you are personally accountable for the life chances of all these young people. We have to scrutinise the tracking data and the performance of the students, but also have to scrutinise resource allocations to ensure we’re spending against the right priorities. Ultimately, the role of a governor is about the infrastructure and fabric of the school. School governors are responsible for resource decisions, policies, attainment, and physical safety of the students. There’ll be a subcommittee that looks at achievements, standards, behaviour, exclusion, remuneration, premises etc. – but we are all accountable in one way or another.
Dan: Governing bodies exist to provide both strategic steer and accountability to schools over the educational performance of its pupils and the way in which its budgets of public money are spent. We do this by analysing performance data, evaluating action plans and asking school leaders challenging questions. A good governing body should be made up of different people from across a local community so that scrutiny can come from a variety of perspectives. Having a governing body also provides schools with an opportunity to draw from knowledge and expertise from different sectors and industries in shaping school and MAT policies.
Beth: Curiosity and integrity. There’s a tension in the role of governor because you’re setting the direction for the school, but you’re not making the everyday decisions. You are there to set a vision and make sure standards are high. To do that, you need to ask lots of questions and genuinely want to know the answers. As for integrity, you need to be able to ask tricky and important questions while also being able to understand the difference between your role as a parent or local businessperson and your role as a governor.
Rebecca: To be a governor, you don’t necessarily need to have prior experience in schools or education, but you need to be well-informed on what makes a good school and what Ofsted considers to be “Good” and “Outstanding”. It also takes someone who can listen carefully, ask good questions, and not be afraid to challenge the Headteacher, whilst being supportive. You’re not there to oppose, you’re there to help and advise. I also think it’s helpful to have people that have worked in diverse roles to bring different experiences and viewpoints into the board; for example on our board we have a policewoman, a lawyer and I’m a marketer.
Beth: I love seeing the impact that the school has on the students. Working in EdTech, we are all here ultimately for the same reason: the students. Being a governor, I feel a much greater connection to that. The challenging side to the role is that sometimes there are problems that we as governors can’t solve – sometimes you can only sympathise. I find that quite hard as a solution-driven person.
Rebecca: I love the feeling that I’m helping young people get the best start in life. There are a lot of refugees and Pupil Premium pupils in our school and it’s an important opportunity to help give them the tools and support to become whoever they want to be. Something I find more challenging is being able to really question and help with decisions the school needs to make, especially when it’s with a situation that’s more nuanced. When meetings move back to being in-person I think this will allow conversations to flow more easily.
Andrew: I feel that education has been good to me, having provided me with a career, and many wonderful opportunities in this country and abroad. So it sounds a bit passe, but it really is an opportunity to give something back. My own education was quite poor in many respects, and so the opportunity to ensure that children don’t have to overcome the obstacles that I did, makes me feel as though I’m adding value.
Dan: For me, being a trustee provides me with a great way to continue to have direct involvement in education. Our decision-making shapes the policies that influence the way in which people work within the schools. Having been a teacher, I know how hard-working people in schools are and how tough a job it can be at times, so I like to think that I can be a voice for teacher and staff wellbeing on the board. Sometimes difficult decisions need to be made and one of the hardest parts of the job for me is getting involved in official disciplinary procedures for staff members or exclusion panels for students and having to weigh up what the right thing to do is in each situation.
Beth: I actually witnessed my school move from SIMS to Arbor. Now, the data is so much easier to interpret, especially with the Assessment data out of Arbor, especially for those who are less confident in this area.
Andrew: Having a good MIS is essential to effective governance. I need to be able to see that the decisions we endorse genuinely add value to the learning journey. We’ve always been given high-quality information, but the issue was that it took a long time to get to us because it had to be manually number-crunched, so sometimes the data was half a term behind our meeting sequence.
Dan: To be effective in challenging a school or MAT’s performance, it is necessary to have current data available that can be interrogated easily. However, in my experience as a governor, the MIS has often held things back. I’m often presented with quite two-dimensional and sometimes out-of-date data that merely reflects a snapshot in time – like a statistical average for Pupil Premium attainment. Without an MIS that allows you to do so, it’s impossible to actually explore the variables that might be driving the statistics presented. Arbor helps governing bodies actually drill down into this information to a much greater depth and makes it far easier to collate across multiple schools. Take Custom Report Writer, for example, which can be live fed into Google or Power BI, giving trustees or governors a live dashboard of current data. They can look at this any time, easily drill down and truly investigate the information.
Beth asked one of the children in a Reception class what they thought the Governing Board does at the school. This is what they said:
“Who is that? We don’t know what that means. Is it just a person or a box or is it you? Or are you talking about our board or your board? There’s two boards in here.”
Apply online at Governors for Schools and they’ll match your skills to a local school in need. Find out more about the role here.
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better, which is why we think it’s key that so many of our team have previously worked in and continue to support schools.
You can find more about our story and mission here, or keep up with us on Twitter and LinkedIn to find out more about how we are having an impact on education.
EdTech | Migration
As part of our partnership with Amazon Web Services, we interviewed Andrew Proctor, Executive Lead for Education, about how schools should be thinking about migration to the cloud. You can read a shorter version of this article in our joint whitepaper with Socitm. – How has the move to the cloud looked across other parts
As part of our partnership with Amazon Web Services, we interviewed Andrew Proctor, Executive Lead for Education, about how schools should be thinking about migration to the cloud. You can read a shorter version of this article in our joint whitepaper with Socitm.
I think it’s taken a number of different shapes and forms across different sectors, but I also think it’s important to draw a distinction between those organisations and companies that are born in the cloud and those that are not. Cloud-borne companies can scale rapidly, because they already have a cloud way of thinking and doing. This is more the case for the private sector, where companies are often driven by the need for a competitive edge.
Traditionally, I think the public sector has looked at digital transformation as a set of projects to implement new technologies, rather than an embedded cultural change. For those that have made the move to the cloud, they are able to see past technology as something that simply keeps the lights on. It has accelerated and de-risked innovation.
What we’ve seen over the past two years is evolution and adaptation in the education sector, rather than true transformation and reinvention. An example would be moving lessons online. This is in no way to dismiss the incredible work that the public sector has had to do in a very short amount of time, but it demonstrates that they’ve been limited to almost reproducing what they’ve already been doing via different methods, rather than reinventing and improving them.
The adoption of a cloud mindset should be central to any plans for transformation – viewing cloud as something that can help your team focus on your end-users.
When I was first at Staffordshire University, there were monthly management meetings. The different teams would come in and talk about patches to the infrastructure, uptime and availability. By moving to the cloud, one of the cultural things I was able to do was shift the focus of those meetings away from maintenance of the system and through to telling us what problems they’d solved, what new functionality and new services they’d designed and delivered to help staff and students. Ultimately, cloud was a springboard for a much more user-centric approach.
I also think it’s important to know that you don’t need to boil the ocean and seek perfection. Public sector governance doesn’t often align with digital and agile ways of operating. There’s a tendency towards multi-year business plans where every detail must be nailed down. Teams need to accept that traditional governance and its rigidity may not always be conducive to the benefits of the cloud.
Look at digital transformation as a way of being and doing – not the shift to a different piece of technology. You need to be user-obsessed and focused. My advice would therefore be to start by putting some of the cultural building blocks in place and thinking of the bigger picture.
Don’t try to reproduce what you’ve already done but in the cloud. Of course, you can make cost efficiencies and savings by getting rid of a data centre. But the real advantage of cloud is the ability to be innovative and agile.
I’d also say that you should look to the huge community of support that’s out there for help. You don’t have to do it all alone. Many organisations, sectors, and industries have reinvented themselves and are willing to offer a helping hand. Look to partners as well.
To see other case studies like Andrew’s, click on the image above
Whatever the sector, organisations face some barriers, but many of these are actually just perceived barriers, particularly around security and skills.
The security of the cloud is one such perceived barrier. There’s a trust and comfort to having something under physical lock and key in a data centre in your building. Cloud doesn’t remove locks and keys, it just does them in a better and different way. You still get 100% control over who has access to your data and applications. If you take Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, we have over one million monthly active customers, across every vertical, including policing and security services around the globe. So our infrastructure is designed around the most stringent of security requirements from around the world – and each customer benefits from that. If you’re a school, you’re benefiting from infrastructure that’s been designed for a much higher tier of security than you actually need.
Another concern is around skills. Some organisations worry that they haven’t got the internal skills for digital transformation or cloud adoption. There’s also a natural concern within individuals that they don’t have the skills required. So there’s a fear about making sure transformation is sustainable, because it has the right people moving it along. These concerns have solutions. You can train and develop your internal team where appropriate, rely on partners and also look to grow teams where necessary. In such a fast-paced environment as is the world of IT, the ability to upskill is viewed as an exciting opportunity for internal teams. It’s a positive thing.
The vast majority of projects that are deemed to be large-scale can and should be broken down into manageable chunks. It’s very difficult to produce this perfect, accurately timed and costed multi-year project plan sat at a desk in a room before you’re actually faced with reality. But we still seem wedded to doing that in the public sector.
It’s much better to adopt, again, a sort of cloud mindset, by listening to what end-users need and want. And be prepared to change and adapt where needed.
It’s healthy to think big, but start small. This big idea that all schools will move to the cloud is absolutely right and proper, but the key is to start small, learn some lessons and demonstrate both success and value. Start by migrating those systems that aren’t complex to do so.
In terms of practical advice, the establishment of some core tenets for the project is very important. What are the key things that are driving the initiative? A really rough idea of a tenet could be that you will always prioritise the security of people’s data, so when you come to some difficult or challenging decisions that you need to communicate to everyone, you can refer back to those tenets as well to make sure that you’re staying true to what was agreed upfront. This can help defuse some of the conflict and tension, because you’ve got that established guidance to refer back to. So setting, agreeing and communicating those key tenets to the broader school community can be very helpful.
And again, take digital ethos and approach. It could be moving a single school or a single application or service to the cloud. Take stock, learn some lessons and then progress from there and be prepared to adjust your plans accordingly.
Finally, I think it’s important to advocate for the fact that even though there may be some initial trade-offs, as we’ve discussed with the needs of users, going back to one of the core benefits of a cloud mindset is that ultimately you become much more customer-centric and you get much more time and resource to invest back into your end-users as well. Advocating that to the user community is really important. Naturally, there will be some friction and surprises, but just make sure you’ve got some resources ready to communicate to teams and keep them informed.
I would add that there is a lot in the public sector and education sector to celebrate. There is plenty of opportunity for them in terms of digital transformation, but I think they should take a sense of pride in just how important they’ve been, how important they will remain to be and what they have done during a challenging few years.
It’s been a very challenging environment for universities and schools. Lots of noise in the media and press, lots of pressure politically. But they have absolutely done everyone in the country proud in terms of the service that they provided. If you look at them being able to provide new mental health services at universities and schools and the adoption of those, I think we should all be proud of what the education sector has been able to achieve, and we should all advocate for the many opportunities that are still ahead of them.
A shorter version of this article appears in our whitepaper with Socitm, which also features interviews with Hampshire County Council and Herts for Learning about how and why they are offering schools in their area the choice of a cloud MIS. Click here for your free copy of the whitepaper.
Migration | Partners
We’re excited to launch our latest whitepaper, in partnership with Socitm, about how three organisations are helping schools think about a move to the cloud. As the Management Information System (MIS) market shifts, more and more councils are embracing changing technology. But for many, change presents concerns around capacity, impact on internal structures and getting
We’re excited to launch our latest whitepaper, in partnership with Socitm, about how three organisations are helping schools think about a move to the cloud.
As the Management Information System (MIS) market shifts, more and more councils are embracing changing technology. But for many, change presents concerns around capacity, impact on internal structures and getting to grips with new systems. With many councils wanting to provide choice to their schools and follow the lead of those who are already seeking to harness modern technology, including cloud-based MIS, knowing where to start can be a daunting prospect.
Hampshire County Council and Herts for Learning are two organisations that have already embraced a move to the cloud when it comes to school MIS. In this whitepaper, hear from both organisations on how they managed this project internally, advice they would give to others, and what it was that encouraged them to take action.
We also spoke with Amazon Web Services about the trends they’ve seen across the public sector, and how Local Authorities across the UK can take advice from, and be encouraged by, others who have managed similar projects.
Download your free copy of the whitepaper here to read these three case studies.
All three of our contributors will be joining Phillippa D’Ath, CRO at Arbor Education, for a fireside chat on their schools’ experience with a move to the cloud. Sign up to the free webinar, taking place on 18th October at 1pm, by clicking here.
You can find out more about our partnership with Socitm here.
With summer holidays on the horizon, now is the perfect time to reflect, learn and start putting plans in place for the new school year. We’ve been working hard on updates to make your new year set-up as seamless as possible, especially in Assessments – we hope you find them helpful. – What’s new for
With summer holidays on the horizon, now is the perfect time to reflect, learn and start putting plans in place for the new school year. We’ve been working hard on updates to make your new year set-up as seamless as possible, especially in Assessments – we hope you find them helpful.
New Assessments marksheets are here Our new marksheets are jam-packed with features to make data entry as quick as possible. Say hello to Excel-like functionality, including keyboard entry, custom filters, copy and paste and much more. Learn more here
Copy your Annual Assessment Policy You can now quickly copy over your assessments to the next academic year. Our setup wizard can pre-fill student groups, Baselines and Targets for maximum time-saving. Learn more here
SUM calculations in Assessment By using a SUM calculation, you can now recreate things like AQA Maths or Question Level Analysis (QLA) within Arbor. This means that all your Assessment data can be in one place, rather than spread across different Excel spreadsheets. Learn more here
Cashless catering integrations with Civica Cashless Catering and Live Register We wanted to make the cashless catering process even better for staff, students and parents, which is why we now integrate with Civica Cashless Catering and Live Register. You can now manage cashless catering payments directly from your MIS – without needing a separate payments system as well. The integration is included in our MIS Payments module, and is also part of our Arbor Perform package. Learn more here
In-App message templates You can now create templates for frequently sent in-app messages, such as a PE kit reminder. In-app templates are loaded in the same way as Email, SMS and Letter templates. Learn more here
MAT MIS calculated fields Just like on the School MIS, you can now use custom calculated formula fields in the MAT MIS Custom Report Writer. Learn more here
New PowerBI Datasets We’ve added new datasets to our PowerBI connector to give you more bespoke reporting options. Now you can analyse Staff Absence, Staff Contracts, Staff Salaries, Staff Positions, Staff DfE Position information, and Behaviour Incident Narrative. Learn more here
Assessments | Product updates
With summer holidays on the horizon, now is the perfect time to start thinking about how you can get the most out of Assessments in Arbor, ready for the new school year. We know how important it is to get Assessments right, so we’ve put together our five favourite tips to help make the process
With summer holidays on the horizon, now is the perfect time to start thinking about how you can get the most out of Assessments in Arbor, ready for the new school year.
We know how important it is to get Assessments right, so we’ve put together our five favourite tips to help make the process a little easier. Keep an eye out for some of the exciting features that we’ve added this year!
Say hello to super speedy data entry in Arbor’s marksheets. Our marksheets have Excel-like functionality, including keyboard entry, custom filters, and copy and paste, making life quicker and easier for staff.
Find out more here.
Schools can easily spend hours in the initial setup of Assessments creating baselines and entering targets. With our Copy Annual Policy feature, schools can quickly copy the previous years’ data, including student groups, Baselines and Targets for maximum time-saving.
By using a SUM calculation, schools can recreate things like AQA Maths or Question Level Analysis (QLA) within Arbor. This means that all your Assessment data can be in one place, rather than spread across different Excel spreadsheets.
Report cards are a key link between students, parents and your school’s Assessment system. In Arbor, you can use a report card template to set up your reports and then copy over the information you need when setting up for the following term. This means you can complete Spring and Summer reports in less than 10 minutes and easily share them with guardians.
Want to use your own report card design and layout? Use Arbor’s ‘External Report Card’ feature to bulk upload report cards generated elsewhere, such as Microsoft Word, and easily share them with guardians and students.
We’ve made it easier to create broadsheets with Assessment data in Arbor’s Custom Report Writer! Use our simple slide-overs to bulk add Summative and Ad Hoc Assessment columns to your reports.
Every school’s Assessment model is different, so take advantage of the features and training that will most help your school. But don’t take it from us… hear from Kate Ferris, Data Analyst at Baxter College, about how their adoption of Formative Tracking transformed the way their school thinks about Assessment.
Click here to find out more about Assessments training, or to discuss how it can benefit your school, please contact your Account Manager.
Looking for more tips and tricks? Keep an eye out for our #ArborSpotlight series on Twitter and LinkedIn. for weekly pointers on how to make the most out of our cloud MIS.
Culture | MAT Operations
In February 2022, we surveyed 164 MAT leaders about how they were thinking about culture in their trust. One of the interesting things that came out of this debate was the question of whether schools in a MAT should be close together, and how much this had an impact on the sense of community and
In February 2022, we surveyed 164 MAT leaders about how they were thinking about culture in their trust. One of the interesting things that came out of this debate was the question of whether schools in a MAT should be close together, and how much this had an impact on the sense of community and belonging.
Interestingly, less than 10% of respondents thought that all schools in a MAT had to be in the same area. There were a variety of reasons to justify this response, such as the importance of joint school activities and the equity of treatment from governors who understand the local area.
On the flip side, 26% of respondents said that it was of no importance that all schools in a MAT were in the same area. This was largely put down to the ability of technology to supplement where face-to-face isn’t possible. One respondent also made the point that geographic distance should not be a barrier to taking on schools that are well-suited to the MAT or are in need of assistance which a MAT further away can offer.
Ultimately, the middle ground was popular, with 62% of respondents agreeing that they would want at least clusters of their schools to be near each other for practical reasons like sharing teachers and resources.
Despite this fairly mixed response, the reaction changed when we asked our participants to consider the effect of geography on MAT culture, rather than just the logistics or practicalities of running a MAT. 75% of participants actually agreed that culture can be sustained even when schools within a trust are not geographically close, which was generally justified by the notion that, “technology can link schools that are not geographically close.” This marks a definite shift in attitude, as pre-Covid, MAT leaders were much more likely to state that having a smaller geographical footprint helped to maintain a tight culture.
In fact, nearly 1 in 3 participants felt that having the same systems was one of the most important factors when thinking about how to work together as one organisation, as summarised by one respondent who added, “divergent technology platforms create a barrier for communications and make it much more challenging to operate as a single organisation.” 88% of our participants agreed that, in an ideal world, all of their schools would share the same Management Information System in order to work better together.
It’s certainly an interesting take that, while many seemed to agree that nothing beats face-to-face communication, a shared culture could be sustained through technology.
We put this dilemma to Laura Gregory, Director of Education at Bellevue Place Education Trust. Her piece on the MAT distance debate is one of five articles in our ebook for MAT leaders. Creating a Cohesive Trust also includes our other survey results, insights and a discussion guide. You can download your free copy here.
Keep up with our other blog and ebook releases on Twitter and LinkedIn.
New to Arbor’s content? Click here for more MAT blogs and case studies.
Arbor Community | Case Studies
Last month we introduced our Pay-for-One Promise – giving schools locked into paying for SIMS until 2025 a way to switch to Arbor now without double-paying for their MIS. But we know that deciding to change MIS isn’t just about budget, which is why the Pay-for-One Promise isn’t the only commitment we’ll make to your
Last month we introduced our Pay-for-One Promise – giving schools locked into paying for SIMS until 2025 a way to switch to Arbor now without double-paying for their MIS.
But we know that deciding to change MIS isn’t just about budget, which is why the Pay-for-One Promise isn’t the only commitment we’ll make to your school. We believe passionately that a good MIS is one which is also committed to transforming the way schools work for the better.
So, we asked our schools to tell us #WhyMySchoolSwitched. Hear below how Arbor is making their lives easier and why it’s worth switching to Arbor before your SIMS licence is up.
Use the Pay-for-One Promise to move to Arbor in 2022/23, even if you’re locked into a SIMS contract
Switching MIS isn’t just a system change – it’s a real opportunity to change the way you work for the better. And given the impact switching MIS can have – on everything from workload, to staff happiness, parental engagement and school collaboration – you shouldn’t be prevented from switching by your budget.
The Pay-for-One Promise is our commitment that your school should only pay for one MIS at a time. Put simply: if you’re locked into paying for SIMS, we won’t ask you to pay for your core Arbor license until that contract ends. You get all the benefits of switching to the UK’s leading cloud MIS, but don’t have to worry about double-paying in the process.
Find out more about the Pay-for-One Promise here.
We’re excited to launch part two of our ebook for MAT staff – click here to download your free copy! In our last book for MAT staff, we explored whether trusts could and should create a shared culture. This is now more relevant than ever, spurred on by the government’s statement that all schools should
We’re excited to launch part two of our ebook for MAT staff – click here to download your free copy!
In our last book for MAT staff, we explored whether trusts could and should create a shared culture. This is now more relevant than ever, spurred on by the government’s statement that all schools should belong to ‘strong’ MATs by 2030. We wanted to take another look at what having a strong and cohesive MAT really means and as part of this, how every school could benefit from being in a trust.
In February 2022, we conducted a survey of 164 MAT leaders and discovered that nearly 1 in 5 respondents did not feel that their trust had a cohesive culture which all their schools felt part of.
When we asked participants about the factors they felt best contributed to a shared culture, our survey also revealed that MAT leaders were not drawn to surface-level factors, such as having the same uniform or a standardised curriculum. Instead, respondents were more focused on having shared opportunities for staff and students, and shared vision and values. This seems to direct us towards what having a cohesive trust truly means: sharing, not sameness.
Hear from five MAT leaders
To look further into what it takes to create a cohesive trust, we invited five different MAT leaders to write about what they thought helped build cohesion and resilience in their trusts.
Our book opens with the importance of communication at Learning For Life Education Trust, and the resulting cross-trust oracy programme. You’ll then hear why Wellspring Academy Trust has committed to 125-year plans for all their schools, and how The Learning For Life Partnership shares best practice both within and beyond their own schools. The fourth piece in our book features interviews with three key trust leaders from across the country, exploring how sharing courses between their schools has benefited their students. This is followed by The Kemnal Academy Trust’s unique approach to trust-wide staff retention and opportunities. Our book closes with a look into moral leadership at Prince Albert Community Trust and how this has helped transform a number of vulnerable schools.
The ebook is free to download for anybody interested in helping their trust work together as one organisation, not many schools. We hope you gain some inspiration on how to make sure that every school, and every student, is benefiting from everything your trust has to offer.
Click here to download your copy.
If you missed the first part of our Cohesive Trust series, you can download it for free here.
To keep up with all our other exciting new content and news, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
What is staff wellbeing and why does it matter? Sometimes, we need to take a step back and focus on the small things that really matter. In schools, we’re really good at the big statements and big ideas. But this can often overshadow our own experiences, our lives and our work, made up of smaller
Sometimes, we need to take a step back and focus on the small things that really matter. In schools, we’re really good at the big statements and big ideas. But this can often overshadow our own experiences, our lives and our work, made up of smaller interactions and moments – which are what we need to focus on.
This isn’t to say that we need to make sweeping changes or do compulsory yoga on a Friday. Staff wellbeing is about the fabric and culture of the places we work in. We can draw on something as well-known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – there are fundamentals in place that we need to fulfil to function effectively. We need to make sure the infrastructure is in place to function as human beings first, and teachers or SBMs or office staff second.
It’s easy to throw the word wellbeing around. It crept into the Ofsted framework a few years ago and suddenly everyone was posing the question: ‘what are we doing about staff wellbeing?’ But even when retention is good, what you want to find out is whether people know what to do in a crisis, or if they’re struggling. It’s not just about keeping your head above the water or managing to swim against the tide, but that we actually have a right to be happy.
Wellbeing is a worthy investment of the self. Working extra hours is simply not sustainable, for example. The truth is that the education sector is in need of staff, and so sustainability and retention must be at the heart of strategy, and the core of our own personal outlooks. And that comes back to wellbeing.
Our profession attracts perfectionists. It attracts people who are susceptible to guilt. In my work on teaching and parenthood, I once heard from a young mother who’d left teaching after teaching for just a few months because she ‘got sick of letting everybody down all the time.’ We go into schools to make a difference and to make society a better place than when we found it, and we have drive, and a spark. That means that we want to give, because giving makes us feel good. So we keep giving and giving, until we suddenly realise we’ve worked an 80 hour week or that someone we love is trying to talk to us and we’re just not listening. We’re physically there, but we’re not mentally or emotionally present at all. Suddenly we start to negate that very energy, that very sense of moral purpose. That very spark that brought us into the profession in the first place starts to suffer, and it means our giving isn’t sustainable.
So what we need to remember is that we are not irreplaceable.
That does not mean what we do isn’t precious. When a student contacts you years later and you can see that you have contributed in some way to their lives, it goes to show how valuable of a role we play as individuals. What it does mean is that we cannot be martyrs to the profession, or our own wellbeing will suffer.
As part of my research, I asked education professionals to tell me the small things that ruin their day. You’ve probably experienced these before: broken photocopiers, anything to do with glue sticks, dirty mugs in the sink, meetings where children aren’t mentioned once. It comes down to inefficiency, sometimes collective and sometimes individual. I tried to take these and think how we can move forward and make minor or significant tweaks for ourselves individually and for our organisations to really think about wellbeing in a meaningful way.
So not the compulsory yoga, not the free post-it notes, not the chocolate on Friday, although that always has its value. It’s about being able to say thank you, or sorry, or good morning, or ask how people genuinely are. This creates a more open space where talk is encouraged and individuals understand what the other does. Ultimately, our attention is finite and a gift, so it’s about knowing where to allocate it, both in terms of time management and emotions.
I also asked educators what made them feel good. Answers ranged from seeing a child write their name for the first time, or someone bringing them a cup of tea on a bad day. Most people don’t need big, public thank yous in staff briefings. Schools should instead be focused on making sure everyone drinks enough water, or that the toilets are nice to use, or taking a walk for some alone time. Essentially, that the fundamentals and infrastructure are there, both physically and emotionally.
One thing that was particularly transformative for me was writing down, or recording in some way, three good things that have happened to me each day, be it on a post-it note or in a journal or an Excel spreadsheet. It’s great to look back at what you’ve achieved, but it also creates an artificial barrier in that spill-over between work and life, drawing a line underneath it. There are other ways to create this barrier – whatever works for you. It could be locking the school gates, saying goodbye to the caretaker, or pulling up in your driveway.
It ultimately comes down to this – we are all giving people and that’s why we’re working in schools. But if we give too much, we can’t give anymore. So we must sometimes work against this selfless impulse to give in order to make sure our generosity, drive, wellbeing and our love for our roles are sustainable.
Want to learn more? You can read Emma’s blog and see more of her work by clicking here.
Or, click here to read our other articles on staff wellbeing.
Happy Half Term and welcome to our May product release summary! It’s been a bumper month for new launches. We’ve released brand new modules – Payments Plus and Shared Teaching – along with a range of other updates to help you, your school and your trust. – What’s new for schools At Arbor, we’re on
Happy Half Term and welcome to our May product release summary! It’s been a bumper month for new launches. We’ve released brand new modules – Payments Plus and Shared Teaching – along with a range of other updates to help you, your school and your trust.
The end-to-end payments system from Arbor You can now manage meal choices, create your school shop and take payments the way you want to, with our new Payments module – Payments Plus. School Shop is the first feature, with Advanced Meals and additional Payment Methods functionality coming soon. Learn more here
Share students and courses across multiple schools Sharing courses and teaching resources across schools is a fantastic way to widen your curriculum and give your students more choice. Shared Teaching takes the heavy lifting out of shared course set up and administration, letting you share courses across schools with ease. Learn more here
Set up and mark End of Key Stage 1 assessments You can now use a new assessment template called ‘End of Key Stage 1 – Test Results’ to input data for a wide range of DfE assessments, saving you time and allowing for marks to be exported in Common Transfer Files (CTFs). Learn more here
Track census completion at MAT level
As part of our mission to help MAT central teams support their schools, we’ve added an overview of census completion to the MAT MIS. It gives you a summary of the status of each Census for each school and each academic year letting you be sure everyone is compliant with both DfE and Trust level reporting. For more information on how to access Census Audit in your MAT MIS please contact your Account Manager.
MAT MIS Custom Report Writer Superuser is here
You fed back and we listened. You told us how useful you found the Custom Report Writer superuser permission functionality in School MIS and how useful it would be to have the same in MAT MIS, so we built it! This permission allows superusers to view and edit all custom reports created on MAT MIS. Log in to MAT MIS
Arbor is always evolving, hand-in-hand with Schools and MATs. We update Arbor fortnightly, listening closely and responding to what you tell us. View our roadmap and have your say in where we go next, helping us shape the UK’s most transformative MIS.
Payments | Product release
We’re excited to announce the launch of our new Payments Plus module! Payments Plus is the end-to-end payments system within your MIS your parents will love. Say goodbye to logging in to multiple places to complete different payment tasks. Manage meal choices, create your shop and take payments at your school the way you want
Payments Plus is the end-to-end payments system within your MIS your parents will love. Say goodbye to logging in to multiple places to complete different payment tasks. Manage meal choices, create your shop and take payments at your school the way you want to – all from within Arbor.
Payments Plus means you can make payments self-service, and ultimately become a cashless school. Parents no longer have to travel into school to make payments, and you don’t need to go to the bank to deposit cash or cheques, saving time and effort for everyone.
This exciting new module is an extension to Arbor Payments Core, our current Payments features. It gives you greater flexibility on meal choices, more payment options including Apple Pay and Google Pay, and access to a School Shop.
Works seamlessly with your student data Payments Plus has been built within Arbor to work hand-in-hand with your student data and communication tools – no need to import data into a third party tool.
Gives your parents one easy-to-use system Parents login to just one place for all tasks, from booking and paying for trips, to paying for items, to reading school comms. Fewer questions and frustrations from parents means more time back for you!
Payment methods to fit every lifestyle Payments Plus gives you the freedom to tailor payments to your school needs. Give parents the flexibility to pay the way that suits them, whether that’s by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay.
We’re launching features within Payments Plus over the next few months. School Shop is already up and running, with Advanced Meals and additional Payment Methods functionality coming soon.
For more information about Payments Plus, view our website or speak to your Account Manager.
I’ve never written an open letter before, but I think it’s fair to say that the past few months have seen a lot of “firsts” in the Management Information System (MIS) space…! You’ll probably know by now that back in November SIMS announced it would only offer 3 year contracts to schools. Whilst thousands of
I’ve never written an open letter before, but I think it’s fair to say that the past few months have seen a lot of “firsts” in the Management Information System (MIS) space…!
You’ll probably know by now that back in November SIMS announced it would only offer 3 year contracts to schools. Whilst thousands of schools used this as an opportunity to switch, many more felt they didn’t have time to make the change, so renewed their contracts until 2025.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. At Arbor we believe passionately that switching MIS is a real opportunity to change the way all your staff work for the better. And given the immediate and positive impact switching MIS can have on everything from workload, to staff happiness, parental engagement and school collaboration, we believe you shouldn’t be prevented from switching by your supplier.
That’s why we’re launching our Pay-for-One Promise today.
The Pay-for-One Promise is our commitment that a school should only pay for one MIS at a time. Put simply, if you’re locked into paying for SIMS, we won’t ask you to pay for your core Arbor MIS or payment license until that contract ends. You get all the benefits of switching to the UK’s leading cloud MIS, but don’t have to worry about double-paying, or being out of pocket. In fact, by switching now and replacing multiple other systems such as payments, you’ll actually save money (as well as loads of time).
You can learn more about the Pay-for-One Promise here or reach out to us at pop@arbor-education.com with any questions.
We feel strongly that this is the right thing to do to help your school, trust or LA keep its options open and make the best decision possible. We look forward to hearing your feedback.
Arbor MIS | New Release
At Arbor, our MIS is designed to champion new and different ways of working across communities, schools and trusts. That’s why we are excited to launch our brand new module, Shared Teaching! Sharing courses and teaching resources across secondary schools and sixth forms is a fantastic way to widen your curriculum and give your students
At Arbor, our MIS is designed to champion new and different ways of working across communities, schools and trusts. That’s why we are excited to launch our brand new module, Shared Teaching!
Sharing courses and teaching resources across secondary schools and sixth forms is a fantastic way to widen your curriculum and give your students more choice. Whether it’s about increasing access to specialist subjects like art or music, or having to decide which course to run where budgets are tight – increasing the learning opportunities offered to students can make an incredible difference to their experience and future careers.
“We have a real message of equity and parity and making sure that if a student can do one thing in one school, they should be able to do it in another school. The fact they live five miles away shouldn’t restrict students when it comes to making important choices about their future. Where it has the most impact is with minority courses like drama, economics, and languages – which we just wouldn’t be able to run if we didn’t do shared teaching.”
Tom Hill, The Olympus Academy Trust
But, we know that sharing teaching can be a very time consuming and manual process for staff – which is why we’ve built the Shared Teaching module. It’s designed to take the heavy lifting out of shared course set up and administration, letting you share courses across schools with ease.
Removing the burden of admin
Manual data inputting, constant emailing back and forth between schools, and complicated spreadsheets have defined the shared teaching experience for many school administrators and timetablers. Instead, our new module reduces the amount of manual process by letting schools manage timetabling and enrolment directly in their MIS. Only one person in the group has to set up the courses, and the classes will be pushed to all schools in the partnership.
Shared, but secure data
When schools are sharing students, it’s essential that they have a secure record of information to hand. Teachers need to be able to see important details such as medical needs or dietary requirements for all of their students, and in one place. With Shared Teaching, schools get an accurate, up-to-date record of shared students in their own MIS. Teachers can record attendance and assessment data for every student and it will instantly sync between their home and partner schools.
Insights for every school
We know from speaking to schools who share courses that it can have a real, positive effect on students’ lives, so it’s important that schools can track and monitor the progress of their shared courses with reliable data. With this module, schools and MATs can run reports about shared courses at the course and student level, and for courses taught at both home and partner schools. No siloed data means all schools sharing courses together get comprehensive data and insights, such as progress or attainment.
For more information about Shared Teaching, view our handy guide or speak to your Account Manager.
There are countless ways we could show you how we’re the UK’s number 1 when it comes to being the most-loved MIS. But we figured that this Arbor by numbers blog would be a good starting point. More of a words person? You can read what our customers have to say about us here. Follow
There are countless ways we could show you how we’re the UK’s number 1 when it comes to being the most-loved MIS. But we figured that this Arbor by numbers blog would be a good starting point.
More of a words person? You can read what our customers have to say about us here.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for more insights and weekly customer testimonials.
Now more than ever it’s vital that schools and trusts build initiatives into their strategy to support the wellbeing and mental health of the whole school. Whether this be to help reduce exam stress or as part of the school’s Covid recovery plan. To help you in shaping your school wellbeing programme, we’ve tracked down
Now more than ever it’s vital that schools and trusts build initiatives into their strategy to support the wellbeing and mental health of the whole school. Whether this be to help reduce exam stress or as part of the school’s Covid recovery plan.
To help you in shaping your school wellbeing programme, we’ve tracked down seven of the top school wellbeing initiatives you could consider for your school.
80% of young people with existing mental health needs say that the Covid-19 pandemic has made their mental health worse, (according to a Young Minds survey of 2,036 young people), it’s time to put mental health awareness first in schools.
And it’s not just students who have been feeling the impact; according to a report by Education Support, 52% of UK Teachers say their mental health declined during the first stage of the coronavirus pandemic.
Organising a “Wellbeing Week” at your school is a great way to raise awareness of the importance of wellbeing, and gives students the resources to help them support their own mental health. The Mental Health Foundation has created a free downloadable pack to help you plan the week based around the 5 Ways to Wellbeing: Connect, Get Active, Be Mindful, Keep Learning and Give to Others.
If a whole week doesn’t work for your school, why not hold termly workshops with a focus on mental health and wellbeing. Developing a partnership with a specialist charity like Young Minds can support with this.
Embedding a whole-school culture of wellbeing doesn’t happen overnight, but a good basis to start from is building supportive and respectful relationships between students, teachers and parents. A great way to do this is by appointing student and staff Wellbeing Ambassadors to create a supportive environment where students can talk openly about how they are feeling. Worth-it provides training for Wellbeing Ambassadors to equip them with approaches and strategies to support the wellbeing of their peers as well as their own.
Mental health is often not talked about enough in schools because of the stigma around it. One of the best ways to combat some of the misconceptions around mental health is through education. Stem4 offers free teaching resources for Key Stages 3 and 4 that cover topics such as anxiety, stress and depression to empower students with knowledge about mental health.
There are lots of ways you can introduce a focus on wellbeing into lessons across the curriculum, especially in Drama, English or Art. These subjects in particular can be useful to process their emotions and experiences through creating personal projects or pieces of work.
Another great way to spread awareness of wellbeing and mental health around school is through physical or virtual noticeboards, where students can share posters with their wellbeing tips. You’ll also find some great visuals online like this one from the Anna Freud Centre.
Mindfulness is proven to have a profound impact on our overall wellbeing, with studies showing the positive effects of meditation such as reduced stress and anxiety, improved memory and focus, better relationships and reduced emotional and physical pain. There is now growing awareness of the benefits of practicing mindfulness in schools to help students build attention span, emotional regulation and resilience. Why not introduce a five minute mindfulness session during assemblies, or to begin or round off the school day?
As many schools have found during the pandemic, students are coming to school with difficult experiences that they haven’t been able to process. It’s important to carve out some dedicated time once a week during form or tutor groups for “circle time”, which creates a safe space for students to share what they’re going through. Give each student the opportunity to share either a word or a sentence that describes how they are that day, and create a culture of no judgement from their peers.
Gratitude practices are proven to boost our moods. All you need is an empty jar, strips of paper, and pens. As part of your tutor morning routine, have students write down something specific that they’re grateful for on a strip of paper and put it in the jar. Towards the end of the week, ask students to come up and read out items from the jar!
Wellbeing initiatives are great, but making sure staff are happy and healthy to support them has to come first. Promoting a culture of staff wellbeing is essential to a healthy school. Supporting staff and building trust leads to a happier team, higher performance, better retention and a motivated environment.
Check out why nurturing staff wellbeing is so important at Woodland Academy Trust from CEO, Dan Marrow
Not sure where to start? Here are some ideas:
For more ideas and resources check out the following websites:
If you’d like to find out more about how our cloud-based MIS could transform the way you work, join one of our free webinars.
If you’re not already part of the online community, sign up here for free to share best practice, tips and tricks with fellow Arbor schools.
Or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for more insights and weekly customer testimonials.
As you may have heard, we’re doing ArborFest a little differently this term. ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on 5th May, will focus on all of the exciting new releases we’ve recently launched and give you a sneak peek of what’s coming up over the next two terms. Whether you’re new to
As you may have heard, we’re doing ArborFest a little differently this term.
ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on 5th May, will focus on all of the exciting new releases we’ve recently launched and give you a sneak peek of what’s coming up over the next two terms.
Whether you’re new to the Arbor Community, or you’ve been using our MIS for years, this is the perfect opportunity to discover more about how your school could be using Arbor MIS to transform the way you work. Our support and API partners are also invited to join any of the sessions which take their interest.
You can view the full schedule by clicking here, but we’ve put together a few sessions you won’t want to miss below…
As usual, we’ll be kicking the day off with a welcome talk from our CEO and co-founder, James Weatherill. Alongside our Chief of Customer Success and Head of Product, James will be revealing what’s coming up for Arbor MIS and sharing insights on the education sector!
We have a number of exciting announcements, as well as a deeper look into some of our recent releases.
Who better to learn from than school staff who use Arbor every day?
At Arbor, we champion the feedback from our customers. If you’d like to have your say in the future of our MIS, come along to one of our interactive feedback forums.
To create a safe and open space, these sessions are just for customers. We’re looking forward to hearing all your opinions and ideas.
All the information you need about ArborFest, including the full schedule, can be found here.
We can’t wait to see you there! Make sure to keep an eye out for and get involved with our ArborFest competition on Twitter or LinkedIn.
School Improvement | Sustainability
This year, many people will be thinking hard about how they can make their school greener. But how can a school MIS improve sustainability in schools? There will always be an argument that cloud-based technology is simply better for the environment than going server-based. But we wanted to explore more into the tips and tricks
This year, many people will be thinking hard about how they can make their school greener. But how can a school MIS improve sustainability in schools?
There will always be an argument that cloud-based technology is simply better for the environment than going server-based. But we wanted to explore more into the tips and tricks within your MIS that can help you reach your school’s sustainability goals.
Cloud-based MIS are designed to bring together policies, people and processes, meaning workflows become more automated. This should displace the need for the exchange of information on scraps of paper, or save energy and time spent manually setting up and sending a spreadsheet by email.
One of the clearest ways that schools can reduce wasting paper is in their communication with parents. Your MIS should enable you to communicate entirely through app or browser, particularly for things like consents and permissions, paying for trips or setting up parents evenings online. In Arbor, this can all be done through the Parent Portal without any need for extra slips and letters.
However, what is clear in many schools is that they are doubling up this process and still sending paper copies to parents, just in case. Interestingly, only 2% of households in the UK do not have a mobile phone, and only 3% have no access to the Internet. One way schools could move forward would be to run an internal audit and find out how many parents would be happy to be contacted by app or browser alone.
Having a walk-to-school week, running an initiative to save water at school, or only offering vegan meal choices on certain days? There are lots of different ways to think about sustainability in schools, but make sure to take advantage of User-Defined Fields to help you keep track of which student has done what. At the end of your sustainability initiative, you’ll have exciting data to present to the students and you’ll easily be able to spot and reward those who have, for example, taken part every day. This could be an especially useful tool for Trusts who want to push down a UDF to all their schools or run an inter-school competition.
You could even take the information you collect one step further, by comparing the dataset with attainment. Some interesting patterns could be spotted here: does walking to school improve attendance, or does eating vegan food improve Attitude to Learning grades after lunch? This could transform the way your school thinks about sustainability as something that not only helps the environment, but has a positive impact on students’ learning too.
If you’re a school looking for sustainability or after school club ideas, it could be a good initiative to combine the two. Be it planting trees or making artwork for the school from recycled bottle caps, sustainability clubs are a great way to bring students together, spend time outside and learn about saving the planet. Clubs are designed to be easy in Arbor – you can manage consents, club size, length and schedule sessions all from one place.
Make sure to tag us on Twitter or LinkedIn if you’ve used Arbor in your sustainability initiative!
Want to see how our cloud MIS could transform your school? Meet us at the Schools & Academies Show!
If you’re an Arbor customer with great ideas about sustainability in schools, we’d love to hear from you! Have your say in the future of MIS on our product board.
Join us on the 27th April for the Schools & Academies Show 2022, taking place in the Excel Centre. We are excited to join the biggest names in education in what has become the UK’s largest education policy event, attracting over 8,000 attendees from schools, academies, MATs, LAs and government. Sign-up to the event for
Join us on the 27th April for the Schools & Academies Show 2022, taking place in the Excel Centre.
We are excited to join the biggest names in education in what has become the UK’s largest education policy event, attracting over 8,000 attendees from schools, academies, MATs, LAs and government. Sign-up to the event for free here!
If you’re thinking about switching to a cloud-based MIS, come and visit us at stand G10. You’ll have the chance to meet our friendly team and ask any questions you might have about making the move to cloud-based technology. You’ll also be able to see our MIS in action through a live demo, and see why over 3,000 schools and MATs have already joined the Arbor community.
Already an Arbor customer? Come along to ArborFest: The New Features Edition, our virtual conference on May 5th where we’ll be looking at all the exciting new features in our MIS. Perfect whether you are a long-standing user of Arbor or have only just joined the community! With a programme designed to spark ideas about the different ways you could be using Arbor at your school, you should leave with plenty of inspiration and practical steps to start using the new features we’ve released this year – plus, it’s free!
You can also stay in the loop with us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Arbor Updates | Mental Health and Wellbeing
As schools end a hugely busy term, Arbor’s HR and Office Manager and trained Emotional Literacy Support Assistant, Danielle has put together some guidance on how to think about stress management and allow yourself to enjoy some well-deserved rest. 1. Laugh Everyone has heard the phrase “laughter is the best medicine” but did you know
As schools end a hugely busy term, Arbor’s HR and Office Manager and trained Emotional Literacy Support Assistant, Danielle has put together some guidance on how to think about stress management and allow yourself to enjoy some well-deserved rest.
Everyone has heard the phrase “laughter is the best medicine” but did you know that over the past few years there has been growing research to back this up? There is now a proven link between reduced stress and laughter. A good laugh has been proven to:
So my first piece of advice is to make sure you find time over Easter to speak to a friend or family member who never fails to crack you up. Failing that, be sure to watch a funny film or some stand-up from your favourite comedian.
If you really want to integrate a good laugh into your wellbeing routine, why not follow in the footsteps of This Morning’s Phillip and Holly and try out laughter yoga.
Bonding with loved ones, either through touch, conversation or a shared hobby, can increase our feelings of trust, calm and safety. These help to alleviate the body’s stress responses which can improve both our mental and physical health.
Things as basic as a small gesture of kindness, a longer than usual hug or taking a walk with someone close to you can have a profound effect on how easy you find it to cope with life’s stressors.
Spending time in nature has a range of positive impacts to our overall wellbeing and is a great first step to stress management. Getting in touch with nature will look different for everyone and doesn’t need to be time consuming or require you to travel. If you’re a city dweller, your local park counts!
To reconnect with your natural surroundings, you could:
Check out this article from Mind for more information and ideas for how to feel the benefits of nature.
This might be one that some of us (myself included) find very difficult. But therapists and other mental health practitioners advise that the practice of saying no and setting firm boundaries are crucial parts of self care. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the thought of lots of socialising for the first time in a few months, consider how might be better for you to spend your time to feel your best.
There’s no right way to spend a vacation – the ultimate purpose should be to leave you feeling de-stressed and ready to face the new term. Remember – this isn’t selfish. Managing our own stress levels and maintaining healthy boundaries will ultimately have a positive impact on our relationships too.
Why not extend your stress management efforts to after the Easter break, as well? Throughout April people across the country are getting involved in Stress Awareness Month. The way to take part in the 30 day challenge is to pick one action you can take for your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, and to do these every day.
It takes 30 days to turn actions into habits, so this 30-day challenge will maximise your chances of turning useful wellbeing techniques into long-lasting behavioural change.
I hope you have a wonderful and relaxing Easter break and look forward to welcoming you back to summer term.
We’d love to show your school or MAT how Arbor could help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more. Arrange a free demo here, get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education.com, or call 0208 050 1028.
Arbor MIS | Partners
Click here to read our first whitepaper with Socitm. We are delighted to have joined forces with the Society for Innovation Technology and Modernisation (Socitm). Socitm is a leading membership organisation of more than 2,500 professionals, which is dedicated to inspiring change and progress throughout the public sector. Through events, publications and programmes, Socitm’s mission
Click here to read our first whitepaper with Socitm.
We are delighted to have joined forces with the Society for Innovation Technology and Modernisation (Socitm).
Socitm is a leading membership organisation of more than 2,500 professionals, which is dedicated to inspiring change and progress throughout the public sector. Through events, publications and programmes, Socitm’s mission is to help maximise the effective use of technologies and data across public service organisations and communities to improve outcomes for the public benefit.
This goes hand in hand with Arbor’s mission to transform the way schools work through our cloud-based MIS (Management Information System). As the fastest-growing MIS community in the UK, and a dedication to changing the way schools work for the better through the technology we provide, it seemed fitting to work with Socitm on a number of projects throughout the coming year.
Our joint commitment to driving digital transformation in the public sector led us to writing our first whitepaper together, called Transforming Education. The paper tackles many of the myths and concerns local authorities may face when embarking on large-scale digital change. You can read the paper here.
We thought this was an especially pertinent topic given the changes in the MIS market, as well as our partnership with the Herts for Learning framework (HfL.) Over 200 schools in Hertfordshire were able to smoothly transition to Arbor’s cloud-based MIS through this framework, bringing their technology into the 21st century and helping the Local Authority to meet the needs of students, parents, teachers and school staff across their community. You can read about this partnership and hear from organisations about their move to the cloud here.
If you’re thinking about making the switch to a cloud-based MIS and would like to hear how we can make that process less daunting, read our whitepaper here.
Or, if you’re part of a Local Authority and would like to speak to us, click here to book a call with one of our friendly team members.
We’re excited to announce the latest ArborFest, our twice-yearly conference for the Arbor Community, taking place on Thursday 5th May 2022. This ArborFest, we’re focusing on all of the exciting new releases we’ve recently launched and giving you a sneak peek of what’s to come over the next two terms. ArborFest: The New Features Edition
We’re excited to announce the latest ArborFest, our twice-yearly conference for the Arbor Community, taking place on Thursday 5th May 2022.
This ArborFest, we’re focusing on all of the exciting new releases we’ve recently launched and giving you a sneak peek of what’s to come over the next two terms.
ArborFest: The New Features Edition is designed to spark ideas about the different ways you could be using Arbor at your school. We’ll be shining a spotlight on the latest releases in our MIS, talking about where the system is headed next, and hosting forums for you to share your views.
After the success of our last three virtual conferences, we’ll be going fully digital again for this special edition of ArborFest. Join us from your office, playground or home to get the inside scoop on everything new in Arbor MIS.
See the full programme and book your free tickets here: https://sites.google.com/arbor-education.com/arborfest-may-2022/schedule
Whether you’ve just joined Arbor, been using it for years or just want to get a behind the scenes look, you should leave ArborFest with plenty of inspiration and practical steps to start using the new features we’ve released this year. We can’t wait to see you there!
All you need to do to join is:
How can I keep in touch?
Arbor Community | Arbor MIS
Introducing Creating a Joined-Up School, our brand new ebook for secondary school staff. Collaboration is often talked about as one of the key elements of a successful secondary school. But legacy IT systems and processes can make it hard for teams to work together seamlessly. Accessing data is difficult, reporting is complex and over-customisable, and
Collaboration is often talked about as one of the key elements of a successful secondary school. But legacy IT systems and processes can make it hard for teams to work together seamlessly. Accessing data is difficult, reporting is complex and over-customisable, and student data is spread across multiple systems instead of being in one place. All of this leads to high workload and unnecessary stress, with roles becoming isolated, and staff singing from different hymn sheets. Crucially that means important information about students falls between the cracks.
At Arbor, we believe that your MIS should help your team work more efficiently and effectively together in a more “joined up way”. Our philosophy is that an MIS should be built to be used and loved by all staff – from office staff, to teachers and senior leaders – giving schools one shared workspace to support each other and encourage collaboration.
Diving into the benefits of a shared workspace
We wanted to dig deeper into exactly how our MIS is helping secondary school staff work better, together. In February 2022, we spoke to four pairs of secondary school staff to find out how they are making the most of Arbor to work more efficiently, effectively and collaboratively.
Each of our interviewees emphasised that one key benefit of having a shared workspace was having visibility and transparency over every student, at all times. As well as this, having all changes made by any member of staff automatically update across the MIS, meaning every staff member is kept in the loop and information is always up to date. These benefits were felt across the range of roles we interviewed, including Headteachers, Data Managers, Exams Officers and SEN Admins.
Our exciting ebook for secondary schools
We’ve compiled all of these interviews into a brand new Arbor ebook, featuring staff from Baxter College, Ralph Thoresby School, Droitwich Spa High School and The Grove School, part of Marches Academy Trust. The book explores what it means to have a joined-up secondary school, and how your MIS should encourage collaboration across all roles in your school.
Each of these stories is intended to shine a light on why schools work better when they have access to a shared workspace – something that’s become all the more important in a post-Covid world.
You can download Creating a Joined-Up Secondary School for free by clicking here.
BETT
Another year, another amazing BETT show! It was great to catch up with so many of our existing 3000 customers, as well as meeting lots of new schools and trusts – we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. This time the event took place in March, meaning that we were able to
Another year, another amazing BETT show! It was great to catch up with so many of our existing 3000 customers, as well as meeting lots of new schools and trusts – we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. This time the event took place in March, meaning that we were able to enjoy the sunshine at the same time.
It was a pleasure to exhibit alongside ScholarPack for the first time at our shared stand, as the two most-loved MIS providers in the UK.. We also added a new Arbor classroom to our stand this year, meaning visitors could sit down and join demos run by our team as they highlighted some of Arbor’s best bits.
For the 6th year in a row, we took over Tapa Tapa restaurant to meet our customers, partners, and new faces over lunch, drinks and breakfast. Our Product Team also ran two interactive roadmap sessions to showcase some of the exciting developments we’ve got coming up for our secondary and MAT MIS, and to get feedback from Arbor users. If you missed the session, you can see what’s coming up on our roadmap (and add your own suggestions) here. If you’re not already using Arbor, but want to see how Arbor could work at your school or MAT, click here to watch a demo of our MIS.
Former primary Headteacher (and now Senior Partnership Manager at Arbor) Tim Ward gave a talk at the Tech in Action Theatre on five ways Arbor helps schools transform the way they work. He focused on ease of data analysis, integrated communications, how to automate time-consuming tasks, the importance of support and how Arbor is built with all staff in mind.
We had the excitement of launching not one, but two pieces of new content at BETT.
Our first piece – titled Creating a Joined-Up Secondary School – explores how a shared workspace encourages collaboration across different roles. We interviewed four pairs of secondary school staff from different schools about how they are using their MIS to work better together and to reduce their workload. Click here to receive your free copy.
Our second new book is for MAT leaders – titled Creating a Cohesive Trust – and looks into how to make sure all schools in a Trust are working well as one organisation and with a shared culture. We interviewed MAT leaders from across the country, and put our findings together with five interviews from key Trust voices, (including Bellevue Place Education Trust and The Birmingham Diocesan Multi-Academy Trust) to dive into what culture really means and what Trusts are doing to achieve cohesion. Click here to receive your free copy.
Of course, our favourite moments of every BETT come when we are able to meet customers, prospects and partners. We held breakfasts, lunches and drinks each day in the Tapa Tapa restaurant, and were fortunate enough to be joined by lots of our brilliant Arbor ambassadors.
As you can see, it’s been a very busy BETT for us – we’re already looking forward to next year!
Culture | MAT Operations | MATs
Click here to read our latest ebook, exploring how different trusts are building a shared culture. The debate around autonomy vs. alignment for schools in Trusts has been animated over the past few years, with some MATs giving their schools independence over their policies and others preferring a more centralised approach. If we accept that
Click here to read our latest ebook, exploring how different trusts are building a shared culture.
The debate around autonomy vs. alignment for schools in Trusts has been animated over the past few years, with some MATs giving their schools independence over their policies and others preferring a more centralised approach.
If we accept that trusts will always differ on how centralised to be, perhaps the more interesting question becomes: how do you create a trust which works really well together as one organisation, regardless of where you sit on that scale?
What are the factors which create a successful, shared culture in a MAT? And how do you make sure the academies in your trust benefit from being part of a greater whole?
To get a sense of the national picture, in February 2022 we surveyed 164 trust leaders from around the country. 94% of respondents agreed it’s important all schools in a MAT feel part of the same culture. In fact, many indicated that having a shared culture was fundamental to a MAT’s purpose; one respondent wrote, ‘I would wonder what ‘the point in being a trust would be if there was no sense of a shared culture.”
Having said this, nearly 1 in 5 respondents said that their trust did not have one cohesive culture which all schools feel part of, with many emphasising that this was an ongoing journey for their MAT.
One participant put this down to “each school [being] reluctant to take on ideas and processes the other schools use”, whilst another explained that “we have not had time to build a common ethos beyond our founders’ vision which was entrepreneurial.” For some MAT leaders, a shared culture is simply “a difficult thing to achieve when you are a big, mixed-phase MAT across different authorities.”
We asked those who felt they had already achieved a strong culture in their MAT about what they thought were the main factors that had led to this success. 78% of respondents to this question said that having a shared vision and values were the most important, with having clear leadership and shared staff opportunities also proving to be popular choices. One participant explained that, “shared vision and joined-up leadership are a precursor to successfully implementing any other measures.”
This speaks to a wider trend, where respondents seemed to value structural, trust-level factors over teaching and learning or pupil-driven factors, such as having a standardised curriculum, sharing the same visual identity (e.g. uniforms) and having shared opportunities for pupils across the trust.
With nearly 1 in 5 respondents saying they were yet to achieve a shared culture in their trust, we wanted to explore what some MAT leaders felt were the key drivers and best practices when it came to meaningful cultural change. To do this, we’ve compiled leaders’ viewpoints from five MATs across the country and put them together with our survey insights to create our latest ebook for MAT leaders, called Creating a Cohesive Trust. As well as our survey results and a question guide, hear from MAT leaders on how their trusts work together as one organisation, including discussions on:
Click here to download the full ebook.
Want to read more MAT content? Get stuck in with our MAT MIS series, perfect for MAT Central Teams.
MAT MIS Series | MAT Operations | MATs
Why is a good communication strategy important for your MAT? Your communications strategy should help give all your staff visibility around key information, data and policies at your trust. In turn, it should help staff feel supported and like they have access to the information they need. As important as this is, your communications strategy
Your communications strategy should help give all your staff visibility around key information, data and policies at your trust. In turn, it should help staff feel supported and like they have access to the information they need.
As important as this is, your communications strategy isn’t limited to staff only. It should also encompass students and guardians, making sure that everybody is in the loop when it comes to your trust. Plus, centralisation shouldn’t only promote a trust-down approach. Your academies want to be assured that what’s happening at school-level is being fed upwards and informing the trust’s direction. Information and actions should flow both ways: school-up and trust-down.
A great comms strategy should support two-way communication, while also helping to reduce unnecessary back and forth. We’ve put together three top tips on how your MIS can help to streamline comms at your MAT.
Centralisation is the first step towards an effective communications strategy, as it helps to move work from your schools to your central team.
Having one place to communicate with pupils, parents and staff across your trust helps to dramatically reduce staff admin. At the same time, centralisation means your comms are consistent, building on the sense of a shared culture within your trust.
In Arbor, you can send comms to any selected group, from guardians to a set group of staff or a particular group of students. For example, at the push of a button you could let all your NQTs across your trust know about an upcoming training day.
You should aim to make it easy for your central team to act on data within the system for fast, contextualised decision-making. Your MIS can – and should – do most of the heavy lifting for you, by showing you the live data you need without the hassle.
If your trust is using Arbor MAT MIS, you won’t need to login to individual schools to see your data. This means your team doesn’t have to waste time looking for the information they need or sending multiple batches of comms to different schools.
You also don’t have to log into individual school MIS to send comms. For example, in Arbor, schools can move the task of following up with absent students from individual schools to the central team. This means that all absent students across the trust on a given day are accounted for through one set of comms, reducing workload at individual school level.
Running your trust as one cohesive unit can feel challenging, but having a consistent voice from your central team is essential. This helps create a shared sense of belonging among students and staff.
Plus, sending comms out centrally means workload isn’t being unnecessarily duplicated across your schools.
For instance, if you need to send an urgent message to all your staff or guardians, Arbor allows you to quickly build, write and send an email from your central team. This means that individual schools don’t have to worry about sending their version of the comms.
Ultimately, centralising your communications should help you work as one organisation, and not many. Arbor’s MAT MIS is designed to be a mission control for your central team so that you can streamline processes and reduce unnecessary admin within all your schools.
Already using Arbor? Get started with using our centralised comms features right away – login to MAT MIS here.
Not yet using Arbor MAT MIS across your trust? Click here to book a call with our team of multi-academy trust experts and get started.
Arbor MIS | Parents & Guardians
Why is communicating with parents so important? Having good communication between parents and schools can make a big difference to a child’s education. When parents are more involved, students are often better-behaved, have higher attendance rates and a lower risk of exclusion. In turn, this leads to better results. Support from home has become even
Having good communication between parents and schools can make a big difference to a child’s education. When parents are more involved, students are often better-behaved, have higher attendance rates and a lower risk of exclusion. In turn, this leads to better results.
Support from home has become even more important given the impact of Covid on schools. With students across the country attending school virtually during lockdown, communication with parents needed to be more consistent than ever to make sure that no students were left behind.
The introduction of Ofsted’s ‘Parent View’ questionnaire and similar inspection tools is further proof of the importance of involving parents in their children’s education.
Many things can get in the way of effective communication between parents and schools. It can also be challenging for schools when they don’t have a system in place that allows parents to communicate back to them easily.
It’s time to say goodbye to paper slips and letters. With a cloud-based MIS, you can send emails, SMS messages or in-app messages to parents in bulk, or to certain groups. This not only saves time – and the environment! – but also means parents are notified of any new comms on-the-go and on their mobile phones, which encourages quicker responses and supports two-way interaction.
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 late on a specific day with just the click of a button, which makes life easier for office staff and means parents are notified in a timely way.
And it works the other way, too. Parents can also ask questions on the Arbor App (if your school has enabled this setting) or the Arbor Parent Portal, without needing to have received a message from the school first.This means two-way communication can be effectively supported, and parents and guardians can feel listened to.
Helping parents to feel involved in their child’s education can feel tricky, as you don’t want to overload guardians with information, or not be able to keep track of who has been sent what. The Parent Portal keeps everything in one place, so parents can check in on their child’s attendance, behaviour and academic progress, as well as accessing past and current report cards. In Arbor MIS, you can also see a full parent communication log, so that you know who has been sent what, and when.
Giving parents this visibility over their child means they can become more involved where needed, and are kept in the loop when things aren’t going as well as they should be.
As well as giving parents an overview of their child’s data, the Parent Portal is also the place where schools can ask parents to take action. This could be asking for permissions, payments or registering their child for clubs and trips. Another popular use of the app is as a guardian consultation/parents evening booking system, which makes it easy and less stressful for both the parents and the school staff.
By having everything in one place, both parents and schools can feel more confident that everyone has access to the data they need.
At the heart of any effective communications strategy is making sure that both parties feel listened to and have visibility over the right information. And where time is short in schools, it’s important that your technology is helping to make your strategy as time-saving and efficient as possible. At Arbor, we believe switching MIS is an opportunity to transform the way you work for the better, in that case helping to engage parents and transform the lives of students.
If you’re not already using Arbor, and want to see how it could transform how you engage with parents at your school, get in touch with our friendly team today. Call us on 0208 050 1028 or send us an email at hello@arbor-education.com to get started.
Already an Arbor customer and want to learn more about how to make the most out of your Arbor App? Read our Help Centre for more tips and tricks.
Arbor Updates | Partners
We’re delighted to announce that Arbor is now a Premier Partner of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL). ASCL is the leading professional association and trade union for all school, college and trust leaders. They support over 21,500 members across primary, secondary and post-16 education, who in turn are responsible for more than
We’re delighted to announce that Arbor is now a Premier Partner of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL).
ASCL is the leading professional association and trade union for all school, college and trust leaders. They support over 21,500 members across primary, secondary and post-16 education, who in turn are responsible for more than four million children and young people.
Arbor’s cloud-based MIS gives schools and MATs of all sizes the tools they need to work better today and be ready for tomorrow. Free staff from busywork, work more collaboratively and stay connected on the cloud – so your whole team has a shared view of what’s going on, even if you’re not together. With over 4,000 primary, secondary and special schools and 380 MATs, Arbor is the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community today.
Our partnership with ASCL will bring together two companies who want to support schools across the country. Arbor is the MIS that brings everyone together, supporting all your staff to measurably improve the way your school works. ASCL’s purpose is to support members in becoming more effective leaders and raising student achievement.
Our team will be working on this exciting new partnership throughout 2022 and 2023 – keep an eye out for all the exciting things to come as a result! You can also contact us on 0208 050 1028 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com to learn more about how we can support your school or MAT.
If you’d like to see what benefits being a member of ASCL could do for you as school staff, click here.
Arbor MIS
With SIMS only giving schools the option to renew their contracts for 3 years, many schools have told us they’re trying to work out whether they can switch MIS quickly before their SIMS license ends. To help, we’ve created a dedicated “fast track” programme so you can make a decision about your MIS quickly and
With SIMS only giving schools the option to renew their contracts for 3 years, many schools have told us they’re trying to work out whether they can switch MIS quickly before their SIMS license ends.
To help, we’ve created a dedicated “fast track” programme so you can make a decision about your MIS quickly and confidently. You can then choose to move by 1st April or 1st September 2022.
We’ve outlined the steps you’ll need to take as part of the programme, which differ based on whether your school is primary, secondary or special, or if you’re part of a trust. If you have any questions about the programme, or about moving to Arbor, feel free to give us a call on 0208 050 1028 or email us at hello@arbor-education.com.
You could be up and running on Arbor by 1st April 2022: If you want to switch MIS before your current SIMS contract ends, our Primary School Fast Track Programme makes it quick and easy to see demos, ask questions, and involve your team
Or buy yourself time and move over Summer: Don’t think you can make a decision before Half Term? You can use the SIMS break clause to buy yourself extra time, take a look at other MIS systems, and choose the best fit for your school in the Summer Term. The first step is to join our primary school product demo – click here to book your space
You now have more time to review your MIS options: If you’re not keen on using SIMS for another 3 years, this break clause gives you the chance to explore other MIS systems over Summer Term. You can request the break clause even if you’ve already signed up for the new 3 year contract
We can get you up and running on Arbor by 1st September 2022: With SIMS offering this extra time, we’re re-opening our dedicated Fast Track Programme to help secondary schools see Arbor quickly and easily before making the switch in Summer. The first step is to join our secondary school product demo – click here to book your space
You could be up and running on Arbor by 1st April 2022: If you want to switch MIS before your current SIMS contract ends, our Special School Fast Track Programme makes it quick and easy to see demos, ask questions, and involve your team
Or buy yourself time and move over Summer: Don’t think you can make a decision before Half Term? You can use the SIMS break clause to buy yourself extra time, take a look at other MIS systems, and choose the best fit for your school in the Summer Term. The first step is to join our secondary school product demo – click here to book your space
Your primary schools could be up and running on Arbor by 1st April 2022: If you want to switch MIS before your schools’ current SIMS contracts end, our Fast Track Programme makes it quick and easy to see demos, ask questions, and involve your team
Or buy yourself time and move all your schools over Summer: Don’t think you can make a decision before Half Term? Buy yourself extra time with the break clauses, take a look at other MIS systems, and choose the best fit for your trust in the Summer Term. The first step is to join an Arbor product demo for MATs – click here to book your spot at an upcoming session
As a MAT central team, it can be difficult to make sure you are getting the most out of your data and making data-driven decisions. Whether you have many or fewer schools, making sure you have the right data to hand without the right tools in place can often be manual and time-consuming. We’ve put
As a MAT central team, it can be difficult to make sure you are getting the most out of your data and making data-driven decisions. Whether you have many or fewer schools, making sure you have the right data to hand without the right tools in place can often be manual and time-consuming. We’ve put together five top tips on how to make the most of your data using your MIS, without the hassle of having to do everything manually.
Once you’ve identified this, map out which systems the data sits in, how you get it out to analyse, and how often you want to do this.
MATs using Arbor can see this kind of data immediately on login, no fiddly setup required. Our dashboards are designed so that you can monitor your KPIs and see them in context.
This live overview is designed to give you the most important data at-a-glance, where you can benchmark phases, demographics and individual schools against one another.
As soon as you login, you’ll be able to see:
As a MAT central team, sharing data with governors and stakeholders is a key part of your strategy – but it is often challenging to gather this data easily and quickly. Your MIS should help rather than hinder you with this process, as well as complementing your favourite integrations.
All your at-a-glance updates are available on your Arbor dashboard, but for instances where you need to create in-depth reports to show to the board, there’s plenty more in your toolkit as you explore your data further.
Arbor’s Custom Report Builder, for example, is designed so that you can make in-depth reports in minutes. The end results are easy to read and share with governors or stakeholders, and you can schedule them to send weekly, monthly or termly.
For more bespoke analysis, use the software you already know and love – such as Microsoft Power BI, Excel and Google Data Studio. If you’re using Arbor, our Built-In Live Feeds allow you to export your data to all these integrations.
It can be challenging to zero in on individual pupils within your MAT, but this doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Having a holistic view over all your schools is crucial to the overall strategy of your MAT, but it’s equally vital that any blips at a student-level don’t get lost in the system.
Did you know that, with Arbor, you can see every assessment mark for each student in your trust over time? This is designed so that you can quickly identify any actions you need to take, be it trust-wide or student level, giving you just one example of how your MIS helps you to zoom in and out of the data you need.
Trying to compare data when individual schools are measuring themselves against different benchmarks is a challenge.
Encourage your schools to think as a consistent unit. You can help to lead this way of thinking by creating consistency in reporting. By setting up user defined fields (UDFs) that are unique to your trust, you can push down standard ways of reporting across each of your schools.
If, for instance, you wanted to know how many students across your whole trust walk to school or have a personal laptop, you can set these up as a unique field in Arbor MIS. All of these details will then show up on each student profile, letting you see and compare responses across all your schools.
In short, your MIS is a powerful system – let it do the heavy lifting for you!
We believe your MIS should be a mission control for your MAT, with all the data you need at your fingertips. Making the most of what your MIS has to offer means you can easily act on the data points that will help your overall trust improvement plan, be it preparing for the next Ofsted inspection or to help rethink your internal policies.
Arbor’s MAT MIS is designed to be intuitive, so that nothing has to stand between you and your data. We take pride in making sure our software works around your MAT. It actively helps you work towards your goals, giving you the right data when you need it.
Get started with using some of these exciting features for your data-driven strategy right away – login to MAT MIS here.
Not yet using Arbor MIS across your trust? Click here to learn more.
EdTech | Partners
Close watchers of the Management Information System (MIS) sector often look to the MIS switching decisions of large MATs when trying to work out the direction of the market. However, activity at Local Authority level is growing, especially the rising number of frameworks with a cloud focus. This development could, in the longer term, have
Close watchers of the Management Information System (MIS) sector often look to the MIS switching decisions of large MATs when trying to work out the direction of the market.
However, activity at Local Authority level is growing, especially the rising number of frameworks with a cloud focus. This development could, in the longer term, have a more significant impact on the MIS market as a whole.
But what role do frameworks play? Moving MIS can seem like a daunting task, particularly as many schools only have experience of their current system. It’s easy to be put off by all the consideration that changing a critical piece of software brings with it, even when the change can often be much easier than imagined. There’s a need to consider timing, statutory compliance, GDPR and security before you even start to think about how easy the software is to use or how particular features will benefit your school in the long run.
Frameworks help to take away a lot of this heavy lifting, as the framework provider conducts all the necessary due diligence on behalf of the schools. Value has already been determined and price lists set.
Launched in September this year, Herts for Learning’s (HfL’s) MIS framework is one such example – and it’s rapidly being embraced by local schools.
As Catherine Tallis, Director of Business Services at Herts for Learning, explains:
We have seen first-hand, that when offered choice and value for money, schools, settings and trusts embrace the opportunity.
We’re proud at Arbor to be the first-ranked MIS provider in HfL’s cloud-based lots. This partnership means that, working alongside the HfL team, Arbor will be supporting over 200 HfL schools and trusts move to a cloud-based MIS, which can transform the way they work.
With current changes in the market, it’s likely that the importance of frameworks will continue to grow. This could be in the form of other Local Authorities creating their own versions to best meet the needs of their schools. Or alternatively (and more cost-effectively) using existing frameworks, such as HfL’s MIS Framework (which is designed for national as well as local use), to procure in a compliant and time-efficient way for their schools.
On a personal note, I’m very proud of the relationship that has been built between Arbor and the HfL team. It’s exciting to be playing even a small part in the changes taking place in the MIS market right now.
If you’d like to find out more about Arbor and the different frameworks we are part of, please get in touch. You can email us at hello@arbor-education.com
If you’d like to find out more about HfL’s new Framework, you can contact them at misFramework@hertsforlearning.co.uk.
Arbor MIS | Arbor Updates
One of the questions we get asked most by secondary schools is how can they manage their timetabling in Arbor. So we’re excited to announce that we integrate with two of the best independent timetabling products in the world, TimeTabler and Edval! Build your robust timetables using your timetable software of choice. Then if you
One of the questions we get asked most by secondary schools is how can they manage their timetabling in Arbor. So we’re excited to announce that we integrate with two of the best independent timetabling products in the world, TimeTabler and Edval!
Build your robust timetables using your timetable software of choice. Then if you need to make any small changes throughout the year, you can tweak your timetable directly in Arbor MIS.
Arbor’s integrations with TimeTabler and Edval create a connection between your student and staff data in Arbor and your timetabling data. Build reports, collect data and gain new and valuable insights, such as how timetabling methods impact your students and staff.
For example, you might notice that you’ve a number of students in one class who are below average with their grades compared to other classes. In Arbor you can easily see if your timetable could be impacting grades. Are students who have the same class earlier in the day getting better results, could small timetable changes make a difference? Our integration makes it quick and easy to make any necessary changes to your timetable midway through the year.
Want to hear more about how you can integrate Arbor with timetable software? Contact us today.
Mental Health and Wellbeing | Popular
As schools and trusts navigate this time of tough challenges and constant change, we want to offer some helpful advice for adapting to new ways of working and managing stress. Danielle Arkwright, our HR and Office Manager, has put together some guidance on how to manage any stress you may be experiencing due to all
As schools and trusts navigate this time of tough challenges and constant change, we want to offer some helpful advice for adapting to new ways of working and managing stress. Danielle Arkwright, our HR and Office Manager, has put together some guidance on how to manage any stress you may be experiencing due to all this change. Danielle is trained in creative therapies, stress and trauma, as well as having an MA in Drama Therapy from University of Roehampton, so we’re really excited to share her tips with you.
The past two years have had an effect on the wellbeing of school staff and students up and down the country. You might have had to adapt to the uncertainty of remote working or take on more work at a moment’s notice due to staff absences in schools.
Whatever your situation, you’ve probably been going at full tilt, without having the time to step back and focus on your own feelings. We therefore wanted to share ways of understanding and managing some of the difficult emotions you might experiencing.
This period of change might have left you feeling irritable, anxious or down. You may be feeling less confident than usual and having more consistent worries about body image. You might be drinking and eating more, finding it difficult to make decisions and having trouble sleeping. Maybe you’re noticing unpleasant things going on with your body, like skin irritation, muscle ache and headaches. All of the above are symptoms of stress. I’m going to cover how to recognise and manage these symptoms.
Firstly, it’s important to say that feeling these things is a perfectly normal response to such an abnormal situation. There will be millions of people across the world experiencing similar emotions. Even if you haven’t been personally affected by Coronavirus, you may be worried about you or your loved ones getting infected, or about getting the supplies you need. You may be concerned about how future restrictions might effect education or how your school is going to make sure students are able to catch-up.
Uncertainty is one of the most difficult things to face. Not knowing when things will get back to “normal” makes us feel powerless and unsafe. You might be feeling hyper-vigilant; constantly checking the news to feel more in control. The good news? You’re not alone and there are strategies you can use to cope.
Being aware of what is happening to our bodies when we feel in a panicked state can help us to step back and not judge ourselves.
Sometimes having a stress response is appropriate and helpful, for example, if you’re pushed into a dangerous or uncomfortable situation, it’s good to trust your instincts and avoid it. However, if we constantly experience stress over a long period of time, this pressure can make us feel overwhelmed or unable to cope. This is what we call “chronic” or long-term stress, and it can have an impact on both physical and mental health.
For more info, go to MentalHealth.org
There are small and meaningful things you can do to lessen the symptoms of stress. Some of these techniques might seem simple and obvious, but if practiced regularly, they can have a huge impact on your stress levels.
At Arbor, we’ve set up a dedicated wellbeing committee, who have been rolling out lots of different activities, particularly over the last few weeks, that allow colleagues to dedicate time to mental wellbeing together. We’ve had online yoga classes, weekly group mindfulness practice, fun daily challenges and art sessions. We’re also planning to send out seeds to everyone’s home address so we can start a sunflower growing competition!
Stay connected – Even if it’s a few phone calls a week, sending a funny video, or doing an organised activity like a quiz, connecting with others can remind us we’re all in this together
Stay hydrated – You might usually be really good at remembering to drink, but this can easily be forgotten when our normal routines are disrupted. Don’t forget to keep hydrated to at least cut down on unnecessary headaches
Structure your day – Routine helps us feel secure and is a great start to managing stress. It can be as simple as eating lunch at the same time (perhaps with colleagues) or a regular time you connect with your friends
Take regular breaks and go outside – When you are tasked with taking on more work, it can be easy to allow yourself to work into your breaks. Try and take a moment to yourself where you can, such as with a short evening walk to keep your mind fresh
Try mindfulness – Now is the time for an open mind (literally!). I’d really recommend trying an app like Headspace, even if only for 5 minutes a day, to allow you to step back when it all becomes too much
Remember, some days will be better than others and if you manage just a few of these things you are doing really well. My biggest advice is to lower your expectations – if you don’t feel very productive, don’t let it pull you down. When you’re kind to yourself, you’ll allow your best thoughts to flow.
I’ve put a list together of some resources I think are really helpful, particularly during the challenges we’re facing at the moment:
For coping with the Coronavirus outbreak:
General recommendations:
Tom, our Partnership Specialist, has some reading recommendations too!
If you have any tips to add to Danielle and Toms’ lists, share them with us on social media using #ArborCommunity or on our Community Forum if you’re an Arbor school.
For anybody who would like to take some time out for themselves or discover other tips for managing stress, you can watch my mindfulness session that took place at ArborFest. Available to watch for free here. We’ve also got plenty of other blogs that can help you with different aspects of wellbeing and mental health in schools during Covid – you can view them all here.
To find out how to manage and report on the Coronavirus situation in Arbor, you can read our blog, or find practical advice on our Help Centre. If you’re new to Arbor, find out if Arbor MIS is for you with an online demo – get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education.com, or give us a call on 0208 050 1028.
Arbor Insight | School Operations
With budget deficits affecting more than one in four schools in England this year, it’s especially important to have good visibility over your spending and income. We know every extra minute you have to build next year’s school budget will be crucial, so we’ve built the School’s Financial Benchmarking Report, an all-in-one PDF report, especially
With budget deficits affecting more than one in four schools in England this year, it’s especially important to have good visibility over your spending and income. We know every extra minute you have to build next year’s school budget will be crucial, so we’ve built the School’s Financial Benchmarking Report, an all-in-one PDF report, especially for your school.
Using your latest 2020/21 financial data from the DfE, your report gives you a ready-made analysis of your income and expenditure patterns over the last 3 years – so you can see the impact of Covid-19 straight away. It also shows you how your finances compare against schools like you nationally, locally and within your Local Authority.
With colour-coded graphs and expert analysis on each page, it’s ready to share in your next governor or staff meeting. It’s perfectly digestible for everyone in the room, so you’ll have time to explain your next steps in more detail.
Your report…
Great this term to…
The benchmarking data in your report can help you make better budgeting decisions, especially given the effect of Covid on schools in the past year. Your Governors will be interested to know how and why your financial approach to this disruption differs to similar schools, and how you plan to redirect your resources to support better outcomes for students.
Why not present a benchmarking report to your Governors at the next meeting?
For an even more in-depth review of how to make the most of your report, read our guide to schools’ financial benchmarking.
Arbor’s cloud-based Management Information System (MIS) can give you even greater insight over your performance and finance data. With live, role-specific dashboards and classroom management tools, your staff can get the data they need at their fingertips.
Watch a free demo here to see how Arbor can transform the way your school works.
Don’t forget to sign up (for free) to Arbor Insight where you’ll be able to purchase your School’s Financial Benchmarking report, as well as download your school’s free ASP report from 2019.
Sign up here: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/register then log in here in future: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/login
If you have any questions or would like any help with your report, you can reach the Arbor Insight team at insight@arbor-education.com or by calling us on 0207 043 1830.
If you’d like to find out how Arbor MIS could transform the way you work for the better, we’d love to see you at BETT (taking place 23rd-25th of March 2022)! Register here to meet us over lunch or tea and coffee.
Arbor Updates | MATs
The wait is over – our biggest ever release for MATs is here! When we launched our group-level MIS a few years ago, we knew that we wanted to give trusts and other central teams clear visibility into their schools, an easy way to manage reporting, and a seamless login to school MIS experience. Today
When we launched our group-level MIS a few years ago, we knew that we wanted to give trusts and other central teams clear visibility into their schools, an easy way to manage reporting, and a seamless login to school MIS experience.
Today we’re excited to release the next wave of features to build on that goal. We’ve listened to your feedback and have been busy over the past few months. We have re-shaped our vision and built out new features to make MAT MIS a true mission control for your central team.
Rather than just helping you to see and share your data, our updated MAT MIS is now built to help you run your trust as one cohesive unit, take context-driven actions, and support your central team in adding value to your schools.
What’s new:
We know that MATs handle assessments in lots of different ways – some prefer to standardise their approach, whilst others let individual schools decide.
Previously, MAT MIS let you see summative assessment data across your trust. In this new version, we’ve added the tools to help you create and roll out your assessment policy centrally. What’s more, we’ve added a range of detailed assessment analysis charts too, making MAT MIS perfect for both managing and reporting on assessments across your schools.
You can now create assessment policies at a trust level and push these down to your schools, to give you a joined up assessment offering. The new Mark and Cohort Level Analysis lets you see every assessment mark for every student in your trust, view the raw data and live feed it out for further analysis. View assessment marks over time for every student, plot their progress and identify any actions you need to take.
We’ve also introduced Attainment Over Time reports. Compare grades across schools and filter by year group, demographic, ethnicity or gender instantly. Compare over time and drill down to Student Profiles to take action.
Your central team now have a dedicated space for their staff records! MAT MIS now uniquely includes simple HR features alongside your MIS and Assessment data. Say goodbye to spreadsheets: you can now access your Single Central Record and manage staff records, contracts and checks, all together.
When it comes to creating reports, our Custom Report Writer has always been there to give you lots of flexibility. But we know that sometimes you just want to create standard reports quickly and easily.
To take Custom Report Writer to the next level we’ve added templates for key student and staff data sets, making it faster to get going with the reports you want. Use our report templates as your starting point and customise based on your needs.
Need to report on something unique to your trust? Now you can – you can now create user defined fields (UDFs) in MAT MIS unique to your trust and push down to your schools to give consistency across reports.
Need to send an urgent message to all your staff or parents? Want to move absence follow ups to your central team? Do you have a centralised comms strategy but no easy way to deliver it? MAT MIS is here to help.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve added centralised email to MAT MIS – giving you one place to communicate with all your contacts across your trust. You can email specific schools, year groups or staff roles, and target the messaging for each.
And because we all want to know if someone actually received our emails or not, you can check what’s been sent and when, and be reassured your emails have successfully been delivered.
We always wanted MAT MIS to give your team a clear view of your schools’ data on login – no fiddly setup required. But we knew that the dashboards on your homepage needed a bit of an upgrade to make them easier to use. It might look and feel similar, but your new homepage has just become a lot more powerful!
You can now filter by school or cluster, and with sticky filters you can create a filter and it will stay there until you change it. You can then share with colleagues by copying and pasting the unique filter URL.
See the schools associated with you in the new My Schools section – letting you focus on what needs your attention most.
We’re excited to launch this new feature set, and hope they’re a real game changer when it comes to managing your trust and collaborating with your schools.
If you don’t yet use Arbor, we’d love to speak to you: email hello@arbor-education.com and one of our lovely team will be in contact.
Already using our MIS and want to get started? You can do so by reading our Help Centre articles or speaking to your Account Manager.
If you’d like to read more blogs perfect for MAT staff, get stuck in with our MAT MIS series.
P.S. You may know MAT MIS as Group MIS. New name, same vision but with added features!
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. It’s not too late to get your tickets to ArborFest, which is now just days away! We’re looking forward to bringing leading schools and MATs from across the country together, with the shared goal of transforming the
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022.
It’s not too late to get your tickets to ArborFest, which is now just days away! We’re looking forward to bringing leading schools and MATs from across the country together, with the shared goal of transforming the way we work.
This year, we have six different (virtual!) stages, each packed with talks, workshops, and masterclasses on both the 2nd and 3rd of December.
Browse and book your free tickets by stage below or click here to see our full programme.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, with partner talks and a brilliant mindfulness workshop by our very own Danielle Arkwright making up some of the other must-see moments within ArborFest.
Stay in the loop by following us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
And if you haven’t already, join the Arbor Community – your online space to ask questions, share best practice and learn from, and support, fellow Arbor schools and MATs.
Look forward to seeing you soon!
I’ve never written a blog about a competitor before – I’m of the belief that you should just let your good work speak for itself. However, last week we became aware through public forums that ESS SIMS and ParentPay have written to schools and will be changing their contracts from an annual renewal to a
I’ve never written a blog about a competitor before – I’m of the belief that you should just let your good work speak for itself. However, last week we became aware through public forums that ESS SIMS and ParentPay have written to schools and will be changing their contracts from an annual renewal to a 3 year renewal, effective from 1st April 2022. This means however good our MIS system may be, schools would not be able to choose an alternative to SIMS until 2025….
This news has come very late in an already busy school term, and we have already been contacted by a large number of schools who want to know what their choices are. So rather than give my opinion on SIMS, I wanted to dispel a few myths and highlight what options schools have:
At Arbor and ScholarPack, we’re proud to be the UK’s most-loved MIS providers – giving schools a choice of systems which are easier to use, offer fully integrated modules, and save you 30% on average price-wise compared to SIMS.
To support schools who would like to move MIS by Easter, we’ve put together a dedicated “fast track” programme – designed to give you and your team everything you need to decide whether Arbor or ScholarPack is right for you before the holidays.
If you want to speak to me about any of the above, you can reach me anytime at james@arbor-education.com. Happy to chat through in more detail!
___________
A few clarifications
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. We’re extremely excited to introduce the latest edition of Arbor’s bi-annual conference, ArborFest! ArborFest is your chance to meet (online!) the growing community of over 2,000 schools and 200 MATs using Arbor to transform the way they
ArborFest is your chance to meet (online!) the growing community of over 2,000 schools and 200 MATs using Arbor to transform the way they work.
On 2nd and 3rd December, discover six stages packed with sessions designed for schools and MATs of all sizes. There’s something for everyone, whether you’re already using Arbor or just want to get a behind-the scenes look.
Join us for masterclass sessions, where you’ll learn new tips and tricks on specific Arbor modules, an interactive workshop on mindfulness, and feedback forums where you can help shape our roadmaps!
For the first time we’ll be combining our best-selling, MAT Conference series, “Building a Resilient Trust” with ArborFest. In the next couple of weeks we’ll be launching a dedicated MAT stage at ArborFest, full of thought leadership talks from experienced MAT leaders from across the country. Keep an eye out in your inbox for your special invite to this.
Plus, Dr Emma Kell will be giving a keynote speech on building resilience and creating a sustainable work-life balance, there are talks from Arbor’s CEO and Chief of Customer Success, and the best thing is – it’s completely free!
Click here to see the full programme and book your free tickets!
This year we’ve got sessions including:
Sign up for the keynote speech from Dr Emma Kell here – everyone is welcome!
Who should come?
ArborFest is open to all schools and trusts – whether you already use Arbor MIS, or are interested in learning more about us. We’ve also curated special sessions for the partners we work with.
How can I join ArborFest?
ArborFest is completely free to attend. All you need to do is:
What do I need to join ArborFest?
All you need to join a session at ArborFest is a computer, laptop or tablet, and a good internet connection. If you’re joining a Feedback Forum, you’ll also need a microphone and video camera so you can share your ideas with the group.
Stay in the loop by following us on Twitter or LinkedIn!
Look forward to seeing you in December!
We’re proud to announce that Academies Enterprise Trust, one of the largest mixed-phase academy trusts in England, has just chosen Arbor MIS for its 57 schools. More schools switch to Arbor than any other MIS, and we now support the three largest primary and secondary MATs in the UK! AET’s schools will join our growing
We’re proud to announce that Academies Enterprise Trust, one of the largest mixed-phase academy trusts in England, has just chosen Arbor MIS for its 57 schools. More schools switch to Arbor than any other MIS, and we now support the three largest primary and secondary MATs in the UK!
AET’s schools will join our growing community of over 2,000 schools and 200 MATs who have all chosen Arbor to help transform the way they work – including REAch2, the largest primary school MAT, who moved to Arbor in 2018, and United Learning who moved in 2020.
James Browning, CIO at Acadmies Enterprise Trust said:
“We are delighted that our schools will soon be able to benefit from the partnership we have formed with Arbor. As a trust we are striving to provide the best possible data and technology services to schools and Arbor MIS will form a critical part of these services.
We recognise the strategic importance of a partner too; one that can support our ambitions in using technology to support brave data led decisions and ultimately help launch children into remarkable lives, and Arbor have proven themselves to be fully aligned to this vision.”
James Weatherill, CEO at Arbor, said: “We are incredibly excited to be working with James and the team at AET to use Arbor to help schools transform the way they work and make a lasting positive impact to outcomes for their students. We’re proud that Arbor is now the MIS of choice for the largest mixed-phase MATs with secondary schools and can provide the infrastructure to help trusts scale sustainably from start-up to scale-up and beyond.”
For MATs: Arbor’s MAT MIS lets you work across all your schools from one central system, so you can collaborate more easily and really understand what’s going on. Arbor allows you to track performance from a distance, compare data across schools, manage your staff, and communicate with everyone centrally.
For Secondary Schools: Our MIS for Secondaries lets you analyse your data in any way you like. Choose our out-of-the-box Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards, or securely export your data to external analysis tools like PowerBI, Google Sheets or Excel. Roll out your behaviour policies consistently and automate time-consuming follow-ups such as booking detentions and notifying parents. Arbor also includes end-to-end exams management, cover planning, timetabling, and interventions management.
For Primary Schools: With Arbor for Primaries, daily jobs like chasing absent students and following up on incidents are simple and painless. Our MIS brings all your student and staff data together so you can easily spot patterns, and get the data you need at your fingertips to tell the full story of each pupil as they progress through school. Our primary schools love our lightning-fast registers and simple census tools too.
Academies Enterprise Trust is the latest MAT to choose Arbor – joining trusts like United Learning, REach2, Aspire, Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust, Red Kite, LEO Academy Trust, Wellspring, and Hoyland Common Academy Trust who have all moved to Arbor in recent years.
Over 1,000 schools, and 100 trusts, are likely to switch MIS this year. See why more choose Arbor than any other provider at: www.arbor-education.com
If you’d like to read more of our content for MAT leaders, get stuck in with our MAT MIS series, or our latest ebook on how to create a cohesive culture across your trust.
We’re delighted to announce that Scomis is now an accredited support partner for Arbor MIS! Scomis is a leading specialist in school support services, working with over 810 schools and MATS across England in 53 local authorities. Scomis pride themselves on providing the highest levels of service which empower everyone at all levels within a
Scomis is a leading specialist in school support services, working with over 810 schools and MATS across England in 53 local authorities.
Scomis pride themselves on providing the highest levels of service which empower everyone at all levels within a school or multi academy trust – from teachers to administrative staff and senior leadership teams. They have already ensured that their team is accredited to advanced level to support and train Arbor schools which really highlights their commitment to making sure their schools have outstanding support from the get-go.
Arbor MIS (Management Information System) is the hassle-free way for schools and trusts to get work done.
Whether you’re a primary, secondary or MAT, Arbor helps make your essential daily admin more powerful and less stressful – so everyone from your back office to your SLT can get on and focus where it matters most.
We’ve already helped more than 1900 schools and 200 MATs make the switch to our smarter cloud-based MIS.
Lorum ispum
We’re thrilled to say we are now working together to give schools the option to switch to Arbor MIS and take their support from a trusted educational ICT partner.
Working with Arbor and Scomis together gives your school or trust:
1. A cloud-based MIS which makes your essential admin and day-to-day work hassle-free
2. Access to the right data at the right time through our built-in live dashboards and custom report builder
3. Peace of mind that systems and processes are running as they should be, so that you can concentrate on teaching
4. An MIS Support Team who will help you save time on data management, help you embed your MIS and use it effectively to deliver improved outcomes
5. Direct, fast and responsive access to support experts who’ll be on hand whenever you need- Scomis has specialised in MIS support for over 40 years and is committed to delivering service excellence.
Part of Devon County Council, Scomis has traded as a not-for-profit organisation for 40 years. Any small surpluses they make are reinvested to the benefit of the public sector so that they can continue to go above and beyond for their schools. What’s more, their services are not limited to schools within the Devon area only.
To find out more about switching to Arbor with Scomis contact scomis@devon.gov.uk / 01392 385 300
Arbor Updates | EdTech
What is the EdTech Demonstrator Programme? If you’ve not heard of it, the EdTech Demonstrator Programme provides publicly-funded schools and colleges in England with access to free, tailored, peer-led advice and guidance to help develop their use of technology in support of effective teaching and learning. This follows on from 4,000 schools and colleges benefitting
If you’ve not heard of it, the EdTech Demonstrator Programme provides publicly-funded schools and colleges in England with access to free, tailored, peer-led advice and guidance to help develop their use of technology in support of effective teaching and learning.
This follows on from 4,000 schools and colleges benefitting from the programme in 2020-21, which launched shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic enforced an extended period of remote teaching and learning.
The programme provides peer-led support via a network of over 40 EdTech Demonstrators across England. The EdTech Demonstrators have shown they use technology effectively and have the capacity to help other schools and colleges do the same. The peer-led approach delivers the sharing of learning, upskilling of staff and encourages continuous development for all involved.
The programme offers help on a range of topics, including:
Sign-up to any of the below sessions to get a feel for for the programme and how it can help your school
Strategic Leadership and Creating Change
When developing your digital strategy, teaching and learning should be at the centre of your thinking. In this webinar Edtech Demonstrators will discuss the activities a senior leadership team can do to identify the teaching and learning foci for the implementation of technology.
Sign-up here
Effective Use of Technology to Support the Processes of Teaching and Learning
Technology plays a key role in our leisure, work and education, whether we are adults or still in school or college. This webinar will showcase the work being done by some of the EdTech Demonstrators to support their communities – staff, students, pupils and parents – to develop strategies to improve their digital wellbeing.
Making teaching as impactful as possible when using technology requires 3 key ingredients – appropriate classroom technology, pupil access beyond school, and very clever tools. The EdTech Demonstrators will discuss how they have brought these 3 elements together to gain the most benefit for their staff and pupils/students.
Technology Solutions; Platform Functionality
Five Edtech demonstrators will pitch their choice of the most effective KS2 learning applications to those on the webinar. The audience will then have an opportunity to vote, allowing the winner to further demonstrate how the tool supports effective teaching and learning in the classroom.
If you’d like to find out more or would like to access support from the programme you can register your interest here.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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:
The DfE also brought out a School Workload Reduction Toolkit which contains practical tools and materials that School Leaders can use address 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:
Read how LEO Academies Trust launched a brand new digital strategy
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:
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
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:
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
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
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.
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.
Case Studies
In our recent blog, we took a behind-the-scenes look at the role of the School Data Manager – a hugely important role that contributes to key decision making in schools. It’s also a position that looks quite different from school to school, depending on its size, phase and priorities. This week, we spoke to Tom Kedie,
In our recent blog, we took a behind-the-scenes look at the role of the School Data Manager – a hugely important role that contributes to key decision making in schools. It’s also a position that looks quite different from school to school, depending on its size, phase and priorities.
This week, we spoke to Tom Kedie, IT Lead at The Open Thinking Partnership, to find out about the particular challenges and responsibilities involved in his role. Read his interview with Arbor’s Senior Partnership Manager, Daniel, below.
The Open Thinking Partnership is a Multi-Academy Trust serving three special schools (Dorothy Goodman School, Cleveland House, The Fusion Academy) in Leicestershire. The trust’s Executive Headteacher, Janet Thompson, was a member of the group behind The Rochford Review, a pioneering 2016 report that made recommendations to the Government about assessment for SEN students at primary level.
Because we’re a relatively small trust, my role tends to be a “Jack of all trades”. A typical day sees me doing everything from replacing a printer cartridge, to resetting passwords, to working on our five-year IT strategy. I do have a part-time helper and the plan as we scale is for them to handle more of the administrative tasks in order to free me up to focus solely on strategic planning.
As a SEN trust, we find that the goals of standardisation that many trusts are pursuing, don’t always apply to us. For some trusts, for example, it might make sense to roll out a standard policy or IT system across the trust (such as everyone to use Chromebooks) but for us, it’s unlikely that one decision will accommodate the unique and varied set of requirements our students have. So we usually have to tailor plans and be a lot more flexible.
We had an original plan to replace Microsoft Office with Google platforms across the board, but we have to keep the flexibility of sometimes using a hybrid. For example, most of our educational work is done on Google, with our more administrational work done on Office.
I see the purpose of my role as finding ways of making staff lives as straightforward and efficient as possible through technology. I look at ways staff are working and perhaps what they’re struggling with, and reflect on better solutions. For example, when I joined, the school office was using a physical diary for events, which I knew immediately we could improve by moving online.
One of the next things we’re launching is a new Intranet using Google Sites, which will bring everything that staff have to access day to day together into one place.
Cloud-based systems give us the flexibility to allow staff access to everything they need no matter where they’re working from. Being online also means we save staff needless, time-consuming admin such as updating hard copy forms and spreadsheets, because everything is kept up-to-date automatically in systems like Arbor.
One of the main reasons we moved to Arbor was so staff could access school information without having to be physically at school. We had brought forward our Arbor implementation date to Easter 2020 which was timely just as the pandemic hit, and meant that staff could perform all their essential daily tasks (like processing payments and managing attendance) at home right away. I don’t know how this would have been possible with our previous MIS (Management Information System), which was only accessible via the school servers.
We’re also going to look into Arbor’s Single Sign On functionality which will allow staff to log into Arbor and all our Google or Microsoft apps with the same username and password, saving lots of time.
Moving to Arbor has made a huge difference to how we operate. It has not only given us more flexible and remote ways of accessing information, it’s helped us save money by getting rid of all the systems we used to use for things which you can do in Arbor.
This isn’t a hard and fast rule; some specialist systems are worth keeping alongside your MIS. But if you’re paying a lot for multiple systems to fill the gaps that your MIS can’t fill, you should question the value for money you’re getting.
The next thing we’re considering using in Arbor is the Interventions module which will allow us to create and cost specific provisions for their SEN students much more easily.
The nature of our work means our staff have to complete a high number of specialist qualifications as part of their roles. In our previous system it was near impossible to get a record of which staff had completed which training, and when they had to complete it by. Now, using Arbor means we can set up automatic checks which make it much easier to keep track of training for all staff. We’re also making use of Live Feeds to take reports out of Arbor into Google Sheets, and use conditional formatting to show us when training is due in less than three months.
Because information is much more easily accessible in Arbor, staff across the trust, including Teachers and Middle Leaders, do not have to rely on the school office when they have to get hold of contact information or other key student data. This speeds things up whenever they have to make a quick phone call to a parent, for example. Parents can update their own information via Arbor’s Parent Portal, such as when they move to a new address, and all the school office need to do is approve it, which saves them lots of time.
Arbor saves huge amounts of staff time on admin, which all adds up and frees them up to focus on more valuable tasks. The lasting impact of staff having access to Arbor remotely will also be that we can work towards having fewer site-dependent roles, and more staff who can perform tasks for the whole trust, such as routine data entry or census.
“Arbor listen, adapt and help so our school management information system is efficient and effective. We are only at the start of what we can do with Arbor and already our administration has improved considerably. It is so easy to input, access or analyse data, send information or messages to parents or staff. The visual appearance of information is clear with easy to set permissions so that security is strong.
The reporting function is very flexible, we are easily able to customise our own reports. The support and training available is very high quality, with many easy-to-follow help guides supplemented by highly effective personalised online training.”
– Janet Thompson, Headteacher, Dorothy Goodman School
If you’d like to find out how Arbor could transform the way you work, come along to our free webinars to see the system in action. You can also arrange a personalised demo here or get in touch with us at tellmemore@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
We’ve love to hear how Arbor is helping your special school improve the way you work. Why not add a comment to the Arbor Community forum of 2,378 members? Join the online Community forum today.
Tom Kedie comes from Ekte, a leading provider of Managed IT Services and an Arbor Partner. To find out more about Ekte and how they could help your school or MAT, click here.
School Improvement | School Operations
Schools are used to change. New students come in, classes rotate and cohorts move on. Leadership changes, each coming in with a new vision for how to run the school. Schools also need to react to changes in requirements, regulation and funding imposed by the Government, Ofsted and their Local Authority. Recently the Covid-19 pandemic
Schools are used to change. New students come in, classes rotate and cohorts move on. Leadership changes, each coming in with a new vision for how to run the school.
Schools also need to react to changes in requirements, regulation and funding imposed by the Government, Ofsted and their Local Authority. Recently the Covid-19 pandemic has given schools perhaps the most changes they’ve had to deal with in years, often having to adapt overnight.
Schools may well be used to changes on a daily basis, but when it comes to implementing changes to technology, ways of working and culture, schools can learn a lot from the change management principles used in industries like tech and business to make sure changes are successful and have a lasting positive impact.
Each term and each year, staff work to cycles of continual improvement with the objective to provide the best quality of education and care to their students. From updating textbooks and materials, to adjusting teaching and assessment strategies, to training and upskilling staff, to procuring new systems (like an MIS, or piece of online learning software) – schools are always looking for ways to improve their provision, to ultimately improve student outcomes.
When changes are managed well, they can be transformational. The most successful changes have a positive impact on both students and staff, bringing everyone together in the shared goal of working in new and better ways.
Changing a system, or a way of working, doesn’t automatically bring improvement. Changes need all staff behind them if they’re going to work. Often when Leadership introduces something new, some staff are not brought into the change in the right way, they may think the change is being done to them – mandated from the top. This might mean they’re either confused or sceptical, and the change therefore might not have the desired effect.
In busy schools, one of the central concerns of introducing new ways of working is the impact on staff’s already high workload and the highly time-pressured environment they work in. Staff can be reluctant to change ways of working that they’ve been familiar with for years, fearing that learning new processes will impact their ability to do their job to their best standards.
“People should come before systems… In any systems change, if people don’t have a sense of ownership or the right skills, this simply creates an added challenge.” – Jason Brown, CFO at Bath and Wells Multi-Academy Trust
Since March 2020, schools have had to deal with rapid changes to regulations, online teaching and learning, as well as changes to student and staff personal situations, their wellbeing and vulnerability. Very quickly, schools have had to get used to totally new ways of working internally, with parents, and with other services in their local area.
As with any crisis, humans tend to react and adapt to change in a curve – which starts with panic but ultimately results in finding new ways of operating under the “new normal”.
As the dust settles a little with the pandemic, schools have started to take a step back and reflect on the lessons they’ve learned over the last year, and changes they can make to prepare themselves for the future.
Hear how six MAT Leaders have coped with the pandemic, and how they’re creating sustainable plans for the future in our new free ebook for MAT leaders.
At the top of Leaders’ minds is asking themselves whether the systems they have in place can cope with flexible ways of working going forward.
Check out advice from Rachel Coldicutt, expert on tech and social impact, on how to reflect on the rapid technological changes that have happened during the pandemic, and how to plan for the future.
One of the most important changes that many schools have undertaken is to move to cloud-based systems like Arbor MIS (Management Information System), to give them more flexibility in the way they run their school. Did you know that almost 1 in 5 schools are predicted to switch to a new MIS in the next year?
At Arbor, we’re experts in change management. We’ve worked with over 1,890 schools and MATs to roll out Arbor MIS successfully to make a measurable improvement to the way they work.
In fact, 92% staff say Arbor has changed the way they work for the better. 81% say Arbor has improved how they analyse and understand data, and 92% say they save time with Arbor compared to their previous MIS.
Any big change that you introduce at your school should be planned and implemented using change management principles to make sure the change is manageable and impactful for staff. Effective change only happens when people change their habits, which is when they are adequately prepared and buy into how the change will benefit them.
“When we bring in change, it’s not mandated from the top-down; it’s based on research and best practice – for example, when we see something working well or we see a strength that we want to embed across the cluster.” – Nick Cross, CEO at Kings Group Academies
Here are our top five change management principles from our in-house experts to bear in mind when making any large scale change at your school:
The first things to think about when you’re starting a project are why you need to make the change and what you want to achieve over the long term. The reasons you need to make the change will have a lot to do with:
Once you know where you want to be, you can break down your vision into manageable steps you need to go through to get there. You’ll then be able to track the progress you make from your baseline towards your target.
Our teams at Arbor have found some great free online tools for planning, for example Miro, the smart whiteboard tool.
When you start your project it’s important to work out which of your staff will be directly involved in or impacted by the change. Putting in place roles and responsibilities across your team will help you assign clear owners for every stage in your project.
Staff who have a positive attitude towards the project will make great advocates to promote it to others. It’s often worth nominating one of these people to be your official Change Manager (or a few), who will be responsible for leading the project.
Change Managers can work closely with other staff in a “change network” in order to coordinate communication, respond to feedback, provide support and report on progress.
When schools move to Arbor nominating a Change Manager (called an Arbor Champion!) is a really useful part of the process.
When you’re undergoing a big change at your school or organisation, the easiest thing to do (but most often forgotten) is to talk to each other. When you’re coordinating the priorities of different staff members, communication can be challenging, but keeping everyone motivated and on the same page is one of the most important aspects of successful change management.
However you create your communication strategy, remember these two top tips:
It’s inevitable that some colleagues will be resistant to changing the way they work. It’s a good idea to ask them to explain why they view the change as a challenge. It could be that they’re worried their job is at risk or that they lack the right skill set.
We recommend involving everyone who is going to be impacted by the change in meetings and decisions right from the start. It’s also important to make sure there are channels for staff to give feedback throughout your project. When schools switch to a new MIS, for example, we encourage them to bring staff into demo meetings with us early on to make sure they understand how the system will impact their day-to-day work, and they can voice any concerns.
“If you know you need to make a change that’s important to the direction for the trust you want to set, have confidence. Managing ‘through’ people is too problematic, and the pace and direction of change is not guaranteed.” – Nick Cross, CEO at Kings Group Academies
Finally, when a project comes to a close, too often we think about the problems that came up along the way, rather than celebrating what went well. Marking key milestones and successes helps demonstrate the progress that your team has made together and gives due credit to everyone who has given time to the project. It also validates your reason for the change and keeps everyone on track to achieve the longer term goals of the project.
We hope our change management tips have given you some useful food for thought when you come to lead change successfully at your school or MAT.
If you’re considering moving to a cloud-based MIS at your school, we’d love to walk you through the tried-and-tested approach we take to making the move manageable and tailored to every school, with support from us every step of the way.
We work with school teams throughout the year to move them to Arbor’s cloud-based MIS (check out our blog on how to work out the best time in the year to switch). We can also manage the whole process 100% remotely – we’ve moved over 700 schools to Arbor since the pandemic began!
To learn more about Arbor MIS, arrange a personalised demo for your school here, or get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education.com | 0208 050 1028.
If you’ve recently made the move to Arbor, why not share how it went for you on the Arbor Community forum (of over 2370 users!).
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
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.
Primary schools must report on their pupils’ progress to the DfE via three statutory assessments and one 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
“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
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.
Case Studies | MAT Operations
As part of our popular webinar series for MAT Leaders – “Building a Resilient Trust” – Arbor’s CEO, James Weatherill spoke to Anna Hennell James, CEO of Orwell MAT about her strategies for guiding her trust successfully through Covid-19, as well as how to plan for the future. Anna talked specifically about her decision to
As part of our popular webinar series for MAT Leaders – “Building a Resilient Trust” – Arbor’s CEO, James Weatherill spoke to Anna Hennell James, CEO of Orwell MAT about her strategies for guiding her trust successfully through Covid-19, as well as how to plan for the future.
Anna talked specifically about her decision to move Orwell to a new cloud-based MIS in order to work more effectively as a Central Team during the pandemic and going forward.
You can catch up on Anna’s interview, which took place on 24th February 2021, below. If you’re a fellow MAT Leader, it has some great practical tips on that you can take back and reflect on for how to lead your own trust through this next stage of the pandemic.
You can also catch up on key interviews from the rest of the series in our exciting new ebook. Download your copy of the free ebook for MAT leaders here.
Orwell Multi Academy Trust was founded in 2017 and is made up of six primary schools in Suffolk. Several of the schools are in areas of high deprivation, with high rates of free school meals and pupil premium. One of the schools is currently being sponsored. Prior to being CEO, Anna Hennell James was a Headteacher at one of the schools in the trust. She’s worked in education for her whole professional life. Orwell MAT switched from SIMS to Arbor’s cloud MIS in September 2020.
We chose to change our MIS system for a variety of reasons, and we carried on with the decision even when the pandemic hit. When we formed the trust, we shouldn’t have been quite so reluctant to maintain the status quo. Having seen the impact of changing systems, the only thing I’d say in retrospect is that I wish we’d done it sooner!
The biggest driver was the frustration of staff who work centrally. We’re a relatively small trust and a pretty small team, so we don’t have huge capacity. Any time we wanted any information around employees and staffing, or pupil data and attendance, I had to contact each school separately.
To start with, we felt that was something we could live with, but it soon became frustrating. If trustees asked us for information, it was a pain to have to ask busy schools to send it over. I’d then have to collate it and pull it together myself. It became quickly apparent that we needed something that did this for us, and could show us all schools at once. We needed a cloud-based system.
We involved quite a lot of people in the decision, but on a manageable scale. In January of 2020, I attended BETT (British Educational Training and Technology Show) with our CFO, a couple of Headteachers, plus a couple of Teachers. I thought it was important for people who would be using the system to come along to see what was on offer.
After having narrowed it down a bit, we arranged demonstrations and, by the time they all happened, everything had moved online. At the demonstration stage, we involved all of the Headteachers and Office Managers. Because we had so many different stakeholders involved in the decision, we managed to cover all aspects, and it meant we were confident in making the right decision for everyone. That’s the approach we take on any kind of change that we’re going through. If we’re looking for a new system or a new project, we always hunt in a pack.
When we first started looking for a new system, we hadn’t planned to roll it out as quickly as we did. When we realised it could be relatively straightforward, we brought the switch forward. One of the things that helped us was a basic Excel spreadsheet, a bit like a Gantt chart which had all the things that were going on across the trust. When we started looking at making the change, we plotted it in and we could see what else was happening and where pinch points might be.
We made the decision to switch on 1st September 2020 and gave ourselves the Summer Term to get trained and ready. Starting the new school year on a new system was great because it meant no one could procrastinate. It was actually a very smooth process.
To be honest, not very. I think that’s because, although people were very familiar and comfortable with the systems they were using, they recognised that they weren’t the most efficient and that it was quite difficult to get the information they wanted out. Once people had seen the demonstrations of Arbor and could see what it could do, they were positive about the change.
We also had a couple of eager Headteachers who wanted to start even sooner and were asking if there was a test site to practise on, which there was. That was really helpful because people felt they could go in in their own time and have a play around. This built confidence and, once those Headteachers started sharing what they found, the excitement rippled out and encouraged more people to start getting involved. By the time we actually hit the date to press the button and switch, people were already feeling confident and were ready to make the move over.
I don’t think we’ve been disadvantaged at all by the training not happening in person. In fact, I think people preferred it because some Office Managers chose to do the online training from home so they weren’t getting interruptions in the office. We were able to offer adjusted timings for training, and the beauty of it was that it was all recorded and sent out straight after each live session.
Arbor also provides very comprehensive workbooks and instructions and the Help Centre is really intuitively organised. Our team felt they could help themselves and get ready for the change. Plus, they had the option to speak to somebody if they needed to, so people felt there was a lot of support around it. It has made us discuss the other sorts of training we do at Orwell, because whilst we all miss being in the same room as each other, it’s definitely the most efficient and effective option.
I don’t think anything went hugely wrong. One thing that happened was we ended up with four schools going live on 1st September and two going live on 1st November. In hindsight it would have been better to have everyone go live at the same time. From 1st of November, we’ve had everybody using the system and that’s been when we’ve seen the real impact of it.
Any fears about losing data or children disappearing off the system, never materialised. There were only a few little issues around historical data that were transferred in, but this was due to mistakes in the old system and it was fixed very quickly.
When we were looking, we wanted to be sure the other systems we use would sync with the MIS. For example, we use CPOMS across all of the schools for recording safeguarding and Inventory for door systems, which all sync with Arbor.
The move to Arbor is causing us to reflect on our culture and our approach, as well as the systems we’re using. It highlighted the fact that, although we mostly leave our schools to do what they do best, there are times when it could be beneficial to have more consistency and alignment. For example, as a trust we’ve never imposed a particular way of doing assessments. Assessment data that comes to me is always summative, and the formative process that people go through in schools is up to them. We’re now realising that if we can have a singular system that everyone is putting data into, it would be transformative. We now have an assessment working party who have had training from Arbor on the Assessment module and we’re getting a few bits personalised. This will help us become more of a joined-up trust with more robust discussion and moderation because we’ll be comparing like for like.
I don’t think we would have changed anything because the process was well managed and there was a lot of hand-holding throughout. Everybody was given a really clear timeline of dates and deadlines and I had weekly meetings with the schools to check in and receive feedback on any issues that might be cropping up. The Arbor team is clearly very experienced at doing the process.
It’s made a huge difference and made our lives a lot easier. We get an overview of the trust as soon as we log into the Group MIS dashboard, and we can also drop into individual institutions to get things. I have absolutely loved the Covid-19 attendance dashboard for each school because when I’m reporting to trustees or to the RSC on attendance, or the proportion of our students with EHCPs or FSM, it’s all there for me. I just love it.
It’s also been great in terms of openness between the trust team and the schools because the schools know that we’re working in the same system. We don’t have permission to change anything, but they know what we can see. This has led to discussions around more open sharing of other things.
There’s so much you can do in Arbor that we’re not necessarily doing. One of our schools that is keen to use Arbor to its full capacity is using it as the place to record all their staff performance management. The Headteacher has given me access to that so I can go in and get a sense of what’s being worked on across the whole school and how that compares to the other schools. It’s generating conversations around the commonality of need for CPD in particular areas such as leadership development. It’s changing our way of thinking about a lot of things and we’re only at the very early stages of using it.
I’d say if you’re going to change MIS, make sure you include the right people in the decision making process.
It’s also not as scary as you think. You can often delay these things if you think it’s not the right time. But honestly, our move was incredibly smooth. It was a really tight, well managed process with clear systems, clear lines of communication, good contact and support for everyone involved. This has carried on once we moved over. I think if you can pick the right system with the right support, you can feel confident that even if there are some glitches, they’ll be managed quickly. If we’d had done it four years ago it would have made our life so much easier.
Data and Insight | School Operations
School Data Managers play a vital role in how schools run, yet they can sometimes get forgotten. Doing everything from resetting passwords, to churning out graphs and spreadsheets – it’s a really varied role. Often as one of the only members of staff with highly technical skills, it can sometimes seem like magic how Data
School Data Managers play a vital role in how schools run, yet they can sometimes get forgotten. Doing everything from resetting passwords, to churning out graphs and spreadsheets – it’s a really varied role.
Often as one of the only members of staff with highly technical skills, it can sometimes seem like magic how Data Managers are able to transform data into something understandable for other staff. But behind the scenes there’s a lot of (usually manual) work involved.
Arbor Key Account Manager, Leanne, who worked as a Data Manager for almost 12 years, mostly for large secondaries in London, shares her insights into what this important role involves day to day.
“Being a Data Manager is a really rewarding role, especially in the right school and I am lucky to have worked in some of them. I loved my job, loved helping people and seeing small things I did have big ripple effects on the staff and students I worked with.”
The role of Data Managers is varied and complex, with the results of their work driving a lot of the decisions made in schools. Depending on the school, the Data Manager will either be relatively specialised on data analysis or perform quite a generalist role, covering IT and systems admin. Some Data Managers are responsible for exams and timetabling, whilst some schools have separate Exams Officers and Timetablers. Schools also usually have a separate Attendance officer who handles attendance data.
The general areas of oversight for a Data Manager are usually managing the core systems of the school, including the MIS (Management Information System), collecting data from Teachers, generating key reports for SLT and Heads of Department, and managing statutory reporting and census.
Data Managers are expected to be the expert on everything about all software in the school. A large part of the role is therefore training colleagues on how to use new systems, as well as supporting them on how to manipulate and learn from data.
In busy schools, staff roles often include lots of other responsibilities around school, and the Data Manager is no different. They will commonly have lunch or break duties, and will often help colleagues out with general daily tasks like answering calls, covering reception, post, collecting students from classrooms and taking them to reception.
Data Managers often have to also respond to urgent queries or requests from colleagues that could come at any time, sometimes when they’re halfway through doing something else. The most time is usually taken up with working out exactly what the staff member is looking for, for instance what they want to use that piece of data or report for, before they can work out a solution.
System admin
Managing data
Data analysis and reporting
Statutory reporting and census
Data collection
IT support
General admin
Arbor’s built-in data dashboards give staff at all levels accessible data they can understand and act on day to day. In fact, 81% of Arbor users say Arbor has improved how they understand and analyse their data.
Data Managers say this helps reduce their workload as staff can complete their routine reporting without having to go to their Data Manager for every small request. Instead, Data Managers have more time to get on with the deeper, more satisfying analysis that they love. Our Microsoft Power BI Connector, for example, makes it easy to explore Arbor data in the popular analytics tool, Power BI.
Read more about Arbor’s Microsoft Power BI Connector here. If you’re an Arbor school and you’d like to get started with our Microsoft Power BI Connector, get in touch with your Account Manager at account.management@arbor-education.com .
Discover 5 ways Data Managers are using Microsoft Power BI today
Hear more from Kate Ferris, Data and Systems Analyst at Baxter College, about how using Arbor has transformed how she works with her colleagues.
If you’d like to find out how Arbor could transform the way you work, come along to our free webinars to see the system in action. You can also arrange a personalised demo here or get in touch with us at hello@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
You can also download our guide to Arbor for Data Managers for free here.
Last term, we launched Part Two of our popular webinar series for MAT Leaders – “Building a Resilient Trust”. In each webinar, Arbor’s CEO, James Weatherill spoke to MAT leaders and industry experts about their strategies for running a trust successfully during Covid-19 and beyond. The series explored different facets of “resilience”, including culture, change
Last term, we launched Part Two of our popular webinar series for MAT Leaders – “Building a Resilient Trust”. In each webinar, Arbor’s CEO, James Weatherill spoke to MAT leaders and industry experts about their strategies for running a trust successfully during Covid-19 and beyond.
The series explored different facets of “resilience”, including culture, change management, school improvement, and finance, and gave MAT leaders the chance to hear from peers, share ideas and leave with practical tips to take back to their own trust.
In case you missed the series, don’t worry! We’ve written up all the talks in an exciting new ebook. Download your copy of the free ebook for MAT leaders here.
In your ebook, you’ll find interviews with established MAT leaders (from Ormiston Academies Trust, Academy Transformation Trust, Romero Catholic Academy Trust and more) as well as industry experts, sharing all the lessons they’ve learned from the past 12 months. They also share their advice for how to rewrite your five-year trust development plans with new, more ambitious goals.
You’ll discover how to manage change more effectively, hear ideas on what assessment can and should look like in the future, as well as the steps to making your trust more financially sustainable.
You’ll find yourself reflecting on how to prioritise the things that have the greatest impact at your trust, like how to create a culture of learning to attract and retain the best staff.
Here are the interviews you’ve got in store:
Fill in your details on this page and we’ll email you a PDF copy of this new ebook, for free. We’ll also include “Building a Resilient Trust” Part One, so you can read how another group of MAT leaders navigated the first wave of the pandemic.
Our “Building a Resilient Trust” webinar series is part of our wider MAT events programme, attended by over 600 trust leaders this year so far. We’ve got lots of other great events coming up this term with spaces still available.
On 1st and 8th July, we’re holding two intimate and interactive roundtables online (limited to 12 places each) on scaling, systems and leading successful change at your trust. The discussion will be led by our co-hosts Owen McColgan, CEO of Howard Trust and Nick Doy, Head of Data Quality at Nicholas Postgate, who’ll share how they approached a recent trust-wide systems change.
Read the full agenda and book your free spot at a roundtable here.
If you’re starting to think about a move to the cloud but don’t know where to start, our Switching Made Simple webinars are perfect for you. We’ll talk you through the process from start to finish so you can see what’s really involved in switching MIS and what the next steps would be for you. Perfect for your school level staff.
Click the links to book your spot below:
5 Ways Arbor Will Transform the Way That you Work Wednesday 30th June, 10am; Thursday 8th July, 2pm
Switching MIS Made Simple for Primary Schools Tuesday 29th June, 2pm; Wednesday 7th July, 10am
Switching MIS Made Simple for Secondary Schools Tuesday 29th June, 10am; Tuesday 6th July, 2pm
At Arbor we pride ourselves on working closely with school staff across the country to help us develop the tools that will make the biggest improvement to the way they work. 92% of school staff say Arbor has changed the way they work for the better. 81% say Arbor has improved how they analyse and
At Arbor we pride ourselves on working closely with school staff across the country to help us develop the tools that will make the biggest improvement to the way they work.
92% of school staff say Arbor has changed the way they work for the better.
81% say Arbor has improved how they analyse and understand data.
92% save time with Arbor compared to their previous MIS.
It’s also important to us to hire former educators and education experts on our staff. With over 15 former teachers and many more who know schools inside out, we live and breathe school life!
We recently asked four of our former Teachers to share a little bit about their experience working for Arbor. They’ve also got some tips for current Teachers looking to brand into EdTech, too. Watch their interviews below.
We asked Joe: How do you feel your school/teaching experience has allowed you to add value and become a success at Arbor?
We asked Stephen: What steps did you need to put in place to move into the business sector and what advice would you give someone wanting to make the move?
We asked Chris: How has your school experience allowed you to be a success at Arbor and do you also get the same satisfaction after moving over to the business/MIS side?
We asked Maggie: What were the main challenges for you moving to the business side and how did you overcome them?
Discover the live roles we’re hiring for today! https://careers.arbor-education.com/
With students at different levels, with different learning styles, behaviours and personal issues, classrooms can be hugely diverse and fast-paced environments where Teachers have a lot to juggle. Whilst keeping everyone to task, Teachers also have their own list of admin tasks to think about, technology to navigate, as well as incidents and distractions to
With students at different levels, with different learning styles, behaviours and personal issues, classrooms can be hugely diverse and fast-paced environments where Teachers have a lot to juggle. Whilst keeping everyone to task, Teachers also have their own list of admin tasks to think about, technology to navigate, as well as incidents and distractions to deal with during the lesson.
When social distancing, staggered start times and other covid restrictions are added to the mix, keeping the classroom a balanced and supportive environment has been harder than ever in recent months.
With over 15 former educators here at Arbor, we’ve put our heads together and boiled down our top ten tips for successful classroom management – from building relationships, to encouraging cooperation, to the theory behind the best seating plans. Let us know what you think on Twitter #BetterWorkingLife.
We also want to tell you about Arbor’s My Classroom – our all-in-one tool that combines seating plans, registers, behaviour management and now attainment data, to take the hassle out of admin in the classroom. Jump down to find out more.
The first tip (from Arbor Partnership Manager, Daniel) is to get to know your students as early as possible in the year. It might sound obvious, but knowing the names and a few personal details about the students in front of you helps you build their respect by showing them you care. It’s also helpful to be able to direct questions at individuals to keep everyone engaged.
It’s handy if you have a system in front of you (like Arbor’s My Classroom) that shows you at a glance your students’ names, photos, SEN status, pastoral notes, their behaviour and how they’re doing against their targets – all on your seating plan. This is particularly useful for Teachers in secondary schools who have lots of faces to remember!
The second tip (from Arbor’s Head of Training, Rebekah) is to adapt your teaching style to the space you’re in. Perhaps especially important if you’re teaching in non-traditional layouts like theatre or art rooms, knowing the types of activities that will work best in your space is key to keeping your class on task. Be aware of challenges that the space might pose, like curtains or beams that students might be tempted to play with, or corners where not everyone can see you.
To make the best use of your classroom space, it’s also vital to arrange your students in a way they’ll work at their best. Make sure you have as much information as possible about your students to hand when creating your seating plan – from demographic and pastoral information, to behaviour patterns, to academic ability, as well as your own knowledge of their learning styles and personalities. This will help you make sure they influence their neighbours positively – either challenging or supporting each other. Stay flexible, too. Be prepared to switch around combinations of students to try a better arrangement if it’s not working.
As all Teachers know, the best lessons involve less Teacher talk and more student-led learning. Arbor Partnership Manager, Andrew, recommends the best way to achieve student engagement is through cooperative learning. His top tips are to make sure group activities involve clear instructions and differentiated roles for students roles (e.g. spokesperson, reporter, researcher) to allow for different strengths and learning styles. It’s good to have a variety of tasks available to allow for students’ different starting points, and to make sure the learning is accessible and suitably challenging for everyone.
Cooperative learning approaches give students the chance to take ownership of what they’re learning. Students can also build skills in decision-making, communication, and gain self-confidence. Take a look at these cooperative learning strategies you could put in place in your classroom – from “Think, pair, share” to “Corners”.
AfL (Assessment for Learning) is all about making sure you have ways of knowing how well your students are grasping what they’re learning, so you can adapt and improve your teaching methods. The best Teachers build AfL into their lessons as a natural part of what they do. For example, to find out if the class is with you, ask an open question or, better yet, ask them to give an example, rather than asking them “do you understand?” which they can respond yes or no to.
Arbor’s Head of Partnerships, David, says AfL is also about allowing students to become more independent learners. When students are encouraged to take an active role in their learning, they can see clearly how they’re doing, where they’re going and what they need to do to get there. You can achieve this by giving students the chance to demonstrate how they’re doing themselves. For example, ask students to go to a certain corner of the room in response to a multiple-choice question, or to put their work in a colour-coded drawer as they leave to indicate how they think they did.
A recent survey of adults showed that 89% of people remember not what they were taught but how they were treated by their Teachers. Arbor’s Product Manager, Stephen, says building relationships with students was the most important technique he implemented as a Teacher. The key is knowing what each of your students respond well to, and adapting your approach to make sure you connect to them on their level.
For example, for some students who are used to a lot of shouting at home, it’s unlikely that raising your voice in a classroom will help with behaviour management. For students who don’t get any praise at home, praise will work as a motivational tool in the classroom. However, this might not work for other students who might respond better to fair, directed feedback.
The best piece of advice Arbor’s Key Account Manager, Maggie, has to share is to always follow through with what you say. This shows your students they can rely on you and is key to earning their respect. If you say you’ll help them with their homework, arrange a time and do it. If you say you’d love to watch them play football, go and watch them.
Being consistent is also central to managing behaviour. Be consistent with how you react and respond to certain behaviours and set clear expectations for all your lessons. If you say students have to stay during break time for one minute in silence, time one minute visibly and if there isn’t silence, start again. Students will always notice if there seems to be one rule for some and one for others. And remember, if you make a mistake, own up to it.
Our next tip comes from Arbor’s Software Trainer, Zuhal, who explains the importance of keeping lines of communication open with families, and remembering to emphasise the positives as much as the negatives. Sometimes it can be easy to always phone home about causes of concern. But making sure you also take the time to talk through what students are doing well (not just at Parents’ Evenings) helps build a positive relationship with parents and guardians, which will filter down to the students, too.
You should find that creating this atmosphere makes families more confident to reach out to the school for support, especially if their child isn’t showing the same behaviour at home as they do at school. Zuhal found this particularly helpful with SEN students.
When it comes to managing behaviour, Arbor’s Head of Product, Hilary, says your starting point should be that no child is simply misbehaving for the sake of it. Rather, their behaviour is as a result of a range of factors – from something that happened at home the night before, to their relationship with other students, to their emotional needs and struggles. Hilary used the iceberg model to explain this to colleagues and families – the tip of the iceberg above the water is the behaviour you can see, and under the surface is what the child is going through.
Understanding why young people are behaving a certain way will help you to look past any stereotypes or biases you might have built, such as those you might label “the trouble maker”. Allowing for what students are dealing with will help you build a better rapport and encourage students to open up and participate in class.
Get advice from Educational Psychologist Dr Rob Long on how to understand and better manage “difficult” behaviour in the classroom.
Arbor Software Trainer, Joe, shares the success he found implementing a “growth mindset” with his classes. This approach can apply both to the way you present learning material and to the language you use in the classroom, and is all about emphasising that students are on a journey of development. Instead of talking in terms of things students can or can’t do, it’s about emphasising that they’re things they can’t do yet. The main thing is to show students it’s okay to not quite get things right at first – and that actually this is the point!
Another aspect to developing a growth mindset is encouraging regular reflection on learning. Carve out time for “DIRT” (Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time), where the class looks through the week’s learning and the feedback they’ve received, respond to it and set targets for the following week. Make sure these sessions are open, honest and optimistic – allowing students to learn from and support each other.
So many things can crop up when you’re trying to keep your class engaged, not to mention the long list of admin tasks to take care of at some point during the lesson. From announcements to give, to behaviour points to award, to homework to collect, to safeguarding concerns to note. With all this on your mind, it’s best to have a tool in the classroom (like Arbor’s My Classroom) that makes admin tasks quick and easy so they don’t have to disrupt the flow of the lesson.
The former Teachers at Arbor have also been hard at work this past year developing teacher-focused features in Arbor MIS. My Classroom is our popular, all-in-one classroom management tool designed to help you organise your lessons and manage your class seamlessly – giving you your time back to focus on teaching and learning instead.
My Classroom brings seating plans, registers, behaviour management and attainment into one place for the first time. Create your seating plans using easy drag-and-drop blocks, take the register and record behaviour points directly onto your plan throughout the lesson – either on your tablet or desktop.
See key information about each of your students directly on your seating plan, including student photos, demographic data, plus how your students are doing against key targets. With all this information to hand, My Classroom helps you arrange your students in a way you know they’ll learn best.
The best part is that My Classroom is powered by Arbor MIS, which means you can follow up on absences or behaviour straight from your seating plan, without switching screens. Plus, everything you capture in My Classroom shows up on students’ profiles, helping you share information with staff across school.
If you’re new to Arbor, our Partnership Managers would love to show you how Arbor’s intuitive tools could help you transform how your school or MAT works. Get in touch to book a free demo here.
If you’re already part of the Arbor community but don’t have My Classroom, get in touch with your Account Manager to learn more at account.management@arbor-education.com
Popular | School Improvement
School staff work hard every day to improve standards and student outcomes. But it’s the responsibility of School Leaders to bring staff, parents and the wider school community together behind core values and objectives which focus their attention and efforts. As students’ circumstances have changed during the pandemic, schools have had to be flexible with
School staff work hard every day to improve standards and student outcomes. But it’s the responsibility of School Leaders to bring staff, parents and the wider school community together behind core values and objectives which focus their attention and efforts.
As students’ circumstances have changed during the pandemic, schools have had to be flexible with their resources, making quick decisions in order to prioritise what’s best for students. In many cases, schools have made vast improvements to the way they work, faster than they would have before. More students now have access to devices at home, staff have gained extra digital skills, and school communities have been brought closer together.
Above all, Covid-19 has brought to light the students who need the most support, and schools now have the opportunity now to put objectives in place that will really help them long term.
The School Improvement Plan or School Development Plan (SDP) is the central document in which School Leaders map out their strategic plans for the development of their school. Based around the school’s established values, it sets out the actions and resources needed to achieve priority objectives. It is often shared with Governors and published on the school’s website.
All other key plans, such as staff appraisal objectives and CPD programmes tie back to the SDP. The school’s strategic financial plan will also link closely to the strategic improvement objectives, in order to plan sufficient funding to achieve them.
Every school’s SDP will look different, but the most important thing about an SDP is that it’s developed based on evidence of where the school is at, and what it can realistically achieve in order to best support its students. It is also a living document that’s reviewed and updated in an ongoing cycle.
When you come to write your SDP, there are several resources you can draw on. First, refer to your four-year strategic plan which will provide the foundation of your key aims. Second, return to last year’s plan to assess what you’ve achieved and how your priorities might have changed. Third, your strategic financial plan (usually written in January) will show you where you’ve committed spending, and what still needs to be addressed as part of your four-year plan.
Next, remember you’ll need to back up each of your objectives with evidence showing why you’ve identified each focus area, and what your actions will achieve. For this, you’ll need to first carry out a school self-evaluation (SSE) which will help you judge your school’s past performance, strengths and areas for improvement. Your SDP should then align with each of the points in your SSE report.
Check out guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation on how to create school plans this year.
The first (and arguably most important) step in creating an effective SDP is to really understand your school’s performance in depth, including the attainment gaps between different student groups and the factors that cause them. You should look at both summative and internal assessment data in order to build a full picture of how students have been doing this year compared to previous years.
Discover how Arbor’s free Insight performance reports could help you prepare your SDP.
In combination with your past performance data, you can also look at data from other sources, such as:
Look critically at your performance data before writing up your SSE report. Ask questions like “Why did these trends happen?” and “Are they typical of our school?” These will help to make sure your judgments are not based on any bias or previous assumptions.
The best way to make informed judgments about your school’s performance is to benchmark against schools like you nationally and in your LA (local authority). Arbor Insight reports will help you with this, by showing you:
But you still might not know:
You can take two approaches to help answer these questions:
1. The Socratic approach – Think about your data from various angles (e.g. “Do boys underperform in reading in all year groups?”, “How does this affect SEN pupils?”, “Should we look for another reason for this?”) to uncover any hidden assumptions you might have before taking action
2. Ask “why” 5 times – This single, repetitive question is a really useful way to dig deeper into the context behind your results and again, challenge your assumptions
A big focus of most SDPs this year will be how to get students back on track after lockdown. Your Governors will need to understand the impact of partial school closures on students’ learning and wellbeing to help them review your plans for recovery.
To understand the impact of Covid-19 on your students’ attainment, you might have carried out various baseline tests, and compared these results with where students were at before lockdown. Full and broad evidence of students’ prior performance will help you reliably understand what has changed and set the most effective goals for how to get students back on track.
Think about other areas that have been impacted by the pandemic, such as students’ mental health and wellbeing. Find out how The Mead Academy Trust investigated how students’ vulnerability, educational needs and wellbeing had changed as a result of Covid-19, and the interventions they’re putting in place to support students.
Similarly, hear how Aspirations Academies Trust are banning the terms “catch-up” and “behind”, to focus on positive recovery.
Schools should structure their School Improvement Plans (or School Development Plans) around Ofsted’s four inspection categories:
1. Quality of education 2. Behaviour and attitudes 3. Personal development 4. Leadership and management
Under each category, you should map out your key objectives with actions and targets associated with each of them. A good model to use is SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-framed), which means making clear the associated costs, timescales and resourcing needed to achieve each of your objectives.
Get advice from education advisor, writer and speaker, Mary Myatt on how to carve out time for satisfying work on curriculum improvement.
Check out these helpful articles in Schools Week about how to improve sectors of your curriculum: Science, Maths, RE.
If you’re a new Headteacher, it can be really useful to have a look at example SDPs from other schools, particularly those with similar sizes, cohorts, or in your geographical area.
The Key for School Leaders has some great guidance and resources on creating your SDP, including a school improvement plan (SIP) template and checklists to help you implement and evaluate your SIP.
As you’re writing your plan, it’s important to share your findings, judgments and reasoning with your Governors and staff, so you can work together to perfect it. Governors will especially have an eye on how you plan to close certain high-profile gaps in attainment such as disadvantaged students.
As the school year goes on, the needs of your students may change (the world they live in certainly will!). That’s why your school improvement planning should be done in cycles; with ongoing evaluation throughout the year to help you figure out what’s working.
If the objectives you set in your SDP are measurable, you’ll know what evidence you need to look at to work out if you’re on track. The most effective way to track the impact of your school improvement initiatives is in your MIS. Systems like Arbor give you a clear, visual view of how your students are doing at school or MAT level across behaviour, attendance and attainment. It’s then easy to problem-solve your student performance and understand the root factors using relevant information such as students’ background and personal circumstances.
This evidence will show you where you might need to tweak the focus of your objectives so they have a more meaningful impact.
Got a question about how to write an effective School Development Plan? Why not ask fellow schools in the Arbor Community of over 1,800 schools? Join the online Community forum today.
Want to find out how our schools use Arbor to work faster, smarter and collaborate more? Listen to our case studies here.
2020-21 was one of the most challenging years on record for schools. From navigating changing DfE guidance, to keeping tabs on vulnerable students, staff have had a lot on their plate. On top of all this, leadership teams have had to grapple with legacy, server-based software, which slowed schools down as they adapted the way
2020-21 was one of the most challenging years on record for schools. From navigating changing DfE guidance, to keeping tabs on vulnerable students, staff have had a lot on their plate.
On top of all this, leadership teams have had to grapple with legacy, server-based software, which slowed schools down as they adapted the way they work.
Next year won’t be without its challenges, so you’ll need smart, flexible systems that can do the heavy lifting for you.
That’s why hundreds of schools are switching to a cloud-based MIS like Arbor to help them react to anything that’s thrown at them, without missing a thing. Over 600 schools have moved to Arbor since March 2020.
Check out The Arbor Guide to managing your school during Covid-19 – based on the learnings we’ve gathered from schools and MATs during the pandemic.
1. Stay on top of DfE requirements 2. Get the information you need wherever you are 3. Pivot and stay flexible
Let’s break that down…
Having a cloud-based MIS in place makes it easy to adapt to rapid changes in regulation, like socially distanced timetabling, new attendance and absence codes or key worker status.
Whatever the DfE introduces, Arbor can make updates to the system as soon as we can (sometimes even on the same day), meaning you can keep on top of new requirements. No more patches or workarounds!
You’ll also have everything you need to follow the new DfE reporting requirements thanks to Arbor’s Covid-19 dashboard. Every day, Arbor crunches the numbers for you across all the DfE’s categories, including students with an EHC plan, a social worker and confirmed cases of Covid-19, giving you everything you need to submit the Daily Form each morning.
Schools are having to work in lots of new ways – some Teachers are moving between classrooms, some staff are quarantining at home, and some schools are going into local lockdown.
In order to keep your school running whatever happens, your staff need access to their student information so they can complete their essential tasks, like tracking attendance, reporting on vulnerable students and following up with parents and guardians – all from wherever they’re working.
That’s where a cloud-based MIS like Arbor comes in, which gives staff all the data they need wherever they are, without being restricted to school computers or setting up a VPN. Plus, Arbor’s people-friendly dashboards help you get insight from your data and take action in a few clicks.
In an unpredictable term, you might have to change your social distancing arrangements, timetables and staff rotas at short notice.
Arbor gives you the flexibility to plan or switch up your arrangements whenever you need to. Here are just some of the ways the system will work around you:
Because managing your school how you need to right now is so difficult with a server-based system, the question has become not if you should move to the cloud but when.
To help, we’ve made the process of moving to Arbor simple and we can get you up and running in a matter of weeks, 100% remotely. From migrating your data to Arbor, to training up your staff to use the system confidently, a dedicated Project Manager will guide you every step of the way.
Read about how Woodland Academy Trust moved to Arbor remotely during lockdown, along with more than 600 schools!
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
People buy and sell every day, and schools are no exception. As a product manager developing payment systems, the main ‘use cases’ I consider when thinking about school payments include school meals, paid clubs, and field trips. There are a lot of other use cases depending on what kind of additional services the school provides,
People buy and sell every day, and schools are no exception. As a product manager developing payment systems, the main ‘use cases’ I consider when thinking about school payments include school meals, paid clubs, and field trips. There are a lot of other use cases depending on what kind of additional services the school provides, such as selling snacks, school uniform, items in the school shop, books, tickets for school events, and more.
The most popular ways to process payments from parents and guardians are:
Let’s discuss the pros and cons of each of these methods!
On the school’s side, cash has the major benefit of no processing or transaction fees. Parents at many schools may also prefer to use cash to pay for activities and meals – this is generally a question of demographics, as lower-income families are less likely to use cheques or have credit/debit cards as their main form of payment.
Cash does have its downsides though, from the stress of counting bags of coins and banknotes, to the security required to safely store them in school and take them to a bank at least several times per week (hello, staff time and safety).
Cheques are another way of accepting payments that mostly have similar pros and cons to cash. The specific downsides of cheques, however, are that there is a longer lag time between the parent making the payment and the school being able to cash it. This can cause problems with, for instance, having the money you need for a trip in time for every child to go, or even with cheques bouncing altogether.
It’s probably fair to say that in a lot of places this way of accepting payments is slowly dying out because of its inefficiency, and the long time needed to process money. A lot of people these days simply don’t use cheques, or even own a chequebook.
This payment method doesn’t involve dealing with banknotes and papers, everything is in one place on the screen, and the accounting is so much easier. However, this payment method is not as popular at schools because it tends to be very time-inefficient when it comes to making frequent, smaller payments of different sizes – as you do with school meals. The time that it costs to make a bank transfer is worth more than the £2.40 you’re actually sending.
Research shows that most people prefer using card payments when they can. From the parents’ point of view, card payments provide several incentives to pay reliably and on time: it’s fast and easy, refunds are simple, and they can track their payments in their account or on their phone.
Schools must always consider the fee that comes with each payment and understand whether this is feasible for them to use (remember, that lots of providers don’t use a flat fee and usually charge some percentage plus a couple of pence, which become super expensive for micro-payments that are most common in schools). However, sometimes it’s better to lose a small percentage on a transaction fee, rather than losing 100% of a payment when a parent says that they don’t have enough cash with them!
All these considerations are why we take a holistic approach to school payments and have given our MIS the ability to log cash, cheque, bank transfer, and online card payments. Arbor provides a sophisticated solution for managing school payments via the MIS and our Parent Portal. Together with taking payments for school meals, trips and clubs, it gives flexible possibilities for setting up and accepting payments for bespoke accounts, such as for books or uniforms. You can also use Arbor to audit and report on all these transactions and accounts.
This is up to you, but on balance out of all four options, it’s no secret that going cashless is the current trend in today’s world. The United Kingdom had the highest revenue rate in cashless payments among all EU countries in 2017 – more than 100 trillion pounds. More and more schools are joining this trend and deciding to opt for a cashless payment system (or mostly cashless), for simple reasons:
A payments system like Arbor will help you go cashless in a format designed for schools and integrated with all your other MIS modules.
Image 1: A screenshot of the Arbor App
The benefits of card payments in Arbor:
We are at the beginning of a fascinating journey for different ways of accepting payments, and the future may bring even more developments, from mobile and biometric payments, to things like cryptocurrencies. If your school trip funds are still tied up in a lockbox in reception though, a decent card payments system may just be the best place to start.
If you’re an Arbor customer, you can talk to your Account Manager about getting started on Arbor Payments and Parent Portal in your MIS. If you’re not yet an Arbor school, and would like to find out more, get in touch via our contact form or on 0207 043 0470.
Arbor Updates | School Operations
Working to meet the needs of a diverse range of students is a universal challenge in schools today. For SENCOs this is even more challenging, given the specific and complex needs of the students they look after. SENCOs also have a lot of student data to manage (and not to mention lots of paperwork).
Often with other teaching or wider school responsibilities, SENCOs have limited time in their days. Not only have they got to run effective interventions, they’ve also got to be able to communicate well with their colleagues to recommend the best ways to support SEN students and guardians across the school.
To be most effective, SENCOs need good data management, organisation and communication. Above all, they need good tools at their disposal that make reporting and communications as quick and easy as possible, so they can make the best use of their time.
Our in-house SEN expert, Tammy, who has over 30 years experience in working with SEN children from EYFS to Key Stage 5, has put together her top four tips. If you’re a SENCO or staff member with SEN responsibilities, these principles will help you maximise your time.
Organising your students’ SEN data in an efficient way is the first thing that will help you quickly access the information you need regularly. It’s best to identify the data you need to cross reference or report on a lot, as well as the SEN information you need to share with Teachers and other staff. Keeping this data together will save you time and effort when it comes to running reports and preparing for meetings.
It can be time-consuming to keep staff across the school up to date on critical SEN information. Having a consistent format for communicating information can help your colleagues know what to expect so they can immediately jump to the most important parts.
Find a format that’s easy to produce and to speak to, time after time. Think about sending weekly updates, sharing access to a live document or folder, or setting aside five minutes during staff briefings for SEN announcements.
As every SENCO knows, it’s vital that parents and guardians are part of their child’s SEN journey but it can be a challenge to achieve open communication between school and home. Building a rapport with your parents and guardians outside of meetings can help achieve this.
Look for ways to connect on an informal basis, such as spending a few minutes outside after school to say hello. Think about ways to celebrate students’ successes in the form of a short email, phone call or postcard home. You could even create a termly newsletter providing helpful tips and information for parents.
Provision Maps are great tools for organising your SEN information and monitoring the effectiveness of the support you have in place to meet students’ needs. They’ll also help you target and plan future interventions.
When creating your Provision Map, make sure you include details of the interventions you’re providing, with measurable outcomes and individual students’ aims and strategies. If you’re tracking intervention costs, be sure to add these details as well. Consider including student behaviour and attendance information to help you track student progress.
Arbor MIS is built to make a measurable improvement to the way schools work. It’s intuitive, people-friendly tools free staff from busywork so they can focus where it matters most – on their students.
For SENCOs in particular, here are a few ways Arbor helps you support the students in your care:
Are you an Arbor user? Do you want to grow and develop in your SENCO role? Our new CPD course – Core Skills for SENCOs – is designed to give you a deeper understanding of your data so you can make the biggest impact for your students.
Led by our in-house SEN specialist, Tammy Middleton, who has over 30 years experience working with SEN students, this online course shows you the best way to manage your data and take action to support your SEN students.
By the end of this course you’ll be able to:
Perfect for:
Get in touch with your Account Manager to find out more today! Accountmanagers@arbor-education.com
Schools have been adapting and innovating endlessly over the past 12 months. It’s been tough, but it’s also resulted in some innovative, positive changes to how schools work. To handle these new ways of working, we’ve seen more schools than ever before planning to move to a cloud-based MIS (Management Information System) like Arbor, with
Schools have been adapting and innovating endlessly over the past 12 months. It’s been tough, but it’s also resulted in some innovative, positive changes to how schools work.
To handle these new ways of working, we’ve seen more schools than ever before planning to move to a cloud-based MIS (Management Information System) like Arbor, with over 900 schools switching fully remotely in 2020.
1 in 5 schools are looking to switch MIS in the next year, so we want to make it as easy as possible for you to get all the information you need to make the right choice.
Older school systems that rely on servers make it really difficult to run your school flexibly. They also work slowly and put a huge admin burden on staff.
Arbor is people-friendly, giving staff the tools and data they need wherever they’re working from. As a result, Arbor schools work faster, smarter and collaborate more.
To help demystify the move to a cloud-based MIS, we’re running lots of free webinars this term.
From case studies, to demos, to deeper dives into core parts of the system, our webinars are designed to show you why over 1,700 schools and 180 MATs have joined Arbor – the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community.
Whether you’re uncertain of a system change right now, or you’re struggling to get your team onboard with the decision, these webinars will give you the information and tools you need to take that next step.
Check out our free webinars and events below, and pick the session for you:
1. Switching Made Simple: The benefits of the cloud 2. Discover Arbor MIS: Demos of Arbor MIS 3. Moving to Arbor: How the MIS switch works 4. A Deeper Dive: How Arbor works 5. Hear from real Arbor users: Case studies 6. Virtual Tea and Cake: Personalised demos with tea and cake!
If you’re starting to think about a move to the cloud but don’t know where to start, our Switching Made Simple webinars are perfect for you. We’ll talk you through the process from start to finish so you can see what’s really involved in switching MIS and what the next steps would be for you. Click the links to sign up today!
Switching MIS Made Simple: Conversations with MAT Leaders – A roundtable on scaling, systems and change management CEO Roundtable: Thursday 1st July, 2pm COO and CIO Roundtable: Thursday 8th July, 10am
As you’re starting the process of moving MIS, it’s a good idea to get an in-depth demo of systems on the market so you can make an informed choice. Our Discover Arbor MIS series will give you a quick introduction to Arbor and how it could transform the way your school or MAT works. It’s also your chance to ask our education experts any questions you might have.
Discover Arbor MIS for Primary Schools (live demo with Q&A) – various dates
Discover Arbor MIS for Secondary Schools (live demo with Q&A) – various dates
Discover Arbor MIS for Special Schools/APs (live demo with Q&A) – various dates
Discover Arbor MIS for MATs (live demo with Q&A) – various dates
We work with school teams throughout the year to move them to Arbor’s cloud-based MIS – last year over 400 schools moved to Arbor 100% remotely! We know it can seem like a daunting task, which is why we’ve designed a tried-and-tested approach to help you manage the change in a way that’s right for your school, with support from us every step of the way. Discover the journey in one of our short webinars:
Moving your Trust to Arbor: From Procurement to Implementation (live webinar with Q&A) – various dates
Moving your Primary School to Arbor: From Migration to Implementation (on-demand webinar)
Moving your Secondary School to Arbor: From Migration to Implementation (on-demand webinar)
Once you’ve got more of an idea of what you need from your MIS, a more in-depth look at a core area of Arbor – from assessments, to behaviour, to office functions – can be really helpful in seeing if it’s right for you. Come along to one of our live or watch an on-demand webinar in your own time:
Managing Primary Assessments with Arbor (live demo with Q&A) – various dates
Managing Secondary Assessments with Arbor (live demo with Q&A) – various dates
Managing behaviour in Arbor MIS (on-demand webinar)
Increasing Parental Engagement in Arbor MIS (on-demand webinar)
Running an effective school office with Arbor MIS (on-demand webinar)
Arbor’s Group MIS: The Benefits of moving all of your schools to the cloud (on-demand webinar)
If you want to hear how schools and MATs across the country have made the move to Arbor, and how Arbor’s smart, time-saving tools are helping them work better, check out one of our on-demand webinars:
How to move your MAT to a cloud MIS: A panel discussion with Watergrove Trust and Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust (on-demand webinar)
Why Red Kite Trust Moved to Arbor (on-demand webinar)
Why we chose Arbor MIS for Rainbow Education MAT (on-demand webinar)
Why Northlands Wood Primary Academy Moved to Arbor (on-demand webinar)
Between 10th and 17th June, we’re running Virtual Tea and Cake with Arbor, giving you an informal way to learn about Arbor’s MIS over tea and brownies on us! We’ll walk you through what the process of moving to Arbor could look like for your school, including how we can get you up and running around your time scale, and 100% remotely. Once you book your spot, we’ll send you free tea and brownies in the post to enjoy over a call with a member of our expert team.
This term’s Virtual Tea and Cake with Arbor is currently sold out this term, but if you join the waiting list we’ll get in touch with you if a spot becomes available.
If you’d like to speak to us directly about how Arbor could make a positive difference to the way you work, we’d love to hear from you. You can send us an email at tellmemore@arbor-education.com, call us on 0208 050 1028, or book a personalised demo here.
As a former Maths teacher at an Alternative Provision in Leeds, I’ve encountered more than my fair share of students and parents reluctant to get involved in school life. Here are the top five methods I found worked to increase parental involvement in schools. Why parental engagement in schools is important Parental involvement can have
As a former Maths teacher at an Alternative Provision in Leeds, I’ve encountered more than my fair share of students and parents reluctant to get involved in school life. Here are the top five methods I found worked to increase parental involvement in schools.
Parental involvement can have a significant impact on a child’s performance at school. Not only do studies show that good engagement improves their academic success it also helps with behaviour, homework, and a child’s confidence. Teachers and schools need great communication with parents and to establish an environment for collaboration.
At a school where most students had already been excluded, parents were used to receiving nothing but negative news. But effective parental engagement doesn’t mean only speaking when things go wrong. Tell parents about positive events too, with greater frequency. At the Alternative Provision, we’d send a quick text for positive events. If a student had a really good day, we’d use a phone call. Track what’s been said by keeping a communications log.
Parents Evenings aren’t just for telling parents about their child’s grades. They can also be an opportunity to talk about their social development, friendships, career goals, attitude and behaviour, and agree an action plan of how to support the child at home and at school. To increase the number of parents who attend, stop relying on sending kids home with sign-up sheets and use an online booking system, letting parents book slots whenever they want.
Image 1: A screenshot of the Arbor MIS Guardian Consultations feature
Education has changed so much since parents were in school, they may have no idea what their children are studying. Keep parents engaged by assigning homework that they can help their children complete. For primary school students, try giving tasks to read aloud. For secondary schools, let parents know what assignments their child has to complete and if it’s been submitted on time using a student or guardian portal.
Parents are most likely to get involved if they feel like they can make a real difference. Whenever parents visit or contact you, be willing to listen to their responses, answer their questions, and make them feel their contribution is welcomed. Make sure parents feel they can come to you if they have questions about how your school works, and let them know which person they should contact about certain issues.
Despite your best efforts, there will always be some parents who won’t respond to a text, email or letter. You also can’t rely on students to pass on information. Maybe they’ll forget to mention something, or they simply don’t have a good relationship. To overcome this, give parents all the information they need in the palm of their hand by using an App. Not only does this notify parents instantly, but they can also refer back to it later if they forget.
Image 2: A screenshot of Arbor’s new in-app messaging feature
At Arbor, we’re always trying to improve how we can support schools to take parental engagement to the next level. We’ve recently introduced an in-app messaging feature that allows fast, free communication between schools and parents – take a look at this article to see how else you can use our new Arbor App!
It’s been a tough 12 months for schools across the country, with staff having to learn and adapt week-by-week to the changing situation to best support their students. With concerns around the impact of the past year on creating a “covid generation” who have supposedly fallen behind, schools are feeling the pressure to support students
It’s been a tough 12 months for schools across the country, with staff having to learn and adapt week-by-week to the changing situation to best support their students.
With concerns around the impact of the past year on creating a “covid generation” who have supposedly fallen behind, schools are feeling the pressure to support students to “get back on track”.
But is this the right way of framing the next phase of the pandemic?
For some students, the challenges thrown up by the pandemic and the cycles of lockdown have meant their situation has changed, with many becoming more vulnerable and detached from their learning. For others, the challenging time has exacerbated their existing vulnerabilities.
However, as the 15 schools within the Aspirations Academies Trust have found, the remote learning programme they ran during lockdown was highly effective. Recent assessments have found that the majority of students are where they should be with their learning. What is more of a concern, however, is the impact on their mental health that has suffered from the lengthy time away from school and their friends.
We’ve seen a lot of headlines in the media dominated by the terms “catch up”, “lost learning” and “Covid generation”, but many schools are starting to step away from this language, finding it unhelpful in creating the right atmosphere for students to thrive in.
Schools in Aspirations Academies Trust have found that these negative words actually have the effect of reducing students’ self-esteem and giving them the message that they’re the problem and need to change.
Aspirations Academies Trust are championing new approaches to “catch up”, by reframing the negative language associated with it and focusing instead on boosting student wellbeing through more creative subjects, extra-curricular clubs, and a Quality First Teaching approach.
Get advice from education advisor, writer and speaker, Mary Myatt, on how to carve out time for satisfying work on the curriculum
Since being back at school, Rivers Academy in West London have banned use of any negative language to refer to the “covid generation”, which they’ve found has boosted student happiness.
Words and phrases such as “catch up”, “what you have missed’’, ‘’you’re behind’’, ‘’we don’t have time to finish the syllabus’’ and “Covid generation’’ were replaced with “Let’s build, strengthen or enhance what we already know”, “map where you are”, “master the skills’’ and “everyone is in the same position”.
The decision was inspired by academic and author Judith E. Glaser who said “words create worlds”.
The Rivers Academy has also seen the benefit of positive language. According to Tim Wormald, the school’s Wellness Lead & Assistant Principal, “We have support zones set up for our pupils where they can come and talk to staff about any concerns they have and they have been quiet. You can see and feel the impact that positive language has had at the academy, it feels settled and the students are happy.’’
Plugging the gaps in knowledge has started by acknowledging the effectiveness of the remote learning that was put in place. As Tim Wormald explains, “The kids did make progress during lockdown. The key has been identifying gaps in their knowledge not through testing but discussions. It is their evaluation skills that have suffered because you can’t question and discuss online in the same way that you can in class with face-to-face contact with your peers. Tackling the issue has come not through extra lessons but focussing on Quality First Teaching.’’
Executive Principal at Harriers Academy, Alex Pearson, explains that the vast majority of students at Harriers also engaged well with remote learning during lockdown and are now either where they should be or only just behind. In a survey of their parents, 98.5% rated the remote learning and support provided as good or excellent.
Harriers Academy in Banbury also banned the phrase “catch up”, and instead have put the focus on boosting the wellbeing of students and incorporating “the three M’s”: Measuring, Mapping and Mastering, combined with a focus on Quality First Teaching.
Alex Pearson explains, “Once our students returned, we introduced daily “calm time” with yoga sessions, mindful colouring or simply time to talk. Each class also has a calm zone where children can go if they feel it’s necessary.”
Alex Pearson explains how they’ve implemented “the three M’s” at Harriers Academy:
‘’We have continued with the curriculum and have ensured the children have exciting topics to keep them motivated and engaged. We have focused on lots of time to play with one another and build precious social interactions with peers.’’ – Alex Pearson, Executive Principal, Harriers Academy
At Park Academy in West London, the focus since returning to school has been on interactive lessons that engage students, and increasing the number of timetabled hours for creative subjects including music, drama and art.
Principal Juan Delgado said, “Rather than having extra lessons or asking our students to stay late, the focus has been on increasing their love for learning through lessons that are engaging and interactive. We’ve also focused on increasing their passion for reading to help with closing any attainment gaps and also incorporating little “Do Now” activities in their lessons, so it’s low stakes testing. The overall aim is to make sure our students settle back into school life positively without feeling overwhelmed.’’
Increasing the number of hours devoted to PE, Art, Drama and Music for KS3 per week, has had the effect of boosting the mental health and wellbeing of students at Park Academy. According to Principal Delgado, the benefit is that “although the lessons are practical, the students are using their creativity and imagination”.
The school has also introduced an extra-curricular programme of activities which includes a wide variety of sports, such as football and netball, music, art, technology and STEM. These clubs have proven really popular with the students with numbers increasing throughout the term.
Hear how this secondary school is using Curriculum-Led Financial Planning to address gaps in learning during the pandemic
For information on how Arbor can support you manage your post-covid challenges, check out our latest blog The Arbor guide to managing your school during Covid-19.
If you’d like to find out how Arbor MIS could transform the way you work for the better, join our webinar series, which includes live demos, as well as sessions walking you through how we move schools to Arbor and work with you to drive long term impact. Check out what’s coming up and book your spot.
Parents’ evenings are an integral part of the school year. They give parents the chance to feel involved in their child’s education and the school ethos. With so much to consider – from organising, to making sure parents sign up, to keeping meetings running smoothly – managing successful parents’ evenings can be a stressful process.
Parents’ evenings are an integral part of the school year. They give parents the chance to feel involved in their child’s education and the school ethos.
With so much to consider – from organising, to making sure parents sign up, to keeping meetings running smoothly – managing successful parents’ evenings can be a stressful process.
At Arbor, we make it easy for you to manage all of your school milestones in one place, and parents’ evening is no exception. Check out our top tips to help make your next parents’ evening a success:
Busy parents need to know when parents’ evenings are coming up so they can get organised, so it’s good practice to start planning how you’re going to run them early on in the year. To give parents flexibility, you might want to run meetings over multiple dates or at different times of day (some of our schools run them in the early afternoon). Think about how long you want each meeting to last – some parents might benefit from a longer session, or one outside of the timetable you’re offering.
Make sure your schedule of meetings is realistic for your Teachers. Assess how many meetings you’ve got in a block and build in at least 15 minute breaks. It’s also a good idea if some Teachers can share the load, particularly those who job-share and might not need to do all of the meetings together.
You might have a perfectly planned programme of parents’ evenings, but making sure parents know about them can be an added challenge. The trick is to make it as simple as possible for parents to find out the details, as well as book onto a session, all in one place.
Make sure you send out key dates of parents’ evenings well in advance, including links or instructions to book their slot. It’s also a good idea to send out text or email confirmations to parents that they can refer back to, plus reminders in the weeks before.
Many schools have been running successful online parents’ evenings during school closures via Google Hangouts, Zoom or other video calling platforms. Many are continuing to run a combination of physical and virtual meetings as a useful way to engage harder-to-reach parents, or as an option for those who are particularly busy. For this to work, make sure your Teachers are comfortable using the video system, and that everyone does a practice run before the day to iron out any technical issues.
We’re all human, and sometimes let’s face it, Teachers might struggle to remember the names of every single student and parent in their care. A top tip is to have a list to hand in the meeting of your students’ key information, including their guardians. Before the meeting, it’s also helpful to gather some summary reports of each student’s performance across assessment, behaviour, plus where they compare to other students. You could print out reports from your MIS (management Information System) or show these on a device.
It’s a good idea to decide as a department or Year group a standard format for your meetings that works best. That way, Teachers have guidance to fall back on and each meeting flows. Consider starting with an overview of the student’s performance this year across attendance, behaviour and assessment. Highlight their strengths first, followed by areas they need to improve.
Some schools find standardised record sheets effective, which Teachers fill out before and during the meeting, in order to make the main points clear for parents, keep terminology consistent, and to bring a sense of mutual accountability.
The highlight of a good system for running your parents’ evenings is one that allows you to schedule meetings, communicate information to parents, and for parents to book, all in one place. The best systems also make it easy for Teachers to access all the information they need about their students’ performance at their fingertips.
Arbor MIS brings everything together, so you can manage every stage of your parents’ evenings in one platform, without having to use a separate communications app.
1. Schedule sessions in the calendar, including video links (if appropriate) 2. Invite parents by email, SMS, letter or via a message in the Arbor App (straight to their phone) including sign-up links 3. Schedule-in breaks in for Teachers in the calendar 4. Arrange custom meetings to suit certain parents 5. Confirm parents’ appointments by email or share via the Parent Portal (they’ll be able to access video links via their calendar) 6. Prepare instant reports for parents on students’ performance across assessment, behaviour and attendance, with comparisons against their class, Year and demographic averages 7. Access or download a timetable of all of your meetings 8. Access or download students’ profile information to have handy
Townley Grammar School have recently had success running virtual parents evenings in Arbor MIS. Hear from Louise Maddison, Data & MIS Manager, why it works for them:
“It’s easy to share the links with Parents and Teachers, making the whole Virtual Parents Evening very slick. No need to email parents links separately; it’s all there for them. Parents can access the booking system through the Parent Portal & App, this is a very easy process for them. They can either download or use our location links live. Teachers see the appointments on their calendar and can access their appointments via the Guardian Consultations screen – very clear.”
Head to the Help Centre for everything you need to know about setting up parents’ evenings in Arbor.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could help your school or MAT work faster, smarter and collaborate more, why not arrange a personalised demo. Alternatively, join us at one of our upcoming free webinars.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented changes to how schools run. Throughout phases of partial and full closures and local lockdowns, and government guidelines changing regularly, schools have had to adapt to flexible ways of working. Technology has played an important role in supporting schools to adapt, with cloud-based tech giving them reliable access to
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented changes to how schools run. Throughout phases of partial and full closures and local lockdowns, and government guidelines changing regularly, schools have had to adapt to flexible ways of working.
Technology has played an important role in supporting schools to adapt, with cloud-based tech giving them reliable access to school information away from the physical school site.
Top priorities have been ensuring key processes can continue as usual wherever staff and students are, from attendance admin, to finances, to day-to-day communications, to teaching and learning.
As soon as the first lockdown hit, schools had to find a solution to virtual teaching and learning practically overnight. High on the agenda was making sure that students had access to high quality teaching despite classrooms looking quite different.
Many turned to Google Classroom™ and Microsoft Teams, benefiting from procurement and support grants, as well as other tools such as Class Dojo, to hold remote lessons, or to share and collect in class work. Some schools were more prepared than others, and the picture of remote provision started to look very different from school to school.
Even now in a more stable phase of the pandemic when most classes in the UK are back to face-to-face, the impact of the last year is still very clear. The loss of learning as a result of lockdown is a concern, but there are also more positive possibilities that technology has opened up.
Check out advice from an EdTech expert on how schools can learn from the rapid changes in technology usage since Covid-19
The shift to online learning has highlighted vast differences between schools in terms investment and training in digital technology. What’s more, depending on location, demographics and funding, schools have differing challenges and find it difficult to provide the same level of quality when it comes to virtual teaching and learning. Some might have the resources to live-stream a full programme of lessons, whilst others might be limited to uploading worksheets. Of course, every school will find the online learning style that’s best for them; the same approach for a large inner city secondary school will most likely not work for a small rural primary school.
Those schools who already used a digital learning platform like Microsoft Office 365 before the pandemic found it much easier to transition to using it full time during the pandemic. For those who didn’t, it meant setting up accounts for students and staff from scratch. Without an integration with their MIS (Management Information System), setting up a new digital learning platform can mean time-consuming manual work entering student and staff data.
See Arbor’s integration with Microsoft Office 365 and Google Classroom™ below.
Online learning has also drawn attention to the levels of disadvantage that many students across the country are experiencing, which has an impact on how they engage with online learning. From home environments which aren’t fit to study in, to lack of internet or devices, to parents who are less able to support with school work, many schools have found it difficult to reach students remotely.
As schools have found during the pandemic, online learning can open up new issues around safeguarding. For example, when live-streaming lessons, Teachers have to think about the environment they’re teaching in, as well as what might be going on in the homes students are learning from. Many schools have created new rules and policies for online classes, including camera and microphone usage, uniforms, as well as ways of communicating appropriately. It’s also important to make sure there are clear boundaries between school and private life, as well confidential spaces for students to confide in Teachers outside of lessons.
Remote education naturally means it’s harder for Teachers to be in touch with students and to sense how they’re getting on. It’s been clear, though, that some students have had experiences during the past year which have now put them into vulnerable categories which they perhaps weren’t in before, with many feeling the impact of trauma on their mental health. As a result, Teachers have noticed the varying mental states of students as they come back to the classroom bringing with it some new and challenging behaviour to deal with.
Check out tips from Educational Psychologist, Dr Rob Long, on supporting students’ mental health in the classroom
As a result of the challenges of learning from home for many students, schools have found attainment gaps have emerged between particular student groups. It’s now a top priority to identify students who are behind, and to put in place initiatives to get them back on track. However, due to the lack of consistency of provision from the past year, schools have also had absences of student progress data which presents a challenge to analysing their data.
As flexible ways of working are looking like the future of the corporate workplace, new uses of technology could also have a lasting impact on the way teaching and learning is delivered going forwards.
Blended learning means a combination of remote and face-to-face teaching and learning activities. This might involve part of the class joining remotely, or could be a mixture of digital and physical resources being used in the classroom.
During the pandemic, schools have become used to offering blended teaching and learning, having to provide remote education during lockdown, whilst maintaining face-to-face provision for vulnerable and key worker children.
Since the chance of students and staff having to isolate is still a reality, a blended approach to teaching and learning seems to be the new normal, at least for a while. This means it’s more important than ever to have a reliable virtual learning environment that staff are comfortable using alongside normal teaching, which you could also fall back on for full remote provision if you needed to.
Even though face-to-face teaching looks to be the default again, the investment schools have made in technology has not gone to waste.
EdTech brings lots of opportunities to rethink the format, pace and content of lessons. Research also shows that technology can increase students’ retention of knowledge, and allow for more interaction, creativity, student choice and motivation.
Here are a few ways blended learning can support the classroom:
“If implemented in the right way, tech can improve and transform the way schools work so they can weather any storm.”
-Richard Martin, Special Projects Lead at LGFL
Read how LEO Academy Trust rolled our digital technology across their schools
Discover the vision of Red Kite Learning Trust for a centralised and collaborative IT infrastructure across their trust
With digital technology here to stay, schools need a platform they can rely on, that not only makes it easy to run blended learning, but will also allow for a pivot to full remote provision at short notice if you need to.
Setting up your courses and classes from scratch in your digital learning platform (e.g. Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams) by manually entering all your student and staff data could take hours or days defending on how big your school is. To avoid this, it’s a good idea to have an integration between your MIS and your digital learning platform, so that your data is synced automatically.
At Arbor, we’ve developed integrations with Google Classroom™ and Microsoft Office 365, which make managing online learning fast and secure for your school. With our integrations, all your student and staff information sync automatically into your Google or Microsoft accounts, saving you any manual data entry. What’s more, once you’re set-up, data syncs every 24 hours, meaning your information is always up-to-date.
What is financial benchmarking? Financial benchmarking means comparing your finances with other schools and academies who have similar characteristics and challenges. Areas that schools often compare are their income, expenditure, balance and workforce with either schools of a similar size or within their Local Authority (LA). Why is financial benchmarking so important for schools? We’re
Financial benchmarking means comparing your finances with other schools and academies who have similar characteristics and challenges. Areas that schools often compare are their income, expenditure, balance and workforce with either schools of a similar size or within their Local Authority (LA).
We’re all aware of the widespread funding shortfalls in the education sector, and it’s definitely a challenging time to be a budget holder in schools and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). In recent times especially, schools have had to be even more resourceful with their budgets to adapt to the challenges of Covid-19.
Managing the school budget is a balancing act between lots of different factors, with a high level of scrutiny from Governors, the LA, Ofsted and the DfE. To make the right decisions when planning an effective budget, it’s vital to see how this year’s spend not only compares to previous years, but to other schools too, so you can see what’s working and where you could direct your resources more efficiently.
Financial benchmarking can also help you identify areas where you could cut back on spending (e.g. building improvement) in order to allocate more resources towards your curriculum initiatives or support for students and staff. This kind of analysis will be useful in shaping your school development plan.
First, for financial benchmarking to be most effective, make sure you comparing against schools that are in either the same geographical area as you, are a similar size (in terms of staff and students), have a similar demographic cohort of students (e.g. proportion of FSM, Pupil Premium and EAL), as well as student attainment. This level of comparison gives you the best chance of learning from how these schools are managing their finances.
Second, when you look at your data, bear in mind some key questions:
The DfE’s schools financial benchmarking service compares the spending, staffing structures and performance of all schools in England each year. You can identify schools like you, then reach out to them for advice via their websites.
Once you’ve looked into your benchmarking data, you should evaluate how this data will help you make the best budgeting decisions. Your Governors will be interested to know how and why your financial approach differs to similar schools, and how you plan to redirect your resources to support better outcomes for students.
Why not present a benchmarking report to your Governors at the next meeting? Some Management Information Systems (MIS) like Arbor MIS have a benchmarking portal, which allows you to compare your school’s behaviour, attendance, attainment and school context data to national averages at key points in the year. This gives you useful context to support your budgeting decisions.
At Arbor, we create Financial Benchmarking Reports each year for every school and academy in England. The reports give you an overview of all your income and expenditure over the past three years, with comparisons against national financial results, schools like you and others in your local area.
Arbor Financial Benchmarking reports are visual and easy-to-read PDFs, with helpful commentary and colour-coded stats, giving you reliable evidence needed to drive forward budget planning decisions. Perfect for presenting at Governor meetings.
Simply sign into your free Arbor Insight portal to download your copy of your latest report:
*Out soon! Watch this space
Over 10,000 schools and 300 trusts have been using Arbor Insight over the last four years to benchmark their performance, dig deeper into their results and shape school improvement. Arbor Insight helps you focus on what matters, with intelligent dashboards showing your attainment, attendance, behaviour and school context data from the last 5 years. And it’s free!
We update your dashboards every academic year with your latest ASP data from the DfE. As soon as you log in you’ll see your headline performance measures benchmarked against your student groups, national averages and local schools. Click on any measure to uncover which student groups are driving over or underperformance.
Since the pandemic began over a year ago, schools have been working in lots of new ways, adapting sometimes week by week to changing guidelines from the Government. At Arbor, we’ve worked with our community of over 1,600 primary, secondary, special schools and MATs to develop new product features which support you with the new
Since the pandemic began over a year ago, schools have been working in lots of new ways, adapting sometimes week by week to changing guidelines from the Government.
At Arbor, we’ve worked with our community of over 1,600 primary, secondary, special schools and MATs to develop new product features which support you with the new challenges – from remote teaching and learning, to reporting to the DfE, to rolling out covid testing. During this time, we’ve also moved over 600 schools to Arbor during 100% remotely.
Since the Government introduced Catch-Up Premium funding, it’s been important for schools to identify where the attainment gaps have opened up across their student groups as a result of lockdown disruption, and the “catch-up” initiatives that will support students the most.
Arbor can support you with closing your attainment gaps at each step of the way:
Read an interview with the Director of Inclusion and SEND at The Mead Educational Trust about how their “catch-up” strategy is going
To help you deliver Covid-19 testing, we’ve made it easy to track everything in Arbor with our new Testing Register. Schedule regular tests for staff and students, see who is due for a test each day, manage guardian consents, update test results and log confirmed cases. Parents can also instantly log covid test results for their children on their Arbor App. What’s more, Arbor’s My Classroom is a really handy way to trace contact between students by using our live seating plans.
To save you time completing the DfE’s Daily Form, Arbor’s Covid-19 Dashboard crunches the numbers for you, giving you all the student attendance data you need to submit in the form each morning. Plus, staff absences are flagged to everyone who needs to know, making arranging cover simple.
Your Dashboard is up-to-date with the latest attendance codes and categories that the DfE is tracking, including key vulnerable categories and confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19. Click on each category for a breakdown by year group and a full list of students, and follow up with guardians straight away if you need to.
For a MAT-level overview, you can use Arbor’s Group MIS to analyse all your student and staff data in one place. Monitor attendance patterns, student and staff absence, key disadvantaged and vulnerable groups and manage Covid-19 related issues centrally.
Check out our latest community article about how Arbor can support you as an Attendance Officer.
Forget switching between systems or uploading or downloading contact lists, in Arbor you can follow up with parents, students or other staff members as soon as you spot something important, from wherever you are in the system. Simply choose the method that’s best for your message – from an email, an SMS, a mail merge letter or a message via the Arbor App.
Find out how Arbor’s communications allowed The Parks Academies Trust to improve the way they contacted hard-to-reach students during the pandemic.
Check out three top tips for communicating with your staff, parents and guardians from our Head of Support, Emily.
Depending on the various year groups, bubble classes, plus a range of clubs, trips and activities, your timetable is probably quite the balancing act. Arbor makes it easy to design exactly the right timetable for your school, with an easy integration with TimeTabler if you need to build something particularly advanced. Stagger your start and end times, meal times, and keep tabs on where everyone is with a live central calendar.
Plus, Arbor is designed to be flexible, making it easy to adjust and change your timetable whenever you need to – which has come in handy throughout the changes in government regulations over the past year.
It’s now important to have a reliable virtual learning environment so that you can continue provision for students who are isolating at home. Having everything set up also means you’ll be able pivot to remove provision at short notice if you need to.
Since schools started to offer virtual teaching and learning, we’ve developed integrations with Google Classroom™ and Microsoft Office 365, which makes managing online learning fast and secure. With our integrations, all your student and staff information sync automatically into your Google or Microsoft accounts, saving you any manual data entry. What’s more, once you’re set-up, data syncs every 24 hours, meaning your information is always up-to-date.
In Arbor, it’s easy to pull together custom reports on key demographic groups, including children with EHCP, child protection status, FSM, and children of key workers at school or MAT level. Given that Clinically Extremely Vulnerable (CEV) staff and students have been told to shield at home, you’ll easily be able to track their attendance, send out communications or add them to an intervention in Arbor.
Arbor’s in-built safeguarding features also help you keep on top of any changes to your students’ circumstances – from automatic notifications on the Homepage when any student records change, to medical notes and key pastoral information flagged on every Lesson Dashboard.
Check out our most popular blogs on supporting vulnerable students:
At this time in the year when School Budgeters are looking ahead to next year and how they can use school resources best to support students. It’s also a time when there will be a lot of reflection on the extreme and challenging year it’s been since Covid-19 began.
Using your latest financial data from the DfE combined with expert analysis, we’ve created Financial Benchmarking Reports for every school and academy in England. The reports give you an overview of all your income and expenditure over the past three years, with comparisons against national financial results, schools like you and others in your local area.
Find out more about schools’ financial benchmarking in our guide.
As we’ve been working with school staff closely this past year, we’ve learnt a lot about the impressive job everyone has been doing, as well as the enormous pressure you’ve been under. Mental wellbeing is really important to us at Arbor, and our in-house wellbeing experts have been putting together tips and advice for how you can encourage positive wellness at your school. Discover the latest blogs:
Because Arbor is cloud-based, you can manage your school with more flexibility, accessing what you need to do your job from wherever you’re working. Plus, if the DfE brings out any new guidelines, we make updates to the system as soon as we can (sometimes even on the same day!) to help you keep up to date.
Don’t forget the Arbor Team is here to support you whenever you need us.
Arbor Community | Popular
We were honoured to welcome education advisor, writer and speaker, Mary Myatt, to give the keynote speech at this term’s ArborFest – our two-day virtual festival exploring innovative ways of working with Arbor MIS. Mary gave a brilliant talk about how schools can carve out time for satisfying work on the curriculum by focusing on
We were honoured to welcome education advisor, writer and speaker, Mary Myatt, to give the keynote speech at this term’s ArborFest – our two-day virtual festival exploring innovative ways of working with Arbor MIS.
Mary gave a brilliant talk about how schools can carve out time for satisfying work on the curriculum by focusing on fewer things in greater depth. You can read her talk below – or catch the recording here.
You don’t need me to tell you how demanding, exhilarating, exciting and exhausting it is in schools, even in normal times (and it has been that to the power of ten recently). So while there’s nothing we can do about what’s happening in the wider world, I think there are some things we do have control over.
I often hear staff in schools complaining that they’re not as far ahead as they’d like to be in certain areas such as curriculum or school improvement. But what I encourage them to recognise is that they only have so much bandwidth. Sometimes we must accept how things are and not beat ourselves up.
On flights when they give out the health and safety instructions, they say that in the case of an emergency, if we’re travelling with someone vulnerable or a young child, we must put our own masks on first. Why is that? Because we can’t look after other people unless we’re safe and sound ourselves.
Greg McKeown talks about rest as a responsibility. It’s not a luxury. It’s really important, for example, that we eat proper food on a regular basis, that we get a bit of fresh air every day and that we go to bed at a reasonable time.
Trying to do everything is a problem for us as a sector. We want the best for our children and our communities, but we simply can’t do everything.
A real mantra of Greg McKeown’s work is the need to cut back in order to set clearer prioritie that are likely to make the biggest difference. And in the context of education, priorities need to be framed around a focus on what is likely to make the greatest difference to children’s learning. As McKeown says, if we have too many priorities, we’re simply not going to do anything really well.
Pareto’s 80/20 rule is also worth remembering. In Italy in the 1890s, Pareto found that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. What has emerged from this insight is that across many sectors, a relatively small amount of input has a disproportionate impact. And this broad 80/20 rule also applies to schools. If we cut out some of the processes and resources we use, for example in the curriculum, that have less impact, we’ll be able to focus on the things that make the greatest difference.
There is overwhelming evidence from all quarters, not just my own work, that it’s the quality of the curriculum that makes the greatest difference for the greatest number of children. The quality of the curriculum has certainly gone up the agenda recently since the addition of the “quality of education” judgement to the latest Ofsted framework in 2019.
There are eight main things we need to get right when thinking about quality education:
1. Realign priorities
Both my work and Ofsted’s research have found that in some schools, priorities have become distorted. In some primaries, for example, in order for children to do well in their SATs, they are given a diet of SATs in the mistaken belief that that will produce better results. But if you look at the scores for the children who didn’t do so well in the reading papers for 2019, it was because of a lack of vocabulary. So how do we develop children’s vocabulary? Through a broad and balanced curriculum, not just a list of spelling.
2. Address curriculum misconceptions
I notice some misconceptions around the curriculum, such as focusing on skills and thinking of them as “cross transferable”. Just because a child can evaluate and dissect something really well in geography doesn’t mean to say they can do the same in history if they don’t know any history. We need to think of skills and knowledge as being like conjoined twins; through rich exposure to and engagement with the curriculum, skills develop.
3. Remember children’s entitlement
It’s also important to consider the idea of entitlement. What I’ve found is that some children who need additional support get so many interventions that they actually miss out on the wider curriculum with their peers. Interventions are important but they need to be bespoke and have impact as quickly as possible, so that children can rejoin their peers.
4. Be more ambitious
For the first time, the Ofsted framework now has a discussion of ambition. We should be asking to what extent the curriculum is ambitious for all our pupils, regardless of their starting points, and what the children themselves are saying about it. Pupil voice is a strong thread in my research, and I’ve found that at the heart of it, children want more demanding work.
5. High challenge, low threat
According to Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, “human beings are curious, but thinking is hard”. If we make things too easy, then the learning is likely not to be so secure. We should therefore not dumb things down for our children.
About 18 months ago I was working in a school in London with some students who were identified as high priority but underachieving. They said the only lesson they engaged with was geography because the teacher gave them really difficult, demanding stuff to do, such as articles from National Geographic. The teacher would say “You’re not going to understand it all, but that’s alright.”
When I looked at the results for geography in that school, these students were the highest by a margin. The teacher wasn’t giving those students work that was above their “pay grade” in order to get great results; the great results followed from the students relishing the high challenge that was accompanied by low threat.
6. Be prepared to be surprised
One of the most worrying results of our current system is the reading deficit. In 2019, over a quarter of our children did not reach the expected standard. Research a few years ago found that only about 30% of children are read to on a daily basis, and in 2018 Teacher Tapp found that only 15% of all children are read to in class every day.
Research from Sussex University found that simply reading challenging, complex novels aloud at a fast pace in each lesson repositions poorer readers as good readers, giving them a more engaged, uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period. The teachers were actually surprised at what the students achieved.
7. Underpin learning with high quality texts
When introducing new units over time, we should underpin them with high quality texts. Why? Books contain complex ideas and sentences of greater lexical depth and complexity which enrich children’s vocabulary. Through rich resources we’re able to draw out the important vocabulary we want our children to be fluent in by the end of the unit.
For example, a high quality text to support the Year 6 science unit about the theory of evolution and inheritance could be Sabina Radeva’s “The Origin of Species”. Sabina trained as a scientist and then she retrained as an artist, which gives the book two threads: high quality information and beautiful imagery.
For more examples of high quality texts to use across the curriculum, see the recording of Mary’s talk here
8. Use meeting time to talk about books
So what should we be cutting in order to find time for these marvellous resources? Firstly, we should think about how we use staff meetings. There are plenty that could be handled in an email or just a brief summary. Instead we should turn our meeting time into opportunities to discuss the books and reading we’re going to do with children.
Harvard professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about the six keys to doing good work in any organisation. I think these are useful when thinking about curriculum work:
As a final note, let’s remember that we’re human beings first and we’re professionals second. The young people we work with are human beings first and they’re learners second.
If you enjoyed Mary’s talk, make sure you download her further reading list to learn more.
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. Last Thursday and Friday (18th-19th March), we were delighted to host the third ever ArborFest – a two-day virtual festival with talks, workshops and forums exploring innovative ways of working with Arbor MIS. A huge thank you
Last Thursday and Friday (18th-19th March), we were delighted to host the third ever ArborFest – a two-day virtual festival with talks, workshops and forums exploring innovative ways of working with Arbor MIS.
A huge thank you to our sponsors 4Matrix, MyConcern, SchoolsICT and The Key for helping to make the event such a success.
The dynamic programme was a real showcase of the completely new ways in which schools have been working, especially over the past year, with topics ranging from data analysis, to assessment, to MAT expansion.
There was a real energy across the sessions, with everyone leaving with ideas for how they could work in new ways to improve how they support students, and create a better working culture for staff too.
1,300 people including SLT, Teachers, Admin Staff from 700 schools, MATs and partner organisations joined our 31 talks happening across five event stages!
For Arbor schools and MATs, it was a chance to network with fellow staff across the country, and to share tips and tricks for getting the most out of Arbor MIS.
For schools who are only just hearing about us, it was an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes insight into what it means to be part of the Arbor community of over 1,600 schools, and how moving to Arbor could transform the way they work.
Arbor’s CEO, James, and Chief of Customer Success, Sonia, kicked off the festival with a welcome address, setting the tone with an analogy of schools in 2021 like playing table tennis with a quick-fire machine (compared to the dodgeball metaphor in his welcome talk at ArborFest in November 2020!).
As James said, “the pace of change is changing. There are still lots of balls being thrown at us but we’ve coped with more change than we thought was possible.”
James also shared some of the recent developments at Arbor, including our growth to 1,600 schools and our joining of The Key Group. Sonia demonstrated some of the ways we’ve been supporting schools to adapt to the new government guidelines and work flexibly over the past year, having moved over 600 schools over to Arbor 100% remotely, with a customer satisfaction score of 98%.
Catch up on James and Sonia’s welcome address here
Keynote speech
Education advisor, writer and speaker, Mary Myatt, gave a brilliant keynote address on how schools can carve out time for satisfying work on the curriculum by focusing on fewer things in greater depth. And it created a lot of conversation on Twitter! If you enjoyed Mary’s talk, make sure you download her further reading list to learn more.
Guest talk from The Key
Caroline Doherty, Head of Education Strategy at The Key, was joined by Mark Talbot, Chief Executive Officer of the Diocese of Chichester Academy Trust, and Matt Crawford, CEO of Embark Federation, for a great discussion around both the opportunities, and the challenges of expanding a trust.
There were some excellent talks led by our partners MyConcern, 4Matrix and SchoolsICT on safeguarding, managing a summer without exams, and blended learning. We also had 70 school staff join us for a relaxing Mindfulness Workshop at lunch.
We had an all-star cast of Arbor schools and MATs including Watergrove Trust, Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust, Glenmoor & Winton Academies, Hyndburn Academy, Red Kite Learning Trust and Northlands Wood Primary Academy, each sharing how moving to Arbor MIS has helped them work in new and flexible ways.
We also had a special appearance by Kirsty Woolls, HR Director at Academy Transformation Trust, and Abby Brayford, Director of ATT Institute, who shared what people development (rather than CPD!) means for them. Abby Brayford said, “change is relational. To effect change and drive improvement you have to think about people’s values.”
The Arbor Team led some deep-dive sessions showcasing tips and tricks for a range of Arbor modules. They also launched some brand new features including:
Our Product team led a series of Feedback Forums which were a great opportunity to gather feedback from Arbor users to help us shape the future of our MIS. Find out more about how we use schools’ feedback to inform our Product Roadmap.
“I was inspired by the attitude of the team and the drive and dedication that came across, ethos can only work when it comes from the top and is intrinsic throughout the leadership team. This was evident throughout.” A primary school customer
“it was useful to hear some of the roadmap items, and helpful to have our say in suggested improvements for the future.” A MAT customer
“Sessions were appropriate and interesting. The online nature (and recordings) meant I could fit it around work commitments”. A secondary school customer
“Just wanted to say thank you I will have to leave early as I have another meeting, however it was very interesting and a very nice layout, user friendly etc. Something definitely worth us looking at taking on for our school in the future. Look forward to seeing the last bit on the recording.” A prospective special school
New to Arbor?
If you want to discover how Arbor MIS could help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more, get in touch to arrange a free online demo for your school or MAT. Alternatively, you can email tellmemore@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
Already using Arbor?
If you’d like more information on any of the new features showcased at ArborFest – or if you need some support – get in touch with your Account Manager or contact accountmanagers@arbor-education.com.
Case Studies | Popular
As part of our continual work to improve and expand Arbor MIS, we work hand-in-hand with our secondary schools to understand the features we should develop that will best support staff in their everyday roles. We spoke to Rebecca Pickles, Deputy Headteacher at Beacon Academy, about the successes they’ve experienced since moving to Arbor remotely
As part of our continual work to improve and expand Arbor MIS, we work hand-in-hand with our secondary schools to understand the features we should develop that will best support staff in their everyday roles.
We spoke to Rebecca Pickles, Deputy Headteacher at Beacon Academy, about the successes they’ve experienced since moving to Arbor remotely during the pandemic. Rebecca talks about how Arbor has supported their goals to work more efficiently as a school by giving staff the data they need so they’re not reliant on others. Rebecca says she was surprised how straightforward it was to switch systems remotely, and encourages other schools to be open to changing the ways they’ve been used to doing things in order to improve their working culture.
We were already partly cloud-based with our previous MIS, but the hosted model was fraught with issues when trying to use it quickly and efficiently. The hosted platform often failed during work and it was slow. Moving to a fully cloud-based MIS means that we can access all the functionality wherever we choose to work that has an internet connection.
Cloud-based data storage assures us that we’re not dependent on hardware in school, backups don’t have to be assured and we can work with Arbor to ensure that we’re securely meeting all legal and security requirements in law. It’s a cleaner system and much easier to manage for all users.
There were no concerns that weren’t easy to address. The only major stumbling block is for those high-level MIS users having to ‘get used to’ a new system. This was something that took some time to work through but concerns around this were easily dealt with and supported by our team at Arbor (a level of support we hadn’t experienced when migrating to our previous MIS!).
Arbor provided a wealth of information and the migration process was well planned to ensure we were all ready when our site went live. Because the MIS is so easy to navigate, it didn’t take long for people to realise what we’d missed for so long; something intuitive that just does what we want it to do!
We were encouraged to try Arbor when we joined our trust (Wellspring Academy Trust). We understood the benefits of being in a group of schools who could support us on our journey and there were lots of very experienced people that could can help us out.
That being said, Arbor for us was also a journey into working with a company whose ethos and approaches to school support aligned with our working model. From the first meeting we realised that the MIS and the development behind it was invested in improving the functionality and making school data management as efficient and user-friendly as possible. The MIS seemed intuitive, built for school use everyday and was built for power and simplicity!
Irrespective of whether the trust was part of the system already, the move was motivated primarily by making our day-to-day MIS lives more efficient, paperless and usable by all. Our previous MIS was clunky, difficult to navigate, and setting up day-to-day functions for efficient processes required many hours of work and was not easy to access by all users in the Academy. We needed a change!
The process of implementing Arbor remotely was actually a lot easier than I’d anticipated. I actually think that remote working was a better method as it allowed more people to join in, we could keep recordings for training purposes and it allowed things to happen more quickly i.e. we didn’t have to arrange meetings, rooms, people being on site together etc. I would highly recommend it as a way of going into the migration process.
There are a number of benefits that we have seen in the short time we’ve been on board:
Arbor has been particularly useful for us in the following ways:
The objective for Beacon Academy was to automate and create efficiency. It was to reduce our environmental impact (particularly around the use of paper communications) and be able to share the system with wider stakeholders to allow for transparency and support in our day-to-day business. This has been evident in its infancy as our new MIS and I’m constantly impressed with different developments and features that I believe will contribute to our overall goals.
We hope that in the long term the power of Arbor for our school will continue to amaze as it has so far. We’ve never looked back and are always surprised and pleased with new product developments and the Arbor Product Roadmap. A real MIS gift that keeps on giving!
Discover how Arbor could transform the way you work with a free online demo for your school. Get in touch here, or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
For over a year, schools and MATs have been dealing with continual changes to the way they work. One of the most important changes that many schools have undertaken is to move to cloud-based systems to give them more flexibility in the way they run their school. We work with school teams throughout the year
For over a year, schools and MATs have been dealing with continual changes to the way they work. One of the most important changes that many schools have undertaken is to move to cloud-based systems to give them more flexibility in the way they run their school.
We work with school teams throughout the year to move them to Arbor’s cloud-based MIS – last year over 400 schools moved to Arbor 100% remotely! We know it can seem like a daunting task, but that’s why our tried-and-tested approach helps schools manage the change in a way that’s right for them, with support from us every step of the way.
Whatever change you’re managing at your school or MAT, our in-house experts in change management have put together five simple things to bear in to make successful changes.
The first things to think about when you’re starting a project are why you need to make the change and what you want to achieve over the long term.
The reasons you need to make the change will have a lot to do with:
Our teams at Arbor have found some great free online tools for planning, for example Miro the smart whiteboard tool.
If you’d like to find out more about how we support schools to switch to our cloud-based MIS, come along to ArborFest – our virtual conference exploring innovative ways of working with Arbor MIS. On the “Why Arbor?” Stage, you’ll hear from schools and MATs who’ve recently moved to Arbor about what motivated their switch, and the impact Arbor is having so far.
For the full programme of sessions across our five stages, head to http://bit.ly/ArborFest-2021
Every school has been working hard on ensuring they have an inspiring, rich and challenging curriculum for the pupils recently. Whilst a great curriculum has always been at the heart of learning, the extra focus of the updated Ofsted evaluation schedule has led to schools revisiting their curriculum design. Reviewing Curriculum Design Whilst reviewing curriculum
Every school has been working hard on ensuring they have an inspiring, rich and challenging curriculum for the pupils recently. Whilst a great curriculum has always been at the heart of learning, the extra focus of the updated Ofsted evaluation schedule has led to schools revisiting their curriculum design.
Whilst reviewing curriculum design, schools should ask themselves not only what pupils should know, be able to do and understand, but also how these aspects work in a cross-curricular way. Is there a skill that will help a pupil’s understanding of many subjects? Should we have explicit goals for learning behaviours that will assist learning in a global sense? Many schools will already do this but – when asked why – they often assert that such learning behaviours are impactful -, without being able to reference any real evidence.
Is this really a problem? Perhaps not. After all, a skilful teacher or leader often draws on years of experiential learning of what works well. High performing professionals are known to work in a constant loop of self-feedback that informs future practice.
On the other hand – maybe this is a problem. Those of you who are familiar with the work of John Hattie will know that his research into the impact of what strategies truly improve learning can be very insightful. For example, his work highlights the relatively small impact of class size on outcomes – yet many still believe this is crucial.
Before we make changes, we need to be sure we are making decisions based on sound evidence.
This brings me to my main point: all schools should be actively researching and monitoring the impact of their curriculum design. If you are about to spend significant time building a change to your curriculum, training teachers and updating documents, then you need to know this change will make a meaningful impact.
During my time working with Computing At School, I saw what I believed to be evidence that computational thinking had a positive impact in other areas of the curriculum, with a focus on problem-solving, decomposition of problems and self-evaluation of solutions. But how could I be sure?
This is where we need to design a process that tests the theory by providing clear evidence of impact; this means building in a way to make the important measurable (as opposed to making the measurable important).
In my example, I may believe that pupils who are better at problem-solving perform better across the curriculum. I might decide, therefore, to explicitly teach problem-solving. In order to effectively judge whether I am right, I need to know two things: which pupils are good at problem-solving and does this correlate with other educational outcomes?
Time, then, for some active research. Using a rubric, I could evaluate pupils’ problem-solving skills.
(Image 1: A table taken from Livingstone Academies part of the Aspirations Academies Trust – Copyright 2016)
I could then cross-reference this to academic outcomes in English and Mathematics. If a strong correlation exists, then it will be worthwhile integrating the teaching of problem-solving into my curriculum.
As ever though – this can be time-consuming work. If schools are to engage in research like this, they need a hassle-free way to get it done. They need a tool that can bring together what you already know about your pupils, such as their background and current academic grades, and your research evidence.
Luckily for Arbor schools, it’s very easy to make a rubric for assessing almost anything, such as the problem-solving example above. Once this has been used, clear analytics can then be used to determine if a strong correlation exists.
Research like this needs to be a continual process, as the needs of your pupils may change; the world they live in certainly will! So, having the tools to make the process easy and hassle-free should be a high priority.
1. When you review curriculum design, look for opportunities that improve outcomes across all subjects
2. Beware of falling back on assumed knowledge of “what works well”
3. Instead, find ways to make what you believe to be important measurable and generate your own research data
4. Use this data to make evidentially driven changes to secure maximum impact on pupil learning
5. Don’t start work without having the right tools at your disposal that will make the process hassle-free and help you get the work done quickly.
If you’d like to find out why Arbor is the MIS schools love to use, why not contact us? You can also book a demo by calling 0207 043 0470 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
Data and Insight | Popular
By School Improvement Consultant, Ed Cadwallader Since I started my career as a School Data Manager nearly 20 years ago, I’ve seen a lot of EdTech come and go. In some areas there have been impressive advances – Arbor MIS, for example, has analytics features that are light years ahead of anything SIMS could offer.
Since I started my career as a School Data Manager nearly 20 years ago, I’ve seen a lot of EdTech come and go. In some areas there have been impressive advances – Arbor MIS, for example, has analytics features that are light years ahead of anything SIMS could offer.
Luckily though, Management Information Systems (MIS) haven’t just been improving their in-built analysis tools, the best ones are also opening up secure data feeds to allow you to export your MIS data and analyse and share it exactly how you want to.
Arbor users can connect secure, customisable data feeds to visualisation tools including Excel, Google Data Studio or, my favourite, Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is enterprise grade business intelligence (BI) software that lets you combine and analyse data from multiple sources to create interactive dashboards and apps.
Of course, as a busy Data Manager or School Leader, you don’t have bags of free time to learn new software, so I’ve put together five of the top things you can do in Power BI so you can see if it’s for you.
As a Data Manager, I used to share screenshots of reports with SLT, but I would often get asked lots of basic questions, such as “who is this 20% of Year 9?” I would reply with a static student list that was accurate on that day but would soon be out of date.
You could solve this by using Excel, but this comes with a host of other problems, such as users typing over formulas, changing underlying data and sharing outdated versions.
Microsoft Power BI gives you all the benefits of Excel without the drawbacks. You can combine data from your MIS, online assessment tools and spreadsheets to produce the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that matter most right now. For example, if you’ve got an initiative around punctuality, you could add the start date onto a graph of lates to see if it made an impact.
Link your data analysis to your interventions
The best MIS systems or analysis tools give you an overview of the big picture while also allowing you to zero-in on the key data points and see the students behind the numbers.
Power BI lets you do just this. You can arrange multiple tables, KPI index cards and charts on a single page, then “drill down” into any of them to see the list of students behind the data. Hovering over a chart will also give you useful context, helping you take the best course of action.
If you spot a problem in a particular year or class group, clicking on that data point will filter the rest of the page by that group’s data. This would allow you to see, for example, if a spike in behaviour incidents within a year group has led to an uptick in exclusions.
Tooltips give additional information and context
Unlike Arbor, many MIS systems don’t allow you to take action directly from your analysis. This means you might be carrying out your analysis and communicating your plans via different channels which can lead to people misinterpreting information and a lack of shared purpose between staff.
Power BI’s web portal gives you a shared online space where your stakeholders can analyse, plan actions and carry out on-going reviews of interventions, all in one place. You can comment on specific pages and tag colleagues to bring data points to their attention.
Alternatively, you can share a dashboard in a Microsoft Teams chat so that a group of staff who are working towards a specific school improvement goal could use live data to inform their efforts.
Make data informed decisions using Comments and Chat in Teams
Not everybody can work with a big table of unstructured data. But when you turn raw records into visuals, you might inadvertently present the problem in a biased way. For example, if your school has seen a spike in behaviour incidents, breaking the data down by either year group, subject or time of day might imply one of these factors is behind it.
Power BI’s “Decomposition Tree” is an elegant solution to this problem. This visual allows you to choose from a list of factors that might affect a measure (such as number of negative behaviour incidents). You can change the order and number of break-downs, either choosing a specific category or one that Power BI has calculated to have a large effect. If a line of investigation leads to a dead end, you can remove, rearrange and look at your data in a new way.
You can also cross-highlight; in the example below, where the user has chosen to break the data down by year, subject and Teacher, selecting “Mr M Parting” shows you that his incidents are resolved slightly faster than the overall average but that a far higher proportion of them are negative compared to the school as a whole (1:1 when the overall ratio is 1:4).
Empower leaders to explore the data themselves with the decomposition tree
The flexibility of Power BI allows you to explore data from your MIS in different contexts. For example, using the map visual, you can plot your students by their home postcode to see if their location correlates with attendance or punctuality issues. You could also create a heat map showing days of the week and AM/PM sessions to see if particular times in the week see higher or lower attendance.
This is another way you can tailor your data analysis to your top priorities, which is more important than ever during Covid-19. With so much disruption to accountability measures because of missed exams, being able to bring in other data sources into your analysis allows you to stay flexible and self-sufficient when it comes to monitoring your school’s performance.
Analyse student locations and journeys with the map visual
The most important thing to remember about Power BI is that it’s a tool not a solution. While licences are cheap at around £20 per year, the platform isn’t pre-programmed to cater to all of your data needs, you need to create your own data model and dashboards. This requires a considerable investment of time, both to learn the program and create the content.
The good news is there’s a friendly and growing community of school-based BI developers on Twitter, free tutorials on YouTube and a dedicated blog, Power BI for Schools.
Arbor gives you sophisticated out-of-the-box dashboards and easy custom reports at school and MAT level, designed to give staff at all levels a shared view of progress.
Arbor has also created a Power BI Connector and five report templates helping you to visualise Arbor data any way you want to.
To find out more, join me for a Power BI masterclass webinar during ArborFest – Arbor’s virtual conference exploring innovative ways of working 18-19th March.
Power BI Masterclass, 18th March, 2pm Book your free spot
Arbor Updates | IT Support | Popular
Since the pandemic began, schools have had to rapidly change the way they manage their lessons, communications and admin. This has meant using technology in lots of new ways to keep lessons going, and smarter ways of using data to understand students’ changing needs. At Arbor, we’ve been developing new tools to support leaders and
Since the pandemic began, schools have had to rapidly change the way they manage their lessons, communications and admin. This has meant using technology in lots of new ways to keep lessons going, and smarter ways of using data to understand students’ changing needs.
At Arbor, we’ve been developing new tools to support leaders and Admin Staff manage the challenges of Covid-19.
Today, we’re excited to launch brand new integrations with Google Classroom™, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Power BI, designed to help you save time and manage your school data in the ways you need to.
As schools have been ramping up their use of digital learning platforms for remote or blended learning, we’ve built an integration with Google Classroom™ and Microsoft Office 365. Arbor automatically syncs your student and staff information into Google Classroom™ and Microsoft Office 365 so you don’t have to enter any data manually. What’s more, once you’re set-up, data syncs every 24 hours, meaning your information is always up-to-date.
We’ll also partner you with a Google or Microsoft accredited support team who’ll give you tailored support to get your integration set-up. They’ll also be your port of call if you need any help along the way.
What does this mean for you?
Check out The Key for School Leaders for some great guidance on getting the most out of a digital learning platform.
Arbor MIS gives staff at all levels a shared view of progress, with accessible, out-of-the-box dashboards and quick custom reports. But we know that you might sometimes want an even more customised approach to reporting.
That’s why we’re excited to launch our brand new Microsoft Power BI Connector. The Connector pre-loads your key Arbor data into Power BI, allowing you to visualise it in creative new ways.
We’ve also created five ready-to-go template dashboards which will save you hours of manual set-up, and allow you to dig into key factors behind your school or MAT’s performance. Plus, they’re fully customisable, giving you the freedom to present your data how you need to.
What does it mean for you?
Already using Arbor MIS?
Get in touch with your Account Manager to get started with Google Classroom™, Microsoft Office 365 or Microsoft Power BI at accountmanagers@arbor-education.com.
We’d love to show you how Arbor could help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more across your school or MAT. Come along to a free webinar to Arbor MIS in action, or book a free personalised demo here.
Alongside our focus on encouraging diversity and inclusion in the Arbor team, our Product Designer, Christie, wanted to shine a light on the work that our new Front-End development and User Experience (UX) team have been doing to integrate inclusivity into the design of Arbor MIS our products. Our mission is to transform the way
Alongside our focus on encouraging diversity and inclusion in the Arbor team, our Product Designer, Christie, wanted to shine a light on the work that our new Front-End development and User Experience (UX) team have been doing to integrate inclusivity into the design of Arbor MIS our products.
Our mission is to transform the way schools work for the better, with people-friendly tools, designed to make a difference. With over 1,500 schools using Arbor MIS (that’s over 200,000 users!), we want our platform to be usable, navigable and accessible for everyone.
When you think about making technology accessible, you might think about a sub-menu of your phone settings with features you can turn on or off, but it’s much more integrated into our daily lives than you might think.
If you’ve used Siri, Face-ID, captions on a YouTube video or put dark mode on any of your devices – you’ve been using technology that was originally designed for people with disabilities. This shows that a focus on accessibility not only benefits disabled users but can improve the user experience for everyone.
More people live with a disability than you might think with 18% of the UK working age population defined as disabled by the Equality Act 2010. This doesn’t take into account the effects of ageing, for our ability to use websites decreases by 0.8% every year after our 25th birthday. This means that every decade that passes makes us 8% less capable of using software.
The need for inclusive design is something that will eventually apply to all of us at one point or another.
1. Keyboard navigation
We’re committed to making all our new product features accessible by keyboard. Not all users have the ability to use a mouse, so we’re making all new pages accessible by using a combination of ‘arrow’, ‘tab’, ‘enter’, ‘space’ and ‘escape’ keys.
We’re working on rolling out keyboard accessibility across the whole of Arbor; so far, we’ve introduced this on the homepage. This works by a blue focus style that highlights what you’ve selected, showing you where you are on the page. This not only improves the experience for users who don’t have the ability to use the mouse, but it also speeds up navigation for everyone helping you quickly move up and down a drop-down menu by using the arrow keys or selecting a tag with the ‘enter’ key.
Keyboard controls in Arbor
2. Use of colour
When our Front-End and UX team consider accessibility at the design stage, we also think about colour. We now run checks on the contrast ratio of background colour to text colour before we release any new feature of Arbor.
Right now, we’re creating a new, expanded colour palette that works for users who are vision impaired or suffer from colour blindness.
Development of our new colour palette (in progress)
These innovations are some first steps in a long journey to make Arbor MIS inclusive for everyone. We’d love to hear from Arbor schools any suggestions you have to help improve the Arbor user experience.
If you’ve got a suggestion, you can join our UX User Group along with fellow school staff in various roles. You’ll help us test out our latest ideas and play an important role in helping to shape the future of Arbor MIS. If you’re interested, please register here and one of the team will invite you to our next feedback forum.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more at your school, come along to a free webinar to see the system in action. Alternatively book a personalised demo or get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education.com | 0208 050 1028
Interview with Sir Peter Birkett, Founder of Highgate Hill House School With more and more special schools moving to cloud-based systems to transform the ways they work, we spoke to Highgate Hill House School, an independent co-educational special school in Devon, to hear about the role that digital technology plays in their strategy. Founder and
With more and more special schools moving to cloud-based systems to transform the ways they work, we spoke to Highgate Hill House School, an independent co-educational special school in Devon, to hear about the role that digital technology plays in their strategy.
Founder and ambassador of the school, Sir Peter Birkett, shares how the school is using SENDit and Arbor MIS to record and monitor their students’ progress throughout school, and to further their school improvement initiatives. Sir Peter also has some great advice for fellow schools in how to get staff onboard with new technology.
In January 2016 I founded Highgate Hill House School in Devon – since that point the school has grown, developed significantly and is currently flourishing. This is largely due to our team working approach and commitment to providing personalized learning programmes for every child in our school. My internal role is to ensure this happens by encouraging innovation, creativity and activities that excites the children and allows them to work at a pace that best suits them.
My role as an ambassador includes raising the profile of the school through national awards, inspections, securing quality standards award (e.g., IIP) speaking at events, press releases, blogs, networking events and the usual social media activities.
Highgate Hill House is in the process of refining its ICT strategy with a company called Academia. Our strategy will focus our meeting our Vision, Mission, Values and Strategic objectives – we will adopt wherever possible technology that is proven to work including virtual reality, simulators and drones.
We see the use of IT as crucial in enhancing and accelerating learning and building on our blended learning approach that has advanced more rapidly because of the pandemic.
As we are a school for vulnerable children with special educational needs, we have remained open throughout all periods of lockdown.
A challenge for us like any other school was planning online delivery almost overnight. Not only the infrastructure, equipment, staffing and parental/carer support but also creating a system that the children would enjoy and quickly get used to.
For those attending school, we had all the social distancing and change of habit challenges to overcome health and safety issues as well associated with the use of IT equipment.
We have learned much from the pandemic and will now have certain aspects of the school curriculum delivered via online home learning.
Technology supports our school by making learning interesting. We tailor each child/young person’s learning to their individual interests and technology means that we can access resources that inspire them.
Technology used intelligently will not only excite and motivate many students it will also support, enhance and accelerate the learning process.
Technology during the pandemic has also been used for staff development and team building that also included sharing of new learning and teaching material produced.
We chose these companies because they share our passion towards educational excellence, they have the technology that will enable us to record and monitor a child’s progress throughout their time in the school. This will provide the school, the child, parents/carers, inspectors and other key stakeholders with individualised pupil information that will enable us to provide personalised learning and intervention strategies for every child in the school.
It is still early days but we are delighted with the progress seen to date – we are already seeing the points raised above being met.
Very well, we are pleased with the ongoing support from both companies.
Identify a champion, engage all staff by developing a shared plan with phased timeframes and review dates, allow staff time to experience the benefits of the learning platform or portal. Some find it straightforward while others find it daunting, however, once they feel confident their creativity and ideas begin to flow.
To meet our vision and, in partnership with both SENDit and Arbor, build on the work already undertaken. Our aim is to use the technology available intelligently so that we can create a recording, monitoring and learning approach that ensures all children are “happy, successful and able to reach their full potential”.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could transform the way your school works, join a free webinar or arrange a personalised demo here. Alternatively, get in touch with us on tellmemore@arbor-education.com or 0208 050 1028.
At Arbor we know that every school and MAT is different, and that every school has different needs when it comes to choosing the right set of technology. That’s why we work with a growing network of apps – to make sure our schools can connect the specialist systems they rely on everyday with Arbor
At Arbor we know that every school and MAT is different, and that every school has different needs when it comes to choosing the right set of technology.
That’s why we work with a growing network of apps – to make sure our schools can connect the specialist systems they rely on everyday with Arbor MIS, helping them to manage their school data the way they need to.
We partner with specialist providers to give schools choice
We believe that when school technology companies pull together, the impact can be huge. It’s been difficult for technology providers to integrate with server-based MIS systems in the past. However, as more and more schools have been switching to a cloud-based MIS over the last few years, providers have built MIS integrations much more easily. This means schools have the freedom to continue using the tools they love, connected seamlessly to their MIS.
Connect your specialist tools to Arbor easily
At Arbor, we’ve partnered with over 100 organisations across the country who provide specialist systems and support to schools. We believe that instead of a “one stop shop” approach, where schools can only use Arbor for everything, we want to make it easy for schools to use specialist systems for things like safeguarding, timetabling and assessment if they want to, connected seamlessly to Arbor.
We collaborate with the best in EdTech
Working with specialist organisations across the country gives us the opportunity to collaborate and provide the best possible service to schools.
We want to make it easier than ever for partners of all types to give schools the largest possible choice. We’re doing that in three key ways:
1. We’ve made it easy to integrate with Arbor
As Arbor’s community of schools grows (now over 1,500!), we want to make it cheaper and easier to plug third party systems into Arbor. This means that our list of integrations is constantly growing too.
We also want to make it easy to share ideas between schools, Arbor and our partners. For example, we have an online Developer Portal, where companies who want to integrate with Arbor can sign up for free and access all our documentation (with support for free too!). We’ve also built an online Community forum where our schools and partners can easily swap tips and best practice for getting the most out of Arbor.
2. We’re building deeper integrations
We’re also working with key partners on exciting deeper integrations that give schools joined-up insight and seamless workflows. For example, schools using PUMA and PIRA tests from RS Assessment can sync marks straight into Arbor and analyse the results alongside demographic information, attendance and behaviour.
3. We’re supporting schools in new ways
With schools working in totally different ways right now and managing constant change, they’re finding the IT support they need has changed. They need access to information fast – regardless of which system it’s in. Our friendly support team at Arbor provides free support for schools, but we’ve also teamed up with support providers all over the country so schools can choose to get help with Arbor from their local team if they want to.
Our accredited Arbor Support Partners go through in-depth training to help schools get the most value out of Arbor. With skills in business intelligence (BI) and analytics, they can also work with schools and MATs to help them get even greater insight into their data.
Discover Arbor MIS for your school or MAT
To find out how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could transform the way your school or MAT works, get in touch to book a demo or join a free webinar to see the system in action.
Looking to integrate or partner with Arbor?
We’re always looking to invest in new partnerships, so that schools can choose the systems that work best for them and benefit from the power of collaboration. If you want to find out more, get in touch at: api@arbor-education.com
Case Studies | IT Support
Interview with Paula Harris, Business Manager at Lacewood Primary School, Barnsley At Arbor, we think schools should be able to choose the support that works for them. That’s why we’ve built a network of over 50 support partners across the country. In this interview, I spoke to Paula Harris, the School Business Manager at Lacewood
At Arbor, we think schools should be able to choose the support that works for them. That’s why we’ve built a network of over 50 support partners across the country. In this interview, I spoke to Paula Harris, the School Business Manager at Lacewood Primary School in Barnsley, about how they recently moved to Arbor with the support of our accredited Support Partner AdEPT Education.
Find out what motivated Lacewood Primary’s move to the cloud, their relationship with AdEPT Education, and how they’re transforming the way they work for the better – from sharing visibility of data to all staff (not just the Business Manager), to engaging parents in more cost-effective ways.
We started looking at Arbor in April and went live in September, so we had a few things to do over the summer holidays to get it set-up but it wasn’t too much work. There are always a few teething issues with new systems but it was quite straightforward really, the staff were surprised how easy it was!
We’d been thinking about switching for a while, but it was a bit tricky to get some members of staff to change because they were so used to the old system. Some people were quite apprehensive but I was quite excited about using a more modern system. Our previous MIS was quite old and the look of it hadn’t been updated in a long time. Reporting was quite complicated and our support team had to help us generate any additional reports that we wanted. It wasn’t very user-friendly and it wasn’t easy to interact with parents either, because they didn’t have visibility of their children’s data. The final straw was when we moved to a new support provider, which meant we had to buy our MIS license directly rather than from our LA, and the cost shot up to over £10k.
I’m part of a local School Business Managers’ forum, so I asked questions there about what other MIS other people were using and there was a lot of interest in Arbor. It gave me confidence that others were already using it and recommending it, so I thought “why not?”
1. User-friendly
Arbor is much more user-friendly. When you go to a student profile, it’s a lot clearer and all the information you need is there, rather than having to scroll through. You can also pin things to the top of the child’s record so you can access it more easily.
2. Sharing the burden of census
The most recent workforce census was the easiest census I have ever done. The data quality dashboard in Arbor allows you to look at anything that’s been duplicated, so you can deal with things as and when on a day-to-day basis, rather than waiting for the census dry run. On census day it’s always down to the Business Manager to complete everything, but if you’ve got the data quality dashboard, you can involve the admin team too and give them little bits to look at and fix. Obviously that shares out the workload, but it also means the office staff understand what the census is about and why it’s so important that children’s data is correct. Everyone can take responsibility for the data rather than just the Business Manager.
3. Engaging parents
Parents can log in to the Parent Portal to see their children’s details and request that we amend them, whereas with the previous system they couldn’t do that. It’s much more interactive for them and we’re also using the free in-app messaging system so we save money on texting.
4. Bringing systems together
We also use the payments functionality in Arbor, so it’s meant we have been able to bring a lot of systems into one – we used to use a separate communication tool and a separate payments provider, but now everything’s come together in Arbor so it’s cost effective and much easier to manage. Payments are really easy to reconcile in Arbor too, much more straightforward than the system we used to use.
Teachers have said it’s easier now because the dinner register is on the same system as the attendance register, so they don’t have to open another screen. We’re looking at the assessment side of things now on Arbor too and we’re going to have a demo in the New Year.
During the implementation, you have a dedicated person at Arbor who you can contact at all times and they ring every week to check how you’re progressing. They send you lots of links to training webinars and resources too, which I used and shared with the admin team, so by the time we migrated over, we were all ready!
The support from AdEPT is really good. It’s been a learning curve for both of us as AdEPT are fairly new to providing support for Arbor’s MIS, but that’s meant we’ve had a really close relationship with them as we’ve been getting to grips with Arbor. We’ve found it really easy working with Mandy and the team.
It definitely makes a difference working with a team that’s local and that I already have a relationship with. They know what I’m like – I’m not technical! For me to be able to get on with a new system, it had to be well supported and easy for me to understand.
I’d advise them to come and have a look! Visit a school that’s already up-and-running to see how easy it is to use. One of our office staff had been at the school for 27 years and was quite apprehensive, but even she adapted really quickly and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was. When she retired recently, we had a new Attendance Officer join the school and she was up-and-running with Arbor within a day. So my advice would be, just come and visit!
Are you considering moving your school to the cloud?
Join a free webinar to see how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could transform the way you work. From tailored sessions for secondary, primary, special schools and MATs, find out what’s on and sign up today. Alternatively, book a 1:1 demo here.
Are you an IT support team?
If you want to find out more about partnering with us, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch here. Find out more about how we work with specialist providers here.
Arbor Updates | Popular
After the success of our last two MAT Conference webinar series, we’re excited to announce the next instalment of “Building a Resilient Trust”, and you’re invited! With the vaccine rollout pushing on and the date for schools to return set at 8th March, trust leaders are having to shift from leading in a reactive way,
After the success of our last two MAT Conference webinar series, we’re excited to announce the next instalment of “Building a Resilient Trust”, and you’re invited!
With the vaccine rollout pushing on and the date for schools to return set at 8th March, trust leaders are having to shift from leading in a reactive way, to being proactive and building a plan for the future. Join our webinar series this term to take practical ideas and strategies to your own trust to help support your schools and staff now and over the long term.
In our new webinar series launching Weds 10th March, you’ll hear from established trust leaders from the likes of Academy Transformation Trust, Ormiston Academies Trust and The Romero Catholic Academy Trust, discussing topics such as building a sustainable work culture, measuring success in light of a second summer without exams and how to become more financially stable as a trust. Each 45-minute webinar will help MAT leaders like yourself prepare for the future and build a strong and versatile trust.
Sign up for the MAT Conference Webinar Series here and get exclusive access to all of the webinars and the recordings.
To sign up for individual webinars, or to see what’s coming up, click on the links below.
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Wednesday 10th February, 10am
In conversation with: Peter Bradburn, Director of IT and Communications, and Giles Hill, Digital Learning Lead, at Aspire Academy Trust.
With remote learning likely to continue into the coming months, join Peter Bradburn and Giles Hill as they share some of the tips, strategies and insights that Aspire Academy Trust has implemented to make remote learning as effective as possible.
Sign up for free here
Wednesday 24th February, 10am
In conversation with: Anna Hennell James, CEO of Orwell MAT.
Rolling out a new MIS (Management Information System) across your trust can feel like a daunting task – and doing it remotely can make it seem even harder. Anna Hennell James, CEO of Orwell MAT, is here to share why it’s not as challenging as it may seem, especially when you factor in the benefits your new MIS can bring.
Whether you’re thinking of centralising your systems soon, or you’re only just starting to research what’s out there, this webinar is a great opportunity to hear from a trust who have made the switch recently.
Wednesday 3rd March, 10am
In conversation with: Patrick Taggart, Director of Operations at Romero Catholic Academy Trust, and Mark Tadman, CEO of Schools Business Services (SBS).
With tougher financial checks coming into place and the fallout from covid being readily felt, how can trusts emerge from this period more financially stable?
Hear from Patrick Taggart, Director of Operations at Romero Catholic Academy Trust, on how they’re budgeting to emerge from COVID and how he’s balancing reactive responses to short-term pressures with longer-term planning. Mark Tadman will share advice on how best to plan budgets and share resources across your trust to save you time and money.
Wednesday 17th March, 11am
In conversation with: Nick Hudson, CEO of Ormiston Academies Trust.
With almost 12 months of blended or fully remote learning, a second summer without exams and a broadening disadvantage gap, what does the future look like for assessment?
Nick Hudson, CEO of Ormiston, a 40-school MAT, will be discussing how he intends to broaden the concept of assessments at Ormiston and beyond. With funding from the National Lottery, assessment at Ormiston will soon include the tracking of soft skills and qualities students gain through school experiences, such as leadership from being a prefect, teamwork from sports, and cooperation from community volunteering.
Friday 19th March, 11am (Part of ArborFest – See what else is on at ArborFest here)
In conversation with Kirsty Woolls, HR Director at Academy Transformation Trust (ATT), and Abby Brayford, Director of ATT Institute.
Creating a culture of professional development and learning within schools and trusts is hugely important, especially for retaining and attracting the best talent. Join this special webinar with Kirsty Woolls, HR Director at Academy Transformation Trust (ATT), and Abby Brayford, Director of ATT Institute, where they discuss how their People Development Programme has created a sustainable work culture at ATT.
Want to see some of the topics covered and the lessons learnt from our last MAT Conference Series? We’ve put together an ebook of the last MAT Conference Series, which includes six interviews with MAT leaders and industry experts sharing best practice for staying agile and adapting to change. Get your copy here!
“Building a Resilient Trust” is brought to you by Arbor Education. Used by over 1,500 schools and 130 MATs, we’re the UK’s fastest growing cloud-based Management Information System (MIS) today. Our mission is to transform the way schools work for the better, and we host this webinar series termly to explore different aspects of building a better working life with trust leaders.
If you’d like to hear about how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could help you and your schools work better today and be ready for tomorrow, join us for an MIS demo webinar.
Schools have had to be particularly resourceful with budgets this year. With that in mind, it’s especially important to have visibility over how this year’s spend compares to previous years, and to other schools, so you can plan an effective budget going forwards. To help save you time when planning your annual budget and present
Schools have had to be particularly resourceful with budgets this year. With that in mind, it’s especially important to have visibility over how this year’s spend compares to previous years, and to other schools, so you can plan an effective budget going forwards.
To help save you time when planning your annual budget and present clear analysis to your governors and key stakeholders, we’ve created a personalised School’s Financial Benchmarking (SFB) Report for every school in the country. Just log into your free Insight portal to get yours now.
Using your latest 2019/20 financial data (just released this week by the DfE!) your report gives you a ready-made analysis of your income and expenditure patterns over the last three years in a clear, easy-to-read PDF report, helping you see the impact of Covid-19 straight away. It also shows you how your finances compare against schools like you nationally, locally and within your Local Authority.
Your report is waiting for you in your Arbor Insight portal – get your hands on it now!
Analyse per-student spend
Arbor’s SFB report is a useful resource for school budgeters, as you’ll be able to see all your expenditure and income across key areas shown as a percentage of total spend so you can visualise all of your finances better. We also break down every value as an amount that has been spent or received per student in your school.
Benchmark your school
Benchmark your school against others in the country that have a similar demographic cohort of students to you, weighted by percentage of prior attainment, FSM and EAL students. If you have a high proportion of disadvantaged students, or perhaps students with low prior attainment, it’s important to see whether similar schools have comparable spending patterns – or if being benchmarked against these schools highlights some areas of funding or spending that might be good to look into.
Use past trends to plan forward
Your report will show you how your finances have shaped up over the last three years with colour-coded line graphs that include trend figures. We also show the last three years of finances for each resource compared with that of the national average for schools and schools like you. Our three-year rolling average for each expenditure and income resource can help you predict and plan your future three-year expenditure planning.
Due to the disruption to learning and assessment as a result of the pandemic, you won’t have all the usual attainment data at your fingertips. To support you, we’ve made our popular Arbor Insight ASP reports free this year to help you get a clearer picture of your past performance.
This bundle of five reports (worth £330)* includes:
We hope using your SFB report in combination with your ASP reports will help you set targets and direct your resources in the best way to start next financial year in a strong position.
Download your performance reports for free from your Arbor Insight account now!
Don’t forget to sign up (for free) to Arbor Insight where you’ll be able to download all your reports.
Sign up here in seconds: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/register then log in here in future: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/login
If you’re looking to keep your cost low and give next year’s budget a little wiggle room, find out how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could transform the way you work, helping you focus on what matters most – your students.
Find out more with a personalised demo or join a free webinar.
MAT Operations
In our popular “Building a Resilient Trust” webinar series last term, we invited MAT leaders and experts working with schools and trusts to share how they were adapting to the challenges of Covid-19, whilst developing sustainable strategies for the future. We’ve collated six of the best interviews into a special ebook which we hope will
In our popular “Building a Resilient Trust” webinar series last term, we invited MAT leaders and experts working with schools and trusts to share how they were adapting to the challenges of Covid-19, whilst developing sustainable strategies for the future.
We’ve collated six of the best interviews into a special ebook which we hope will help you reflect on your own trust, and leadership strategies you could put in place to guide your schools through the next stage of the pandemic and beyond.
Download your copy of our new ebook for MAT leaders here
You’ll hear practical insights from fellow CEOs, MAT leaders and industry experts on topics such as turning around schools during times of turbulence, and how centralisation of finance and budgeting can ensure a sustainable way of working beyond Covid. You’ll see how to procure technology quickly and compliantly, and techniques you can use to plan better during uncertainty. In our final articles, you might find yourself reflecting on your approach to leading through a crisis and how to keep your staff engaged, motivated and connected.
1. Turning Round Schools in a Time of Turbulence By Nick Cross, CEO at Kings Group Academies
2. How to Build a Centralised Approach to Financial Management that will Outlast Covid-19 By Jason Brown, CFO at Bath and Wells Multi Academy Trust and Will Jordan, Co-Founder of IMP Software
3. Is Blended Learning the Future of Education? By Giles Hill, Digital Learning Lead at Aspire Academy Trust
4. Lessons Learnt From Procuring Systems During Covid-19 By Jim Farquhar, COO at Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust
5. Leading Through a Crisis: How to Keep your Staff Engaged, Motivated and Connected By Andy Buck, CEO of Leadership Matters
6. How to Reflect on Rapid Change and Plan for the Future By Rachel Coldicutt, Expert in technology and social impact
This month we’re launching the next instalment of our popular webinar series for MAT
Leaders. Each session, our CEO James will talk to MAT CEOs, COOs, CFOs and industry experts about their strategies for running a trust successfully during Covid-19 and beyond.
The series explores different facets of “resilience”, including culture, change management, school improvement, and finance, with talks by:
See what’s on and book your free spot today
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. In just two weeks’ time, we’re hosting the second ever virtual ArborFest – a two-day festival dedicated to discovering new ways of working with Arbor MIS. ArborFest is your chance to meet (online!) the growing community of
In just two weeks’ time, we’re hosting the second ever virtual ArborFest – a two-day festival dedicated to discovering new ways of working with Arbor MIS.
ArborFest is your chance to meet (online!) the growing community of over 1,500 schools and 130 MATs using Arbor MIS to transform the way they work.
Following our popular festival in November 2020, where we were joined by over 700 staff from 400 schools, we’d love to invite you to the next instalment of our popular community event for school leaders, teachers and support staff.
The theme this Spring is all about exploring innovative ways of working at school. We’ve designed a programme of talks, workshops and feedback forums to show you how using Arbor can change the way your school works for the better – whether you’re already a customer, thinking about switching, or a partner of ours. There’s sure to be a session in the programme for everyone – from your SLT to your Support Team. And the best thing is it’s completely free!
Already use our MIS? With sessions designed to help make sure you’re getting the most from Arbor, you’ll have opportunities to learn new tips and tricks, share best practice with other schools, and attend masterclasses on areas like data analysis and PowerBI.
New to Arbor? ArborFest is your unique chance to get a behind-the-scenes look at how Arbor works from schools and MATs who have recently made the switch. With a range of talks and workshops to choose from, it’s the perfect way to get an informal feel for whether Arbor is the right fit for you.
Plus, there’s a keynote speaker, a mindfulness workshop, and opportunities to network with fellow schools.
Click here to see the full programme and book your tickets
ArborFest will run across five virtual “stages”, each hosting multiple talks across the two days. Click the link above to see the full programme and book into the sessions you’d like to join:
We’re excited to announce a very special keynote speaker for ArborFest – Mary Myatt. Mary is an education adviser, writer and speaker who will be sharing insights and advice from her latest book, “Back on track: Fewer things, greater depth.” Mary will dig into why there might be redundant processes in schools, and uses Greg McKeown’s ‘disciplined pursuit of less’ to help school leaders and teachers create time and space to do deep, satisfying work on the curriculum.
Sign up for the keynote speech here – everyone is welcome!
Watch our video showcasing our in-person ArborFest back in February 2020. Take a look and see what ArborFest means to us:
We look forward to seeing you online soon – don’t forget to tell your colleagues!
P.S. If you’re having trouble getting onto the webinar site to book your tickets, make sure you’re using an updated version of Chrome or Firefox and delete any cache or cookies, which may be blocking you.
We’ve got lots of free webinars in the run-up to ArborFest designed to show you how Arbor MIS works. Find out what’s on here and book your spot.
Alternatively, get in touch here to arrange a personalised demo.
Former Secondary School Headteacher and Arbor’s Senior Partnership Manager, Andrew, speaks to Steve Gibson, Deputy Headteacher at Berwick Academy In my first article on the subject of curriculum led financial planning (CLFP), I asked: Is your Curriculum planning improving outcomes for your students? In this article, I discussed with a secondary Senior Leader how schools
In my first article on the subject of curriculum led financial planning (CLFP), I asked: Is your Curriculum planning improving outcomes for your students? In this article, I discussed with a secondary Senior Leader how schools are addressing CLFP mid-pandemic, including how to juggle the challenges of budgeting whilst addressing gaps in curriculum and learning, and planning for the future.
Steve Gibson is Deputy Headteacher at Berwick Academy, a small community high school and sixth form in Northumberland that aims to improve skills, knowledge, understanding and values through friendship, learning and respect. Balancing the budget in a small, rural school is not a science but an art form, as Steve discusses the challenges he faces with outdated building stock, rural isolation and difficulties around recruiting and retaining quality staff.
You can read our conversation below.
Steve: Obviously, the main focus is on ‘the now’ but as we have funding challenges anyway, our eye constantly has to be on the budget. We have had the support of external resource advisors but sometimes they lack school operational experience and don’t appreciate the complexities of providing a balanced curriculum when numbers on roll are below average, or that by reducing staffing to any great extent we wouldn’t be able to function. We have implemented many suggestions, but some of their suggestions would be detrimental to our curriculum and the way we operate.
We have an old school building which has been well looked-after, but it’s fair to say that some parts of our site are in a poor condition and the costs associated with operating our ten buildings are high. This is a costly site and needs a lot of upkeep. As part of our Covid response and financial prudence, we have reduced movement between buildings to maintain heat and minimise student contact but the buildings are not large but do house specialist facilities. We are not able to consider any major capital projects at the moment.
S: Suddenly we find we need more people on duty and more people at the gate without any additional funding, and while this is built into our contact time allocations, changes like this rely on a lot of goodwill. We have already had to change the structure of the school day to make the site Covid safe and currently operate a three lesson day.
With the reduced movement of students, we found this approach had a positive effect on behaviour and when all students return, the reduced timetable may remain in some form. We like it because it maximises learning time as students settle more quickly. In effect, we exploded our one week timetable over two weeks so you get a good chunk of curriculum time. The curriculum is therefore protected but some subjects may only see classes once per fortnight.
Attendance follow up will be a priority when students return and we are buying a day of Education Welfare Officer time to help us get students back and engaging with learning. We’ve also maintained our EWO contract throughout lockdown last year and again this year in order to help us to reach out to some of the more difficult to engage families.
Mental health and wellbeing have emerged as strong priorities and our Pastoral Team have really stepped up in this respect to ensure that there is a wellbeing helpline, regular catch-up calls and home visits when appropriate, and support for families where we, or they, identify a need.
S: It hasn’t been easy as the information is held in a number of different places. What we do know is that staffing costs are high and recruitment is difficult, and therefore staff are expensive. We have built a planning model that shows how much each subject costs and can even demonstrate what each lesson costs.
We have found that some of our activities are cost-negative. Things like our “On Call” rotas are mostly made up of the Senior Leadership team and that’s predictably an expensive use of their time. We have used some classroom management software to analyse how often Senior Leadership have been called to assist in classroom difficulties as the basis for some calculations, and as a way of identifying trends and training requirements.
S: We have had to reduce the range of options subjects for Year 10 whilst trying to keep a broad curriculum. We have had to limit the options for students by grouping similar subjects such as graphics and design technology into a single subject offer. We only have one MFL teacher so all students study French and this is our only language GCSE in order to meet students’ language acquisition aspirations and the requirements of the EBacc.
We offer a broadly traditional curriculum, but are evaluating it annually with the needs of each cohort in mind. We have also reduced the offer in the sixth form to those subjects we know we can deliver well as we understand that it is reliant on main school funding to exist.
S: Yes we have. We have considered shutting our sixth form but the nearest alternative is 30 miles away or a difficult journey to attend college in a big city and we feel our community deserves local provision. There are many difficult decisions to make around curriculum and financial planning, but our first priority is always what is right for our students and our community, and then we work hard to make that happen within our financial means.
S: We have a clear vision for where we need to improve, and we have not allowed the lockdowns to change that course. We have built on CPD for staff, and our teaching and learning strategy has become embedded through our virtual learning to reflect our in-classroom learning.
We are seeing the benefits of increased learning time. Not all subjects are big fans of the longer lessons but we may consider changing our timetable to a 4 period day to maximise the positive effects of fewer lesson transitions and the opportunity to go deeper with students during those longer lessons.
The forced move to virtual learning to support students at home has not happened in the way we expected, but has followed our intention to move as much home learning as possible to our virtual platforms. A positive outcome of the current situation is that our students and parents are now used to accessing and learning from these platforms. Our staff have also had the opportunity to learn new skills in working remotely, and our ability to offer lessons of quality at home has been developed at breakneck speed.
S: We have, the main one is considering our status as a high school. Our students join us in Year 9 and school funding modelling nationally favours the secondary school model starting at Year 7. The modelling of two additional year groups enables us to demonstrate a balanced budget, and if we continue to believe in the current system, we therefore have to acknowledge that funding should be different for those schools who don’t fit the standard primary-secondary mould. Either changing the model of the school, or changing the funding mechanism for those of us operating in a three-tier system, would make us more financially sustainable.
S: It is just about, because we’ve carefully looked at our Teacher contact ratio and costs per lesson. We know we can’t shave any more of these costs. The challenge for us is to look at efficiencies in our operating costs so we can prioritise the curriculum. For example, when we look at our technology costs we know that on top of our MIS costs we have safeguarding software, a classroom management tool, a parent communication tool and a homework tool. All of these add up and all of them are relied upon by someone to do one specific job. Our homework tool for example has become our main vehicle for managing our online learning. We don’t underestimate the value some of them bring.
We look for efficiencies all the time, and we are good at repairing before replacing! We look after our buildings to make sure they provide the best environment that they can, and when money needs to be spent on them we make our choices with one eye on today and the other looking to the future. It’s the same with our curriculum. We want to offer the widest and most appropriate curriculum we can for our students, but to do that we need to maintain a clear understanding of the cost of any decision we make, and balance that with a clear understanding of the needs and aspirations of our students and our community.
For more information on a tool and advice on your CLFP, go to: https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/resources-products/how-schools-can-best-implement-curriculum-led-financial-planning/
Rolling out a new MIS (Management Information System) at your secondary school can feel like a daunting task. That’s why we work hand-in-hand with schools to implement Arbor at the right time and pace. There really is no best time to move – we work with schools throughout the school year and during holidays to
Rolling out a new MIS (Management Information System) at your secondary school can feel like a daunting task. That’s why we work hand-in-hand with schools to implement Arbor at the right time and pace.
There really is no best time to move – we work with schools throughout the school year and during holidays to fit your move to Arbor around your priorities, school calendar and staff commitments. During Covid-19 we’ve moved over 400 schools to Arbor.
You’ll have the support of your Arbor Project Manager who will ensure your staff have the right training they need to use Arbor confidently as soon as the system goes live. Find out more about how we help make Arbor a success at your school here.
If you’re wondering when would be a good time to move systems during the academic year, our Head of Professional Services, Emma, has some handy pointers below to help you decide:
If you want your Arbor site to go live in September, your implementation will begin after the Easter break.
What to bear in mind in your school calendar:
How Arbor can help:
If you want your Arbor site to go live in October Half-Term, your implementation will begin after May Half-Term.
If you want your Arbor site to go live in January, your implementation will begin in September.
If you want your Arbor site to go live in February Half-Term, your implementation will begin after October Half-Term.
If you want your Arbor site to go live in Easter, your implementation will begin after Christmas.
If you want your Arbor site to go live in May Half-Term, your implementation will begin after February Half-Term.
Want to find out what your implementation journey to Arbor MIS could look like? Join our free webinar on 2nd February at 11am to hear from Rebecca all about the structure and process of moving your secondary school to Arbor’s cloud-based MIS – from data migration, training, to driving long-term improvements to the way you work. Sign up here for free.
In November 2020, we caught up with Jim Farquhar, COO at Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust, about his strategy for systems procurement across a Multi-Academy Trust. Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust is made up of 27 schools across Teesside and North Yorkshire. Formed in 2018 from four smaller MATs and several LA maintained schools, it
In November 2020, we caught up with Jim Farquhar, COO at Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust, about his strategy for systems procurement across a Multi-Academy Trust.
Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust is made up of 27 schools across Teesside and North Yorkshire. Formed in 2018 from four smaller MATs and several LA maintained schools, it now serves approximately 1,300 staff and 9,000 students.
Find out below how Jim led the project to procure a new MIS (Management Information System) for all schools in the trust, driven by the need for a system which could stand up to the challenges of Covid-19. Jim has some great advice for fellow MAT leaders who are considering procuring systems at scale.
Over the last two years our strategy has been moving towards more centralisation for the functions that are best suited to it. We’re quite far along, with central teams for finance, HR, governance, IT, attendance and standards. We are also now looking at our estates functions as a next step.
Our IT strategy going forwards is to consolidate systems, with the goal of only 4 or 5 key systems across the trust. This will allow us to make maintenance and quality assurance of data much more efficient and consistent.
All schools and MATs come from different starting points but in my experience there is often a lot of historic spend that goes unchallenged every year. Central Teams need to question what they’re getting for their money. With LA maintained schools especially, you can often see big contracts continuing on that were originally set up by LA.
We have found it has been worth hiring a procurement manager in house with experience in the public and private sectors, who will be good at spotting these types of legacy contracts and putting new arrangements in place.
Our schools were previously using a mixture of systems, including SIMS, ScholarPack and Bromcom. Because of this, we’d built a reporting process where we were taking data out of schools’ systems and were collating and analysing it using Power BI. This took a great deal of time and resource for the IT team and was not a sustainable solution for moving forward as a trust. As a result, our Head of IT and Head of Data Quality put in a strong case for moving to a cloud-based, multi-phase MIS and their rationale made sense from a number of perspectives.
As Covid-19 hit, we realised our systems couldn’t stand up to the added challenges such as tracking and supporting staff and students in isolation and in a timely manner. There was a real information vacuum which became a serious issue.
Although the first few weeks were taken up with ‘firefighting’, after about a month once we had procedures up and running, we sat down as a leadership team and weighed up the opportunity that a new MIS would bring. We were conscious that we’d already introduced several new systems since forming as a trust, so we didn’t want to put additional burden on staff.
But we decided to take the plunge and move to Arbor MIS and were surprised that we were able to procure within one month. Only 6 months later, Arbor is completely implemented and we’re receiving great feedback from staff. The best thing is we now have access to the information we need to make much better decisions as a trust. It also puts us in a much better position to tackle second and potential third waves of the crisis.
It’s been a lot easier than I was expecting at the start. The process flowed, we’ve had great support from Arbor, and the system has just worked. There are always challenges with an implementation process but with Arbor they have been totally surmountable. We’ve also had the advantage of a strong project team we put in place – with a combination of teaching and learning, and technical expertise – which has meant we’ve had the right people driving momentum forward and making sure the system works for everyone.
We used the DfE’s G-Cloud framework to procure which made it really straightforward as it mapped out the process into stages and milestones, with guidance to follow along the way. It meant that we had documentation at every stage to back up our decision making and it took care of all the heavy lifting for us.
The first thing we did was set out our written strategic intent which detailed what we wanted the system to do. We then looked at the suppliers on G-Cloud to see which would meet our requirements well. This helped us narrow down the choice to two options. We then had demos with each supplier and set up an awarding panel consisting of our project team as well as our leadership team to make the evaluation.
It was a ‘soft sell’ at first. We floated the idea of moving MIS without the mention of timescales at first so as not to cause anxiety for staff. We brought them into the process along the way; Headteachers and Business Support Staff joined demos with the two suppliers and also had a play around with the system. We also arranged lots of Q&A sessions for staff to ask any questions and raise any concerns they had about changing systems, which helped dispel any fears.
We had great buy-in from the schools; we offered them a gradual transition plan which would go through to Easter 2021 but all volunteered to come on board straight away. The quality of the Arbor product and the support team helped in reassuring staff and demystifying what could be perceived as a chunky process. Staff were excited that this was a positive step to take the trust forward.
We had the advantage that in the first year as a trust we had put all schools on the same internet and communications platform, which meant that we could engage with school staff directly and much more easily.
Yes, we received 6 or 7 freedom of information requests which got quite vexing. However, we were able to deal with them quickly and in a straightforward fashion because we had all the documentation, audit trail, timelines, etc. thanks to G-Cloud to evidence our decision. This really highlighted the strength of using a procurement framework as it narrows the potential for challenge in the first place, plus if you’ve followed the steps correctly means you don’t need to panic if you do get challenged.
For more advice on procuring systems for your school or trust, check out our blog:
4 top tips for procuring a cloud-based MIS for your school or MAT
At this time of year, we’d normally be getting ready to meet schools and MATs at BETT (over lunch and a glass of wine!). Sadly that can’t happen this year due to Covid-19, so we’ve decided to make a new plan instead. You and your whole team deserve a break after what’s been a challenging
At this time of year, we’d normally be getting ready to meet schools and MATs at BETT (over lunch and a glass of wine!). Sadly that can’t happen this year due to Covid-19, so we’ve decided to make a new plan instead.
You and your whole team deserve a break after what’s been a challenging 12 months. So, we’ve decided to host a series of virtual afternoon tea sessions before Half-Term – with brownies and tea on us!
We’re running these sessions as an informal way for primary, secondary and MAT leaders to find out about Arbor MIS, and explain how we’ve helped over 1,400 schools pivot to remote working and blended learning this year.
Because Arbor is cloud-based, our schools can access it from anywhere – which means they have a way to track staff sickness, plan teacher rotas, set work for students and send mass comms out from wherever they need to work.
Your afternoon tea session is a chance to see the system in action, and talk through how Arbor can help you achieve your longer term strategic goals. We’ll also discuss how simple switching MIS really is, and share some stories from the 412 schools who moved to Arbor remotely in 2020.
Book your 30-minute afternoon tea with us (from 27th Jan-5th Feb) using the link below. Share your address, and we’ll send you tea and brownies in the post to enjoy during our chat (hosted on Zoom). It’s that simple!
Click here to sign up for your tea and brownies with Arbor
Hope to see you for a cup of tea later this month!
Got a question? Get in touch on 0208 050 1028 or email us on brownies@arbor-education.com
In busy secondary schools with so much information in different places, it’s often difficult for staff to find what they need. With the added demands of Covid-19 and staff and students working remotely, now is the time to switch to a cloud-based system that you can rely on to support your daily tasks. Arbor’s Secondary
In busy secondary schools with so much information in different places, it’s often difficult for staff to find what they need. With the added demands of Covid-19 and staff and students working remotely, now is the time to switch to a cloud-based system that you can rely on to support your daily tasks.
Arbor’s Secondary School MIS is designed to make a measurable improvement to the way you work by bringing all your systems, data and communications under one roof. This gives everyone at your school a single source of information so you can support the students and staff who need it the most.
Over 209 secondary schools have chosen Arbor MIS for a better working life, joining the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community of over 1,800 schools and MATs.
Moving your school to a new system might seem daunting, but over 600 schools moved to Arbor remotely during Covid-19. Below are three of the top reasons you should consider a switch this term:
Schools are working in totally new ways right now and older school software simply can’t keep up. Because Arbor MIS is cloud-based, you can stay connected to your school community and maintain all your administrative tasks wherever you need to work – with fast, secure online access.
During Covid-19, we’ve also developed market-leading tools to help free staff up to focus on supporting students and staff:
“I just wanted to say how impressed I have been with Arbor during the COVID crisis. What you guys have implemented has made my job so much easier.” Josh Pearce, Marches School
Arbor is designed to meet the needs of secondary schools of all shapes and sizes. With so much going on, Arbor helps you create a more joined-up school, with a shared view of progress and purpose for all staff.
With accessible, flexible reporting at every level, Arbor gives you a holistic view of your students’ progress across all areas of school – completely out-of-the-box – so you can direct the right support to the right students. Plus, Arbor’s powerful integrations with data analysis platforms including Power BI, SISRA and 4Matrix mean you can dig into your data exactly how you need to.
Arbor’s fast, intuitive tools, like timetabling, communications and end-to-end exams management, cut down on repetitive manual work and help make life easier for everyone, from Support Staff, to SLT, to Teachers.
92% of school staff say they save time with Arbor compared to their previous MIS, and 81% say Arbor has improved how they analyse and understand data.
When you join Arbor we’ll take the time to truly understand your school and your goals – then help you meet them, year after year. Our friendly, expert team of consultants and former educators will work with you to provide the training and services you need to drive impact with Arbor at your secondary school.
Being part of Arbor, you’ll share best practice with a growing community of like-minded schools learning from each other and sharing best practice. What’s more, we’re always keen to hear your feedback on Arbor and work hand-in-hand with schools to shape the new features we develop.
We’re proud of our 97% customer satisfaction rate for support and 99% customer retention rate.
Want to discover more about Arbor MIS and see the system in action? Join one of our free webinars this term to find out how Arbor could help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more at your organisation. See all the sessions that are coming up here.
Alternatively, get in touch with us directly – we’d love to hear from you! tellmemore@arbor-education.com | 0208 050 1028
With schools working in totally new ways right now (juggling in-person education with remote learning, remote parent engagement, and remote working, all whilst keeping up with rapidly changing DfE advice), many staff members have reported an increase in workload this year. In fact, TES reported that 84% of teachers felt stressed in Autumn Term, whilst
With schools working in totally new ways right now (juggling in-person education with remote learning, remote parent engagement, and remote working, all whilst keeping up with rapidly changing DfE advice), many staff members have reported an increase in workload this year. In fact, TES reported that 84% of teachers felt stressed in Autumn Term, whilst The Key found 48% of Business Managers reported an increased workload.
Often this increase is down to the fact that, whilst schools are working in totally new ways, the tools they’re using haven’t changed. Older, server-based software wasn’t designed for remote, flexible, and highly changeable ways of working – not least because they require the user to work at a fixed station within school.
But there is a better way to work – and it starts with finding a system that can support your staff now and in the future.
We designed our cloud-based MIS to make a measurable difference to the way schools work, and we’re proud to say that 92% of our customers say we’ve changed the way they work for the better. We’re here to help with all the extra Covid-specific admin and workload challenges you’re facing now (see how here), and we can help you build sustainable ways of working as we all start to plan for recovery.
In this blog we share 5 ways our schools use Arbor to reduce workload for their staff every day, with a focus on how we can help you in the longer term:
When you’re making decisions on how to support your students, you need the right evidence to support you in turn. Because Arbor gives you access to student progress data alongside behaviour, attendance and contextual information in one place, you’ll have the full picture you need to identify the students requiring support at your fingertips.
Plus, where some systems just show you data, Arbor goes one step further and helps you ask those “why” questions. With people-friendly dashboards that are easy to filter and drill into, and personalised reports you can make in a few clicks, you’ll be able to easily get to the bottom of patterns and problems influencing performance in your school.
Arbor is the only MIS to integrate DfE performance and finance data with your live, in-year data, so you can understand how your school’s or MAT’s performance compares with others across the country. Not only will you have over five years of attendance, behaviour, attainment and student characteristics data built-in, you’ll also get intelligent call-outs and analysis, helping you see what’s important without spending hours analysing raw data manually.
Get started today with free benchmarking for your school or trust with Arbor Insight.
We build Arbor hand-in-hand with schools, which means everything we do is focused on tackling the real problems leaders, teachers and support staff face day-to-day. In fact – you can check out what we’re working on next here. With intuitive design that just works, Arbor automates your key admin tasks like data collection, reporting and communications, giving you hours back a week to spend where you like.
Many schools have the goal of improving how they communicate with their community of parents and families. With Covid-19 making it more important than ever to keep parents in the loop, you need a reliable system in place that makes communication seamless.
Arbor MIS gives you lots of communications options so you can choose the right way to send the right messages, at the right time. Send multiple, personalised SMS, email or letters at once or share reports directly to parents’ phones via the Arbor App. What’s more, with all your student information at your fingertips, you’ll be able to target your communications to the most hard-to-reach students, and keep easy records with a built-in log.
What do Arbor schools and MATs say? Thanks to Arbor, 73% of staff at The Parks Academies Trust say communication has improved throughout Covid-19, with the Pool Academy managing to keep contact with 100% of students every day during the first lockdown.
Whether it’s schools who have lots of different systems and processes, or MATs whose schools are working in disconnected ways, a big focus for many trust leaders is finding the right balance between standardisation and autonomy. Arbor helps you set common expectations and procedures around behaviour, attendance and assessment, so that everyone is on the same page. This makes reporting and decision making much quicker and easier, plus it helps you embed an ethos and values for your organisation.
Want to discover more about Arbor MIS and see the system in action? Join one of our free webinars this term to find out how Arbor could help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more at your organisation. See all the sessions that are coming up here and if you can’t make a live webinar, watch any session on-demand!
MAT Operations | Popular | School Operations
Hundreds of schools are switching to cloud-based IT systems this year to help them work more flexibly. But with several cloud-based MIS systems on the market, it can be difficult to know where to start in choosing the system that will work best for your unique requirements. To support you in your search, we wanted
Hundreds of schools are switching to cloud-based IT systems this year to help them work more flexibly. But with several cloud-based MIS systems on the market, it can be difficult to know where to start in choosing the system that will work best for your unique requirements.
To support you in your search, we wanted to share some of the best advice we’ve gathered from our 1,700 schools and 110 MATs about how to take control of the MIS switch and choose the right system (and the supplier) for you.
Read below for top tips to help you break down the process into manageable steps, when to involve your staff, and how to work with your supplier to get the most value out of your new system.
When you’re first scoping your MIS switch, start with a small team of staff who represent both IT and teaching and learning. Together they make the perfect team to think about the full potential of what a new MIS could do for your school. Try to worry less about admin (in the beginning!) and focus instead on how you want to improve ways of working at your school.
Remember, your current system will be easier to replace than you think!
The best MIS suppliers will work with you to help you achieve your school or trust’s long-term goals. So make sure you talk through your objectives during the sales process. The company should make clear how you’ll be able to adapt the system to meet your needs, and how it will help you implement improvements at your school over a longer period of time.
Remember, switching to a new MIS isn’t just a one-off project, it should be a partnership you can trust in year after year.
Many of our schools and MATs have found using a government-approved framework like G-Cloud a really clear and compliant way of procuring MIS. Having the information about all MIS suppliers on the market in one place can save you time, and helps you choose the most competitive, reputable and secure supplier.
Read our handy guide to using G-Cloud to procure your new MIS.
A change in systems can be daunting for staff, so it’s a good idea to get them involved in the process early on, so they have the opportunity to air their concerns and ask any questions they have. The best suppliers will provide personalised demos for each of your key staff (E.g. Admin Officers, Finance Manager, Middle Leadership, SENCOs, Teachers, HR Manager) to help them visualise how the new system will work for their everyday roles.
Remember, your supplier should be able to reassure all your staff how the new system will improve (not just replace) their day-to-day ways of working.
Arbor is the UK’s fastest-growing MIS supplier, with more schools switching to us than any other supplier.
If you’d like to discover how Arbor MIS could help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more at your school or trust, join a free demo webinar or get in touch with the team at tellmemore@arbor-education.com or 0208 050 1028.
You can also check out our profile on the DfE’s G-cloud framework here:
Arbor Community | Case Studies | IT Support
Local Authority IT teams have been working with schools in new ways over the last few years. Joining forces with cloud-based MIS suppliers, many are now able to give their schools more choice of systems, whilst still providing the local support and advice that schools value. At Arbor, we work with a wide range of
Local Authority IT teams have been working with schools in new ways over the last few years. Joining forces with cloud-based MIS suppliers, many are now able to give their schools more choice of systems, whilst still providing the local support and advice that schools value.
At Arbor, we work with a wide range of local IT support teams and Local Authorities in all regions of the country. We run an established accreditation programme to certify our Partners to provide schools with training and support with Arbor MIS.
Hertfordshire (Herts for Learning) and The City of Bradford (E-ICT Team) are Local Authorities that we work especially closely with. Both teams are Arbor Accredited Partners and support a growing number of schools in their local areas. We recently spoke to them about their experience of working with us – check out their case studies below.
Whether you’re a Local Authority looking to provide more MIS options to your schools, or you’re a school who’d like to move to a cloud-based MIS with the continued support from your local IT team, these case studies will give you a feel for what a support partnership with Arbor looks like.
Why did you choose to partner with Arbor?
We have been aware for some time that the MIS market is beginning to fragment, as competition increases and more schools begin to look at moving to the cloud, not only for MIS but teaching and learning too. A few Hertfordshire schools had been using Arbor for some time and Herts for Learning weren’t able to support them at the time they migrated. As more schools started to approach us about providing them with support for a cloud MIS, it made sense to invest our resources into accreditation with Arbor as we had an established customer base and it meant that we could provide schools that want to retain HfL support with more choice. It helped that the Arbor ethos is a good fit with HfL.
How did the accreditation process go?
It was straightforward; we took the decision to start with a small, focused project team, given that we had a limited number of schools to support at the time. Since then, we have rolled out the training to the whole HfL support team, so that customers don’t see any difference in the high level of support for Arbor that they’ve come to expect from us.
The support from Arbor during the accreditation process was good, I think both sides learned a lot from it. We were able to feed back to the Arbor team about what worked and didn’t work for us, and that was taken on board.
How have you found working with Arbor so far?
The relationship we have developed with Arbor is really positive, we’re all working to the same goal ultimately – to improve outcomes for schools. Collaborative working and effective communication has been really key in getting the support we need, in order to be able to provide a great level of service for our schools.
How have your schools that use Arbor found it so far?
The positive feedback from our Arbor schools has been great. As a local support team, we have been able to provide the added value that Arbor are not able to – we provide some very specific guidance that reflects what the local authority requires from schools in Hertfordshire, which schools and the authority really value, as it saves every school re-inventing the wheel in their MIS.
We have also produced tools in Arbor, so that schools can continue to use HfL’s Easy Tracker assessment, part of our PA Plus subscription service which supports schools and academies analyse pupils’ attainment and progress from Early Years to Key Stage 2.
How do you hope to develop your relationship with Arbor in the future?
Working with partner organisations is a key part of HfL’s success and we sincerely hope to continue working closely and collaboratively for the benefit of the schools we support, both now and in the future.
Schools are now looking at moving to cloud-based systems and Arbor seems to be one of the preferred options with good feedback from schools already using it. From the demonstrations by other cloud-based systems, the majority of schools fed back that Arbor was the one that impressed them the most.
It was not rushed and easy to access all the information needed. It was a new way of learning for us as we’re used to a more classroom-based environment but all the information was there.
Very approachable and forward thinking. Arbor makes adjustments that are relevant and on time to make school life easier – they give prior notice with training, and documentation is available early enough to be able to advise schools when needed. We’ve had no problems at all in contacting Arbor for help when needed.
The fortnightly Product Update meetings are very useful and keep us abreast of any changes coming along. We are very impressed with the speed that changes are made to the system. The Team is helpful, friendly and professional.
It is particularly helpful that we have Dominique who works with Bradford so we have someone to contact directly. When we requested a training session on a particular area of Arbor recently, as we weren’t sure which route to go through with our schools, this was set-up very quickly and Dominique answered all our questions.
If you’re a school who’s thinking about switching MIS but would like to continue to work with your Local Authority for support, we’d love to speak to you. Get in touch with us on tellmemore@arbor-education.com
Similarly, if you work for a Local Authority and would like to find out more about the benefits of supporting your schools with Arbor MIS, get in touch on tellmemore@arbor-education.com
I feel like we’ve turned a corner in good news after what has been a fairly glum year, and I wanted to share ours to add to it! I’m delighted to announce that we’ve joined forces with The Key Group to help propel Arbor to the next level on our mission to transform the way
I feel like we’ve turned a corner in good news after what has been a fairly glum year, and I wanted to share ours to add to it! I’m delighted to announce that we’ve joined forces with The Key Group to help propel Arbor to the next level on our mission to transform the way schools work. I wanted to explain a bit more about why this is good news and how it changes our ambition for what we want to accomplish over the next few years.
We chose The Key as they share our values, support our mission, and can accelerate our growth with their network of over 16,000 school leaders and governors. At Arbor, we want to provide an experience that isn’t just slightly better than other MIS systems but which totally transforms the way schools work. This requires a step-up in terms of ambition and investment. We have chosen The Key as partners in this journey as they genuinely care about improving school outcomes, can accelerate our plans with their network of over 16,000 school leaders and governors, and will provide additional investment to enable us to make a measurable difference to even more schools, MATs and support partners!
We’re growing fast, and will now grow faster! Combined with ScholarPack, we are immediately the UK’s largest cloud-based MIS provider, and the most credible alternative to SIMS.
ScholarPack is the specialist Primary school MIS owned by The Key and used by over 1,500 schools – combined with Arbor this immediately makes us the largest cloud-based MIS in the UK! We’re also the fastest-growing, with 8 out of 10 schools who switch MIS choosing either Arbor or ScholarPack. Together we can challenge the monopoly SIMS has had on the sector, and create the most credible alternative MIS that offers outstanding value to schools.
Don’t worry, Arbor and ScholarPack will continue to be run separately for the foreseeable future, with investment into both platforms so schools can choose the solution that is right for them
There are no current plans to merge platforms, so customers of Arbor and ScholarPack will see increased investment into both systems. Schools will be able to choose between ScholarPack’s market-leading MIS for primary schools, or Arbor’s MIS that works across primary, secondary, specials and MATs, with no pressure to switch. I’d add to this that I’m not going anywhere and nor is Arbor’s team, so you’ll continue to work with the same people with the same values and passion. We enjoy our work, and we’re only just getting started!
In short, this means more investment into our product and platform, and a step-change in ambition to provide tools that transform the way you work for the better. Over the next few years we will use this to…
We are very focused on providing an incredible MIS, but for all the other tools and support partners you love to work with, we want to provide a completely seamless and smooth experience too. Imagine if all your tools and IT providers worked together in harmony. Well, you might not have to wait much longer!
Schools contain a sea of information, but too often staff end up drowning in endless charts with no real insight. Imagine logging on to your MIS as a teacher and seeing the three most important tasks that are stuck waiting for your approval, the five students who you should check in on today and why, as well as recommendations for interventions and praise. This will completely change how teaching staff see the MIS, making it an essential tool for daily school life.
Schools don’t just provide education, they cater to large and complex local communities. We want to bring support staff, students, guardians and external providers together using Arbor to help them communicate, coordinate and collaborate around each child’s progress through school, so everyone is kept informed and up-to-date.
I hope that gives you a bit more of an idea of what’s in store for Arbor over the next year. COVID has meant that schools are demanding a different way of working and this will lead to a rapid adoption in cloud-based MIS. As the cloud-based MIS designed to make a measurable difference to the way you work, Arbor is really well positioned to help, so I’m really excited about what the future holds.
I can’t wait to meet you online and hopefully soon in person to tell you more about it!
CEO and Co-Founder, Arbor Education
MAT Operations | Vulnerable Students
The Mead Educational Trust (TMET) is made up of ten primary and secondary academies in Leicestershire. In September, we spoke to Mark Oldman, Director of Inclusion and SEND at TMET, to find out how they were assessing and aiming to close the post-lockdown learning gap, particularly for their most vulnerable students. We recently caught up
The Mead Educational Trust (TMET) is made up of ten primary and secondary academies in Leicestershire. In September, we spoke to Mark Oldman, Director of Inclusion and SEND at TMET, to find out how they were assessing and aiming to close the post-lockdown learning gap, particularly for their most vulnerable students. We recently caught up with Mark again to hear how he’s been implementing those strategies and how they’ve been going.
You can read Mark’s conversation with Dan, Senior Partnership Manager at Arbor, below.
For our primary schools especially, the strategies we’ve been implementing have been really useful to in many ways reinforce what we already knew – that embedding the key skills that will be most useful going forward is much more important than re-covering the curriculum.
In the past, we might have used short-term interventions to target students who fell behind in reading, for example, but what we’re finding more effective is looking at the skills we’d anticipate they would have embedded had they had a normal year last year, and spend a bit more time on them. As a result of focusing on the skills, we’ve seen their progress in the curriculum catch up naturally.
For our secondary schools, they’ve been using a well mapped-out, sequenced curriculum which we’ve adjusted, rather than filling gaps or “playing catch up”.
This approach has been a rapid and valuable CPD process for new Teachers who have joined the trust this term, as they’ve had the opportunity to spend a bit longer embedding good quality teaching and learning practices with peer coaching from a more experienced practitioner.
At the beginning of term we looked at the vulnerability index to assess students as individuals across all school areas. We also used ImpactEd’s Covid-19 Wellbeing Questionnaire for our KS2+ students. This helped us identify key vulnerable groups, some of whom we didn’t necessarily expect to be vulnerable, who had become vulnerable as a result of the initial lockdown. We’ve also just run our first academic assessment which we’ve been able to analyse in relation to the vulnerability and wellbeing data.
Because it’s a national data set of 60,000 students, ImpactEd has allowed us to benchmark our students against national averages. We found that our students are about 70 points above the national average, which I attribute to the fact that we used it in tandem with the vulnerability index, which means we’re looking at wellbeing much more broadly.
Our ImpactEd results have backed up our approach of embedding key skills, as well as the other initiatives we’ve put in place this term, such as our regular contact with families and sending out additional food packages. When we re-ran ImpactEd this week, our students have made about 15% progress on average across their anxiety, wellbeing and metacognition scores.
Another benefit of ImpactEd is you can drill down into each student’s score, which has allowed us to identify the nuances to students’ anxiety. It’s meant we’ve been able to put in place really bespoke interventions, along with our team of educational psychologists and a SEMH practitioner. Examples have included simply increasing the number of positive reinforcement opportunities that we would do anyway in the year, such as hot chocolate with the Headteacher. We’ve also thought about the ways we’re meeting and greeting students, and we’ve arranged “bubble” parties.
It’s really important to us to give all students a sense of belonging at school. We believe there should be no student who doesn’t think they’re the most important person in the building.
We had almost 100% success contact with our Key Worker primary school students over the summer holidays, with staff making weekly visits to selected families. At secondary level, this was more difficult because students had more unstructured time and since they returned to school, we’ve seen an increased sense of anxiety.
For some of our most needy students, the rigour of Covid-19 regulations has actually helped them reintegrate into school and stay out of trouble because they’ve known exactly where they need to be and what they need to do.
We have, however, seen the onset of more mental health problems this term. We were prepared for this to a certain extent, as we hired two Educational Psychologists over the summer, knowing that we’d have more vulnerability and SEMH cases that would need to be diagnosed effectively. We’ve also had a targeted interventions team working with smaller bubbles off-site.
We’re confident that we’re planning and sequencing learning in the right way, and together with our new IT equipment, we’ll be able to set more effective homework and more effective interventions in future. We’ll keep the IT equipment refreshed, and make sure that our most vulnerable students continue to have access to additional equipment.
We hope our blended learning will allow students to work effectively wherever they are. We’ve given all students aspirational targets which they’ll be able to achieve better as a result of having a Chromebook at home. The Chromebooks have been really popular, and students enjoy using them for school work and to structure their time effectively.
The main thing we’ve learned is just how important it is to cultivate a school community and to get to know your families well. The second is the importance of Teachers and the impact they can have on students throughout their lives. We have really valued the efforts of everyone across our schools, in many respects they have been the anchor for their local communities and provided a constant source of support, love and care to everyone associated with their schools.
For fellow Trust Executives, my biggest piece of advice is that you can afford to scale back on things like your normal QA process or auditing measures, and instead focus on a few really pertinent areas of practice that will make the biggest difference.
Yes, definitely. Our SEND provision in particular has benefited from us working more closely together across the transition between primary and secondary. It’s also benefited from us working more closely with the wider community, for example we’ve been able to expedite transfers of our students to local special schools where needed.
Across the trust, we’ve tried to balance the communications we send out about Covid-19 regulations and health and safety etc., with the sharing of best practice across schools. This is because we recognise that our practitioners are ambitious every day – they don’t just want to make schools operate safely, they want to go above and beyond.
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Arbor Community | Arbor Updates | IT Support
With all the challenges of Covid-19, now may seem like a difficult time to switch your Management Information System (MIS) – but what if you had an Arbor expert in your local area, who could support you every step of the way? Working with one of Arbor’s 30 accredited Support Partners located across the country
With all the challenges of Covid-19, now may seem like a difficult time to switch your Management Information System (MIS) – but what if you had an Arbor expert in your local area, who could support you every step of the way?
Working with one of Arbor’s 30 accredited Support Partners located across the country means you can start reaping the benefits of a cloud-based MIS right away with expert support, so you’re freed up to focus on what’s most important – running your school and keeping your community safe.
Your local Arbor Partner will organise a demonstration at a time that suits you and advise you on which of our three simple packages would suit your school best. Once you decide to switch, they’ll help you check and migrate your data, train your staff and be there to support you as you discover your new MIS.
All our Partners go through a detailed training and accreditation process to make sure they know Arbor inside out – and many of them can also support other aspects of technology at your school, from audiovisual equipment and laptops, to network and infrastructure.
Choosing to be supported by one of our Partners means you get the best of both worlds: a future-proof MIS that helps you work better, collaborate more easily and stay connected on the cloud; supported every step of the way by a knowledgeable, local team.
Our accredited Partners are located all across the country, so you’re never far away from an Arbor expert. We introduced you to our first 10 accredited Partners back in March, and we’ve been busy training up a new cohort, so we wanted to shine a light on the most recent additions to our growing Partner network.
See which Partner works in your area and get in touch about switching to Arbor today:
AdEPT Education – Nationwide
Established in 2003, AdEPT are a managed services and telecommunications provider offering award-winning technical solutions for over 12,000 organisations across the UK with a mission of ‘Uniting technology, inspiring people’.
In a world where there is simply too much technology to choose from, AdEPT use their expertise and strategic partnerships to ensure customers get the right solution to their individual requirements. As well as being an accredited Arbor support unit, they specialise in IT, communications and connectivity.
Agile Technical Solutions – East Anglia
Agile Technical Solutions provide all your hardware and software needs – just like having an in-house IT department, but without all the hassle. They are cost effective as an IT solution, particularly for schools. They always respond whatever the time of day and work hard to resolve problems as soon as possible. Agile understands what matters most to you; creating excellent and safe learning environments. To enable this, school ICT support needs to be secure, responsive and value for money.
Agilisys (Sefton Borough Council) – Sefton
For over 20 years, Agilisys have partnered with healthcare, local government and organisations throughout the public sector to unlock the potential of technology and transform services that improve lives. Through a partnership with Sefton Borough Council, Agilisys are delighted to provide accredited Arbor support to schools in Sefton and surrounds.
Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council E-ICT Team – Bradford
Technology plays an increasing role in education. The Bradford Education ICT team offer friendly and expert support and training so that your school can get the most from your hardware and software, both in the office and in the classroom. The team comprises dedicated ICT qualified trainers (who are members of the Learning Performance Institute) and MIS support officers.
Carbon Cloud – Kent
Carbon Cloud is a team of friendly, real people, all with over 20 years experience in the IT industry. They want to use their experiences and skills to make IT better for your business. They’ll explain new technologies and help you understand the cloud, but most of all, they’ll help make doing business easier. Carbon Cloud understands that IT is not a core function of your business – you just want it to work to allow you to focus on growing your business.
The team’s experience is wide and varied, ranging from Cloud computing platforms, like Azure, AWS and opensource technologies to Office 365 and the management of enterprise scale service desks.
Code Green (Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council) – Barnsley
Technology has revolutionised the way in which we work and is an integral part of everyday living. Code Green demonstrates ways to apply this technology effectively within education environments to bring a range of features and benefits.
Having supported schools for over 10 years, their specialism in technology for the education sector is second to none. Each and every employee of Code Green is dedicated to providing the most professional and efficient service possible to our customers.
Cygnet IT Services – Sutton
Cygnet has a team of Arbor accredited staff with extensive experience providing professional MIS support to schools and MATs. They have over 25 years’ experience working within the education sector, specifically in the Sutton area and surrounds, and their continued success and strong relationships within this space reflect the high calibre of support they provide. Above all else, the Cygnet team are friendly, understanding and always willing to go the extra mile to meet the needs of their customers.
Education Lincs – Lincolnshire
Established in 1998, Education Lincs prides itself on providing personable and tailored solutions to primary schools and academies around Lincolnshire and the surrounding areas. Having partnerships with trusted brands such as Google, Lenovo, Promethean and Arbor, we look to always offering the best products and services to each of our schools, whilst tailoring costs to meet the school’s budget requirements.
Holker IT (formerly PC Edutech) – North West
In just 10 years, Holker IT has become one of the UK’s leading suppliers of intelligent, flexible IT solutions and services. Solutions that recognise the critical importance of security and integrity of data to the daily operations of a school or MAT. Today Holker looks to the future, with world-class services such as our Holker Cloud solution, which migrates all systems and IT Services into the virtual Cloud environment, securely, to future proof your school and your data.
In July 2020, Holker IT acquired PC Edutech, experts in IT support for schools with over 11 years’ experience in the Education sector and full accreditation on Arbor MIS.
Integra Schools (South Gloucestershire Council) – Gloucestershire
Integra is a South Gloucestershire Council (SGC) division who trade with schools, local public sector organisations, local businesses and provide services to the council. They have extensive, proven experience of working in the education arena, knowledgeable and committed staff, and a deep shared public sector ethos. The Integra Schools team is committed to making a difference in schools and educational settings; their operational staff are regarded as members of the extended school family and their professional support staff are passionate about the work they do to support school leaders, teachers, support staff, parents, children and families.
Interm IT – South of England
At Interm IT, their family business values centre on providing schools with qualified, experienced, affordable, onsite IT technician support. Each school has a dedicated technician-consultant, who will visit at an agreed regular time, to proactively help keep your computer systems operational, not only to fix but also maintain, advise and progress. This ensures that you have faith to teach with a supported, reliable computer system.
Itech Support – Hertfordshire
Itech Support is an experienced team of IT Specialists, with a Head Office in Hertfordshire, dedicated to making your IT work for you. Their aim is to simplify technology by providing you with a single point of contact for all your IT requirements. They get to know and understand how your business works so they can best support you. Itech Support’s success has grown from offering unrivalled customer service mixed with exceptional technical expertise.
JC Comtech – East Anglia
Based in East Anglia and with over 15 years’ experience, JC Computer Technologies Ltd specialise in ICT support and consultancy for primary schools and Multi Academy Trusts. They don’t just come in, fix your ICT problems and leave. Their aim is to become part of the school team, working with you to ensure your ICT is working effectively, but also supporting you in using ICT to deliver the curriculum. With many years of specialist experience, a wealth of knowledge in their support team and their willingness to go the extra mile, JC always have your interests in all that they do.
Keystone MIS – Yorkshire
Keystone MIS are a Yorkshire based company who provide professional, impartial, comprehensive and affordable MIS support to Schools and Academies throughout the UK. They take a great deal of pride in the level of support they offer and have a long history of excellent customer relationships with a large number of local schools. They’re a friendly, approachable and knowledgeable team who are experts in handling children’s data and keeping up-to-date with current legislation, with core values built on customer service and high quality support.
Somerset Council Support Services for Education (SSE) – Somerset The SSE MIS Support team is a fully accredited, well-established and respected team with expertise in both Arbor MIS and related ICT. The team has a wealth of experience working with Schools, Academies, Federations and MATS. Their aim is to reduce the burden on schools, by providing effective, tailored guidance and support to enable you to fulfil your statutory duties. They react swiftly to new DfE initiatives and work closely with educational colleagues to monitor and apply recommendations from current Ofsted thinking. The team will work closely with you to ensure you get the maximum value and benefit from your MIS system that meets your individual school needs.
School Care – Hampshire
If you teach ICT or manage a school network then you will know that building effective and reliable solutions for schools that support 21st Century educational initiatives is a demanding and skilled task. SchoolCare’s team is dedicated to seeking out the leading new ICT solutions for education and new opportunities to improve teaching & learning. From installations to MIS support, from digital signage to wireless systems and from special needs software to equipment disposal, SchoolCare is able to offer schools and colleges a complete service driving innovation in their ICT.
Services 4 Schools – Wolverhampton
Services 4 Schools offer a range of high-quality professional business support solutions, enabling schools to achieve and operate with excellence and efficiency. The S4S team of experts are available to assist school leaders and business managers with specialist advice, reassurance and hands-on operational support across all aspects of data and information management, HR, data protection, school payroll, finance and governance.
Their competitively priced MIS support is loved by schools. From training and guidance for new users, to specialist consultancy on key processes, S4S can advise your staff on how to get the best out of the systems that keep your schools working.
The SCAS Team – West Sussex
The SCAS Team provides a personal, friendly service enabling all schools to maximise the benefit of their Management Information System (MIS). Based in West Sussex, their team have extensive experience working in a range of roles within schools and completely understand and appreciate the challenging demands placed upon schools.
Trading with Schools (Bristol City Council) – Bristol
Trading with Schools supports schools in delivering a first class education for all learners. The Trading with Schools unit brings together services across Bristol council into one trading unit, to better support the changing needs and requirements of schools and educational settings.
Trading with Schools provides a vast knowledge base and a wealth of experience in meeting the complex business and training needs required to help schools and educational settings perform well. They can offer set packages as well as bespoke services to meet your individual requirements.
SCAS pride themselves on providing a prompt and reliable service to all school staff, enabling efficient use of your MIS and empowering school teams to enhance all aspects of school performance.
Vitalize IT – Nationwide
Vitalize was formed in 2009 with a simple mission – to help schools and colleges around the UK to transform teaching & learning using the power of digital learning platforms. All Vitalize trainers have worked in schools previously, and experienced first hand the impact that digital learning and cloud-based systems can have. With our expert support for G-suite for Education, Arbor MIS and other complementary tools, we can help you create a Digital Learning Strategy encompassing teachers, learners & parents.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could help your school work faster, smarter and collaborate more, join one of our free webinars to see the system in action. You can also get in touch with our team directly at tellmemore@arbor-education.com or call us on 0208 050 1028.
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EdTech | Mental Health and Wellbeing
Schools have been on an incredible journey in the last year, adapting to completely new ways of working with technology to deliver virtual lessons, cope with staff and students offsite, organise complex logistics and report on a whole new range of data. But changing ways of working in such a short space of time means
Schools have been on an incredible journey in the last year, adapting to completely new ways of working with technology to deliver virtual lessons, cope with staff and students offsite, organise complex logistics and report on a whole new range of data.
But changing ways of working in such a short space of time means staff haven’t had the change to properly reflect on this change – especially since schools have remained open throughout the pandemic!
To discuss how we can use technology in a more positive way, we were delighted to welcome Rachel Coldicutt to ArborFest on 12th November to give the Keynote presentation at our customer festival.
Rachel is the former CEO of Doteveryone and expert on the social impact of technology, having collaborated with many organisations in the charity and public sectors. She recently produced The Glimmers Report – a practical toolkit designed to support schools and community organisations to reflect on their use of technology and how to build resilience for the future.
Rachel shared some really meaningful tips that schools can use to make sure as we move forward in a reflective way under the new Covid-19 status quo.
First of all, I think it can be useful to look outside of the school context to think about where you fit in. Since March, society as a whole has had to pivot extremely quickly to cope with rapid change, living now more of less all of our whole lives on video or looking at a screen.
We’ve started to accept new ways of behaving as normal and hardly remember things we took for granted as normal before. I’ve seen, for example graduations – institutions which haven’t changed their format for decades, transformed into a virtual events.
People have responded to new restraints incredibly quickly, and this pivot is completely unprecedented. When we think about change and progress, we normally think of things happening in a linear way; with a horizon in sight. We’re used to moving forwards a bit, then backwards a bit, then forwards again. We’re used to having time to learn the new rules and adapting as we go. We’re used to getting clues and cues so we know when change is having success.
But during the pandemic, progress surged overnight. 2020 has been like having one foot in 2050 and one in 1630 – in some ways a lot of things have been taken away from us, but in other ways we’ve travelled miles into the future. What we need to remember is that we’ve moved into the future with the same skills and experience we had last year.
No time for reflection
Everyone has been gathering around the technology, rather than the cultural or human elements of change. It’s only months later that we’re realising how exhausted we are, having had no down time to talk about the changes, or even to properly process the traumatic things that have happened.
I drew the diagram above in June, but actually it’s probably better drawn like a fast heart rate, to reflect how we’ve been continually adapting to and integrating change at an incredibly fast rate.
Building foundations for the future
As we move forwards into a future that is uncertain, we should think about “recovery” not something that accidentally happens but something you have to nurture. At the moment, as we’re still responding and still don’t know how long the crisis will go on for, it’s important to think about how to look after ourselves, and to prioritise our culture, our team and our tools.
The first step to moving forward is to recognise some of the compromises or problems that have perhaps been overlooked, such as burnout, lack of infrastructure and platform dependency, instead of storing them up for later.
The designer Caroline Sinders has come up with the “digital duct tape” phenomenon which describes how, rather than having well worked-out infrastructure, we’re more likely to be using a collection of tools patched together that only sort of work.
We should also recognise the heavy negative focus that has surrounded new technologies – focusing on safety, privacy and a culture of worry – particularly in schools and the public sector when sensitive data is involved. This has meant that people tend to use platforms only in exactly the way they’re prescribed from fear of doing something wrong. But if systems are well made and safe, they should give you the freedom to adapt, improvise, and use them creatively.
Practical tips for moving forward
The Glimmers Report is a toolkit designed to help schools and other organisations understand where you are now in terms of your use of technology and the impact it’s having, and to end up in a position where you feel you have the tools and experience to be prepared for change in the future.
When compiling the report I began talking to charities and other groups in March and April, most of whom had not really worked in digital ways before the pandemic, but had suddenly moved to operating almost completely digitally. We then carried out interviews and observations, brought together theory and a range of practitioners to share the kind of things they’ve experienced.
The toolkit helps you and your staff reflect around three main themes:
This section encourages you to capture and understand what has changed, what you’ve learned, what you’ll keep and what you’ll discard, helping you to move ahead with more certainty.
These questions allow you to think about how people’s roles have changed, the skills people have gained, and how people have felt during the process. It also helps you reflect on the intimacy that might get forgotten when using technology. For example, without the usual in-person cues, how do we know when people are listening and engaging? How can we create space? How can we get feedback? How can we show applause? How can we celebrate achievements? You might ask these questions once, or keep asking them regularly to see how your responses change over time.
These simple questions and prompts help you look ahead and forecast the opportunities and obstacles that are likely to happen, and how you will respond. This is different to how you might normally plan because you’ll be able to bring the skills and experience of dealing with uncertainty. Just the exercise of projecting as a group what you might do if something totally new happens is really important in building resilience.
An important thing to remember about technology is that no two people use a product in the same way, and the way we use products is always changing. And they’re designed that way – rather than there being a prescribed way of using technology, most developers are fascinated by how their users adapt and integrate technology in their lives.
So rather than thinking of technology happening to us, we should allow ourselves to adapt the tools we use around our lives and experiences, and to meet our changing needs.
Arbor Updates | IT Support
We’re proud to be partnering with Cloud Design Box to host three free training sessions specially designed for schools and MATs who are using (or planning to use) Microsoft Teams to deliver blended learning. Here’s Tony from Cloud Design Box to tell you more: At Cloud Design Box, we specialise in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint
We’re proud to be partnering with Cloud Design Box to host three free training sessions specially designed for schools and MATs who are using (or planning to use) Microsoft Teams to deliver blended learning. Here’s Tony from Cloud Design Box to tell you more:
At Cloud Design Box, we specialise in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Office 365 for Education. As a Microsoft Partner, we aim to make it as easy as possible for people to work, learn and collaborate using Microsoft Teams, offering training, consultancy and intranet packages for schools, academies and Multi-Academy Trusts across the UK.
Cloud Design Box integrates with Arbor to help their schools enjoy more flexibility to set work, collaborate and share resources for their classes. We use data from Arbor to provide access to Class Teams, Class Notebook and centralised subject Teams through an easy-to-use class dashboard.
We’re thrilled to be offering three free Teams training sessions across two days next week – from Tuesday 24th to Wednesday 25th November.
10am, Tuesday 24th November
The first session will centre on helping schools with user adoption and planning for the long term. It’s perfect for you if you have already adopted Teams but need a hand getting students and staff on board and using the technology. We’ll discuss ways you can get started, as well as how you can develop a long-term plan to make the most out of the suite of tools.
We last hosted this session at the Department for Education’s EdTech Festival earlier in 2020 and it went down well with School Leaders and MATs who needed a clear plan of action to succeed with the software.
3pm, Tuesday 24 November
Built specifically for Primary Schools, this webinar will provide you with a solid foundation of using Teams to deliver learning inside and outside the classroom, for example, how to use Class Notebook to host an online lesson and how to make the most of the Conversation features.
1pm on Wednesday 25 November
We know this year has been tough on Teachers, who have had to quickly increase their workload to provide digital and online resources for their classes.
This session has been developed with overworked Teachers in mind, who are struggling with Teams. We’ll show you some time-saving ways that you can centralise and improve your resources with Teams.
All our webinars are open to anyone working in a school, academy or Multi-Academy Trust. To sign up for any of the sessions, please fill out this form with your details and we’ll send you an email invite to join us.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform the way you work, get in touch on tellmemore@arbor-education.com or arrange a 1-on-1 demo for your school.
The classroom has seen a lot of change this term and Teachers are really stretched. To give you an extra helping hand, we’ve developed some really great features in Arbor which take the hassle out of your admin and give you more time to focus on what matters most – your students. Hear from our
The classroom has seen a lot of change this term and Teachers are really stretched. To give you an extra helping hand, we’ve developed some really great features in Arbor which take the hassle out of your admin and give you more time to focus on what matters most – your students.
Hear from our Product Manager for Teaching and Learning, Sophia, below sharing two tools we’ve created to support Teachers this term – My Classroom – an all-in-one solution for classroom management, and My Homepage – a brand new personalised homepage which helps you stay on top of things and act fast.
We know Teachers have little time between lessons to get through their admin, and even less time to check their student records for anything to be aware of. We believe busy Teachers shouldn’t have to search for the information they need.
That’s why today we’re excited to launch My Homepage – Arbor’s brand new, personalised homepage for Teaching and Pastoral Staff, giving you brand new tools to help you stay on top of things and act fast.
As soon as you log into Arbor, you’ll have everything you need for your day right in front of you:
“The filters work great for me as I can quickly select the students I’m responsible for. Student alerts also allow me to easily spot pupils that had an absence mark due to Covid.”
Matthew Domine, Assistant Principal and Music and Geography Teacher at Avanti House Secondary School
“57% of our staff are now more aware of school key measures such as attendance and behaviour compared to when they used SIMS”
Jon Ward, Vice Principal (Curriculum and Standards) at the Abbey Park School
Classroom management is a lot more complex right now, with new social distancing rules, track-and-trace, and challenging student behaviour as they adjust.
To help you manage your class this term and beyond, we’ve created My Classroom – your new all-in-one classroom management tool – that brings together behaviour management, seating plans and attendance in one place for the first time!
Here are some of the main ways My Classroom will take the hassle out of preparing and managing your lessons:
1. Flexible seating plans
My Classroom gives you a powerful solution to seating plans, allowing you to create smart seating plans which reflect your real classroom, assign students using helpful demographic tags, see student photos (or remove in student view if you’re presenting on the board), and share your plans with your colleagues.
2. Take action seamlessly throughout the lesson
With My Classroom, you’ll spend less time on the little tasks which disturb your lesson flow. Cut out the lengthy register call at the beginning of the lesson by bulk selecting marks straight from your plan. Assign positive and negative behaviour points dynamically during the lesson, or log an incident and trigger an automatic follow up action.
3. Powered by Arbor MIS
The best thing about My Classroom is that it’s built into Arbor MIS, which means you have up-to-date contextual information about your students automatically on your plan, helping you to tell the full story of each of your students lesson to lesson. Plus, any behaviour incidents you record or points you assign feed straight back into Arbor, so you’ll never have to update anything twice.
4. Brand new: we’ve added live attainment data to My Classroom!
Choose the grades and targets you want to track, and see them directly on your seating plan. This helps you see your higher and lower achievers right away, so you can best support them in the classroom.
It’s a great way to give cover staff a helpful background to your class, too.
Teachers are already sharing with us how My Classroom is giving them their time back to focus on teaching and learning instead. It’s also proving really useful during the pandemic, by helping to track-and-trace student contact, and create socially distanced arrangements.
“The reason why I think My Classroom is so exciting, is that it does not have to integrate with any other tools. Managing the lessons from one place rather than having to open lots of different screens will be the key benefit for our staff. For us as a school this will be definitely the right tool. It will be cost-saving and you have the whole data set all in one place.”
Steve Hackshaw, Assistant Headteacher (Learning, Progress and Assessment), at Ralph Thoresby School
“Many thanks to everybody for developing this; I think it’s a really intuitive way for teachers to work with their students and classes.”
Andy Cunningham, Headteacher at The Lakes School
“Using My Classroom has really taken off with our staff – they love the overview of students they get on their seating plans and being able to see the seating plan and take the register at the same time.”
Joanne Hedges, Data Manager at Manshead Academy
If you’d like to find our more about how Arbor could transform the way your staff work, we’d love to hear from you. You can join one of our free demo webinars, or arrange a 1-on-1 demo here. Alternatively, contact us on: tellmemore@arbor-education.com | 0208 050 1028
In the meantime, why not sign up to our fortnightly newsletter to get a round-up of our most popular blogs like this straight to your inbox.
The Schools and Academies Show is back! Join us online this week from Tuesday 17th – Friday 20th November to learn more about Arbor’s cloud-based MIS! Previous Schools and Academies Shows have been fantastic opportunities for schools and trusts to meet different suppliers, see products in action with live, tailored demos, and have honest conversations
The Schools and Academies Show is back! Join us online this week from Tuesday 17th – Friday 20th November to learn more about Arbor’s cloud-based MIS!
Previous Schools and Academies Shows have been fantastic opportunities for schools and trusts to meet different suppliers, see products in action with live, tailored demos, and have honest conversations about how a service can help transform the way they work. (Not forgetting all the goodies you can come away with!)
This year, you can still take part from the comfort of your home or office! We’ve got a virtual booth so sign up, jump online, and come and see us!
The Schools and Academies show is perfect for staff at both schools and Multi-Academy Trusts who are looking for innovative and best-value products and resources for their schools. If you’ve been asked to attend by your Headteacher, CEO or SLT, it’s a good idea to agree on some key questions beforehand so you know what to look out for, and can report back.
Whether you’re just starting to think about new products, or you’re further along in the buying process, this is a great opportunity to look at a product in more detail and get answers from an expert.
The Schools and Academies Show has created an easy-to-use online platform which allows you to set up meetings with suppliers at a time that suits you, or to ask your burning questions directly. There’s also a full programme of talks throughout the show, giving you the chance to hear from peers and experts in the education sector.
Just click here to sign up to The Schools and Academies Show for free. You’ll then be sent an email with details of how you can log in to the online platform.
1. Log into your Schools and Academies Show portal 2. Click on the Schools and Academies Show event 3. Select “Sponsors/exhibitors” from the menu in the middle of the page 4. Search for Arbor on the left hand side of the page 5. Select a time slot that suits you this week 6. Select “Virtual Booth” as the location to meet at the event 7. Let us know if there’s something in particular you’d like to know about 8. Click “Send meeting request” 9. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible via the online platform to confirm your meeting with someone from our friendly Sales Team
A 1-on-1 meeting with one of our Partnership Managers is your chance to ask any questions you have about moving to a cloud-based MIS, and to figure out if Arbor is right for you. You can meet the team “face-to-face” via a video or watch a live demo to discover why hundreds of schools and trusts move to Arbor every year.
It’s a good idea to make sure your audio is working on your laptop or computer – but you can always use the online chat if this doesn’t work. The Arbor Team will be on video so you can see our friendly faces, so it might be nice to have your video on as well so it feels like a real meeting! But don’t worry, this isn’t necessary.
If you want to get in touch during the show, you can reach us by telephone on: 020 8050 1028 and by email at: tellmemore@arbor-education.com
We look forward to meeting you at the show!
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. Last week we welcomed over 1,500 members of staff from over 500 schools, trusts and partner organisations to ArborFest – our virtual customer conference dedicated to transformative ways of working. The benefits of being online were that
Last week we welcomed over 1,500 members of staff from over 500 schools, trusts and partner organisations to ArborFest – our virtual customer conference dedicated to transformative ways of working.
The benefits of being online were that we were able to gather together a huge and unique group of school staff from across the country – with some joining from the staffroom, and some from their sofa at home!
As the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community, with over 1,300 schools and MATs, we loved meeting lots of friendly faces from Arbor schools, including Leaders, Administrators, Teachers, Business Managers and every school role you could imagine – and some new faces too!
It was a fantastic opportunity to come together, share best practice and to learn from fellow colleagues. As every school has their own innovative ways of working, we certainly learned a lot ourselves too.
Kicking off the conference, Arbor’s Co-Founder and CEO, James, welcomed everyone by setting the scene (his dodgeball analogy for 2020 might resonate with some of you!) and sharing some of Arbor’s ambitions for the future.
“We should be thinking bigger than just the MIS, and bringing the whole school ecosystem into one holistic view.” – James Weatherill, Co-Founder and CEO, Arbor Education
You can catch a snippet from James’s Opening Talk here
The programme was jam-packed with practical workshops, feedback sessions and a brilliant keynote speech by tech expert, Rachel Coldicutt, who shared some really helpful advice on how we can reflect on our use of technology.
“We’ve all changed our behaviours overnight because of technology but we haven’t really had the time to consider its effect on us.” – Rachel Coldicutt, expert on the relationship between social impact and tech
You can catch a snippet of Rachel’s Keynote Speech here (look out for the full blog soon!)
Accompanied by staff from schools using Arbor, we held workshops across all areas of school operations – including assessment, reporting, exams and parental engagement. One of the stand-out sessions was “How Arbor can Support your School during Covid-19”, where we demonstrated the ease of Arbor’s Covid-19 dashboard – your daily reference point for Covid-19 information.
Arbor’s Head of Product, Hilary, demonstrated how our Product Vision shapes all the features we develop at Arbor. You can find out more about how we prioritise the features we work on here.
The Product Team also revealed a sneak peak of what’s coming up on our Product Roadmap, including the ability to roll out assessment policies centrally across your trust, and an exciting new toolkit – Arbor Enterprise – which gives you more control over your data and setup.
We also welcomed feedback from Arbor schools on how our features are helping them work more effectively in daily school life.
“Our vision is to give school Leaders, Teachers and Admin Staff the tools they need to work faster and smarter, together – with meaningful data and school-focused design and ways to collaborate with their school community.” – Hilary Aylesworth, Head of Product, Arbor Education
Arbor’s Chief of Customer Success, Sonia, talked through our tried-and-tested process for moving schools to Arbor, and how we work with schools to help you transform the way you work for the better.
We provide lots of ongoing support and consultancy services to help schools drive even more impact from Arbor. So if you’re an Arbor school, your Account Manager will be happy to arrange the best session for you. Just get in touch via accountmanagers@arbor-education.com
“When you move to Arbor, you begin a journey. We give you the support you need to empower all your staff to use Arbor to transform the way they work!” – Sonia Leighton, Chief of Customer Success, Arbor Education
A real highlight of ArborFest was the positive activity we saw on social media, with ArborFest attendees spreading the word to colleagues.
We asked attendees to share a photo of their ArborFest location and we were thrilled by all the entries. It was really difficult to choose a winner but in the end, it had to be Dave Leonard, Strategic IT Director at Watergrove Trust, whose beaming selfie really put a smile on our face. We’ll be sending Dave a £100 Amazon voucher as his prize.
Coming in second place, Sarah Sprack, Head of Isle Education Trust and Principal at South Axholme Academy, also impressed us with her lovely sunny view from her office. We’ll be sending Sarah some brownies in the post!
Here’s a small sample of the other runners up:
If you didn’t make it to ArborFest, but would still like to find out more about Arbor MIS, why not join one of our regular free demo webinars to see Arbor in action, or arrange a 1-on-1 demo with one of our team.
If you’d like to receive regular content and updates from us, sign up to our fortnightly newsletter to get the best of our blogs straight to your inbox.
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. Whilst most schools choose Arbor MIS to replace all the various school systems they use for different tasks, it’s important to us that schools can choose to still use the tools they love with Arbor. That’s why we’ve partnered with
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. Whilst most schools choose Arbor MIS to replace all the various school systems they use for different tasks, it’s important to us that schools can choose to still use the tools they love with Arbor.
That’s why we’ve partnered with over 30 of the best-in-breed platforms for communications, clubs and trips, data analysis, and more, so you can use them seamlessly alongside your MIS. That means Arbor will sync data automatically with your favourite apps, so you’ll only have to update your information once!
As well as working with your favourite tools, read below for the top four ways Arbor helps you create a more joined-up school – from data security, to remote working.
With Single Sign On (SSO), staff will be able to log in to their email, virtual learning environment and Arbor MIS at the same time – with only one password to remember! With the possibility of school lockdowns or staff having to isolate, these features free up your staff to access their systems from wherever they’re working.
With remote working, it’s important to make sure your school data stays secure. With our Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) functionality, you’ll have an extra layer of security to logins across your school, which requires the user to enter both their password and a unique code sent to their mobile device. You choose whether to require 2FA for all users at all times, or only for staff who are working from home.
Arbor connects seamlessly with your Google or Microsoft platform so if you’re one of the thousands of schools who has taken advantage of the DfE provisioning scheme for these platforms, this is an added bonus!
Your MIS is home to some of the most sensitive data your school collects on students, staff and guardians. This data is also an incredibly useful source of insight, so you might sometimes want to dig deeper into your data using another system.
At Arbor, we work closely with all the major data providers in the UK including Wonde, Groupcall and Salamander Soft to allow schools to connect with the widest possible range of systems. What’s more, you have total visibility and control over the data you choose to share. The biggest benefit is we don’t charge these companies to integrate with Arbor, so that costs are kept as low as possible for schools.
Arbor’s built-in dashboards surface the data most relevant to your staff, and you can build any number of personalised reports in minutes. But if you want to go the extra mile and do something even more creative with your data, we’ve made it as easy as possible to export your Arbor data quickly and securely with our Live Feeds functionality.
Export any Arbor report in a few clicks into Excel, Google Sheets or even PowerBI! Once the Feed is in, your data will refresh automatically. And don’t worry, we keep your data completely secure using a random, salted 16-digit string within the Live Feed (making them near impossible to hack!). You also have full visibility and control over who can access the Feed in Arbor, with the option to cut it off at any time.
We’re excited to announce that in February 2021, schools will be able to synchronise their teaching and learning tools directly with Arbor MIS, thanks to our new integrations with G-Suite, Microsoft School Data Sync and Apple Classroom. This means your students, staff and classes will be automatically set up in your VLE, so there’s no need to create them manually or use a costly third party service.
This is part of our new Arbor Enterprise toolkit, which helps schools and MATs simplify their setup and get more from their data. Keep an eye out for more news on this next year!
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor could help your school or MAT work faster, smarter and collaborate more, join a free webinar or arrange a 1-on-1 demo here.
Case Studies | School Operations
We spoke to two Senior Leaders in a primary and secondary school about the biggest challenges they’re facing this term, and how they’re feeling about potential Ofsted inspections. To find out some of the questions Ofsted have been asking this term and how Arbor MIS can help you prepare, check out our blog. Martyn Essery,
We spoke to two Senior Leaders in a primary and secondary school about the biggest challenges they’re facing this term, and how they’re feeling about potential Ofsted inspections.
To find out some of the questions Ofsted have been asking this term and how Arbor MIS can help you prepare, check out our blog.
1. What are some of the biggest challenges your staff are facing this term?
The changes to the “zoning” of students has required a change of perspective for some Teachers who have cultivated their own classrooms over the years, but the biggest challenge now is keeping on top of staff and student absence, and seeking to offer the best remote learning experience for those who are not in school.
2. What are your strategies for getting your students “back on track” after lockdown?
We have deliberately avoided using language around “catching up” and “filling gaps” in order to get students back to school. Instead we reconnected with the physical space and daily social interactions without causing unnecessary mental burdens in relation to the time missed between March and July. We are making use of the excellent guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation – we are in the fortunate position that much of the back-to-school guidance chimes with initiatives we already had in place, such as targeted academic support.
3. Are you concerned at all about Ofsted inspections?
No, but I hope they are being carried out as a means to fact-find and share best practice around how schools are approaching this unique challenge.
4. How will you be preparing for an inspection?
We do not implement processes or add requirements specifically in relation to a planned or unplanned inspection, so we will continue to ensure that our systems are working effectively – supporting our students to learn and enjoy their learning, and giving us the data we require to analyse and intervene where required.
5. How has Arbor helped you prepare for inspections in the past?
The quick access to a wide variety of data in relation to students, staff, attendance and behaviour has meant that drawing up overviews and headlines has been very straightforward. But, as mentioned above, rather than it being useful specifically for an inspection, it is the way in which we have been able to integrate Arbor into all of the day-to-day routines which makes it so useful in relation to feeling prepared and on top of what is going on in school.
The close tracking of behaviour, with clear workflows and follow-ups in order to ensure nothing slips through the gaps, has contributed to behaviour in our school being both high quality and consistently managed.
With custom reports and Live Feeds, individuals can create bespoke reports which monitor the data relevant to them – this has been utilised in relation to absence and punctuality in recent weeks.
Finally, we have been able to manage a changing landscape related to timetables and when students are required to be at school thanks to the way the programmes are set up in Arbor.
At the moment, it feels like we’re dancing on the tightest of tightropes. I’ve never known Teachers to work such long hours, and students are now having to make seven steps rather than five just to meet expectations.
This next six months will be the most complicated stage of the current crisis. In some ways, last term’s lockdown was quite straightforward – we had 10-15% of our students in school and the rest we provided remote support to. But the current period is a sort of “halfway house” – we’re not fully open nor closed. The Government’s covid-related illness codes give the false impression that there is a high attendance nationally, whereas in reality the codes mark students as present. One of our schools is currently struggling to reach 90% attendance when Covid-19 registration codes are taken into consideration.
However, I’m pleased to say that behaviour so far has been very good – you can sense students feel the joy of being back to school.
Since the beginning of term, we’ve taken the opportunity to reset. Everything we are doing has been adapted to the Covid-19 situation. This has often meant we’ve had to re-evaluate what we do and why we do it. For example, we’ve re-launched our school curriculum which has gone down well.
It’s uncertain when and what the visits will look like. Under the current framework, core subject leadership is the most challenging area. Until recently, it was only senior leadership who were judged, but for the last five years Subject Leads are being judged more and more. In the 90’s, each Local Authority would have their own Subject Leads, who could upskill staff in schools. But now schools do not have such support. Many MATs and federations are developing dedicated subject leadership strategies. Our approach has been to develop a subject leadership handbook between our two schools. This handbook sets out our vision, expectations and timelines for Subject Leaders. It’s been designed to get new leaders up to speed as quickly as possible, and for experienced leaders it’s a useful touchstone. New leaders have also buddied up with experienced Subject Leaders, often across schools.
The main thing Ofsted will want us to evidence in relation to the Covid-19 learning gap, is “How do you know what students don’t know?” Baseline assessment will support much of this but running alongside this will be an adjustment to our school vision – how does our vision for learning fit in this new climate? What adjustments do we need to make? What financial impacts will this lead to? These are typically long term questions that we are having to make decisions on rapidly in a very uncertain world.
Assessment is better understood. We’re in the process of using Puma and Pira assessments which import neatly into our Arbor MIS. This will show us how student groups are doing across key measures. Equally we’re using our Early Years assessments to gauge how far we have to go in order to meet minimum requirements. Early evidence is suggesting that younger children have a wider learning gap than older children. What we know is that younger children also tend to make more rapid progress than older children. At the moment we have set a challenge to address 18 months of learning in one year. This will have to be adjusted if we are called to close again, as the suspicion is that a second round of school closures could create an even greater learning gap than the first.
Ofsted are also likely to ask whether you’re just doing the “minimum” to get students back on track with their learning, or if you’re being adaptive and creative in order to enrich their learning. The fact that we can’t get out on trips (Transport for London has closed school trips) makes this difficult for us to do, especially for foundation subjects. So we’re working with what we can do locally and internally, for example our Head of School recently dressed up as the Queen (which managed to convince our Year 1’s!)
Arbor is where we can evidence core learning and the effectiveness of our policies around attendance, behaviour etc. We can get the data we need rapidly to show where we are, how things have changed over time, and which students are behind the trends, which is vital in Ofsted conversations.
Want to find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform the way your school works for the better? Book a free demo here or get in touch on tellmemore@arbor-education.com or 0208 050 1028.
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Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. With just over one week to go until ArborFest – our free virtual conference dedicated to schools and trusts – we wanted to tell you all about what’s on so you can book your place! From 12th-13th
With just over one week to go until ArborFest – our free virtual conference dedicated to schools and trusts – we wanted to tell you all about what’s on so you can book your place!
From 12th-13th November, ArborFest is your chance to hear how fellow school staff have transformed the way they work with Arbor MIS. You’ll discover best practice in all areas – from assessment, to reporting, to parental engagement. We’ll also give you a sneak peak of what’s coming up on our Product Roadmap.
If your school isn’t yet using Arbor, it’s a great opportunity to get a taste of what it’s like to be part of the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community, and to see first hand how our schools use Arbor day-to-day.
Here’s a look at what’s on and all the links you need to sign up – just click the title of the talk! Click here for the full programme.
Morning sessions
Best practice and advice from schools and trusts using Arbor MIS
Arbor’s CEO James and Chief of Customer Success Sonia will welcome you to ArborFest and let you know all about the top sessions to look out for.
Find out how to use Arbor to get even greater insight into your students.
Find out how Arbor’s tools could help you communicate in a more dynamic way with your school community.
Hear about our new releases, and take part in workshops to shape the future of Arbor
Ever wondered how an EdTech product team works? Arbor’s Head of Product Hilary will reveal how we decide what to develop to help schools work better.
Discover two of our brand new features for Teaching Staff – an all-in-one classroom management tool and a personalised dashboard.
If you’re using Arbor MIS, this is your chance to tell us what you think about the design, usability and layout to help us improve the experience.
(For Arbor customers only)
MAT Feedback Forum: Teaching and Learning in Group MIS
If you’re a MAT Central Team using Arbor, this is your opportunity to tell us what you think of Arbor’s Group MIS to help us improve the experience.
Afternoon sessions
Our Keynote Speaker, Rachel Coldicutt, expert on the relationship between social impact and tech, will show you how you can manage uncertainty and move on after Covid-19.
We’ll show you how you can quickly access the attendance data you need in a few clicks using Arbor’s out-of-the-box reporting.
Join former Headteacher, Jackie, to find the right approach to assessment and progress tracking for your primary school, and how to implement it in Arbor.
If you’re a primary school discovering Arbor for the first time, join this demo to see Arbor MIS in action.
Hear top tips from fellow Teachers for managing your class and keeping on top of your admin! We’ll also show you how Arbor helps reduce workload, plus our new teacher-focused features.
Join Arbor’s Assessments Lead, Chris, to find out how we’ve built school and MAT-level assessments in Arbor, and what’s on the horizon.
Join Martyn, Deputy Head at The Reach Free School, and Chris, Arbor’s Assessment Lead, to learn how you can get greater insight into student progress in Arbor.
If you’re a secondary school discovering Arbor for the first time, join this demo to see Arbor MIS in action.
If you’re an administrator at a trust using Arbor MIS, this is your chance to tell us what you think of Arbor’s Group MIS to help us improve the experience for trust Office Staff.
Join Stephen, Chris and Nataliia from Arbor to hear how we’re shaping Arbor to best support MATs over the long term.
Arbor’s Chief of Customer Success, Sonia, will walk you through the support we provide throughout your life with Arbor, to help drive long-term impact.
We’ll show you how Arbor makes the DfE Daily Form easy, plus how to keep track of student and staff sickness and absences.
Meet fellow Data Managers, Exams Officers, Admin Staff sharing top tips for managing exams in Arbor.
End your ArborFest experience with closing remarks from the Arbor Team. Hear about what’s coming next and how you can keep up-to-date with what we’ve got coming up. See you there!
If you’re discovering Arbor for the first time, join this demo to see Arbor’s Group MIS in action.
Discover our brand new toolkit for schools and trusts that are large, complex or want more control of their data and system infrastructure.
We really look forward to welcoming you at ArborFest this year. It’s a great opportunity not only to learn more about Arbor MIS but also to network with fellow school staff from across the country.
If you’d prefer to arrange a 1-on-1 demo of Arbor for your school, one of the team would love to speak to you. You can book that here.
Otherwise, see you online!
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Behaviour management is a constant challenge and can take up a large amount of Teachers’ time. With students struggling to adjust to change during the pandemic, managing difficult new behaviour is just one of the challenges Teachers are facing. With awareness of students’ mental health at the top of the agenda, it’s important to understand
Behaviour management is a constant challenge and can take up a large amount of Teachers’ time. With students struggling to adjust to change during the pandemic, managing difficult new behaviour is just one of the challenges Teachers are facing.
With awareness of students’ mental health at the top of the agenda, it’s important to understand how best to support each individual. A large part of this is looking at how we can reframe and manage “problematic” behaviour in the classroom, to understand what students are dealing with emotionally.
We spoke to Rob Long, Educational Psychologist, about his work with schools and the best strategies for managing classroom behaviour.
A lot of schools look at behaviour at a surface level. Though it’s worth saying that schools differ greatly, many focus on “managing” behaviour, having “zero tolerance” and relying on rewards and sanctions. These strategies are based on the assumption that the child is wilfully misbehaving; that is that they can control their behaviour. While such approaches will work for many children, there are “repeat offenders” whose behaviour needs to be understood if they are to be supported effectively.
In some mainstream schools, it can be 3-5% of the school population who are responsible for something like 50% of the discipline referrals. So it’s often the same children/young people who are being sanctioned. It would be fair to say therefore that sanctions are not working for them. In fact, some children, sadly, have habituated to sanctions. It’s what they expect as normal.
The problem with a “zero-tolerance” culture is that some students (3-5%) are consistently at risk of being excluded. There is a case for trying to understand these problem behaviours – an approach that more and more schools are developing.
A one-size-fits-all behaviour policy doesn’t work – we need to address individuals.
We need to understand students’ behaviour on a deeper level in order to get to the root of why they’re acting the way they are. Often students who misbehave are dealing with Adverse Childhood Experiences, such as mental health problems at home, deprivation or abuse. It’s evidenced that children who have had four or more of these experiences are especially vulnerable to having problematic behaviours.
Behaviour is never random – there’s usually a motive for it. Even aggression can be driven by such emotions as fear and anxiety. We should see behaviour as a form of communication, and ask what it is that the student is trying to communicate to us. Have they had breakfast that morning? Is their schoolwork at the appropriate level for them? Are they being bullied? Are there learning difficulties? Have they experienced trauma? Behaviour is ambiguous, three children may have the same problematic behaviour, but for three different reasons.
Given that 1 in 8 children are dealing with some sort of mental health problem (according to MentalHealth.org), and most adult mental health problems start before the age of 15-16, schools need the training to be aware of and support students to manage their emotions.
Here are some techniques I’d encourage schools to use in order to reframe “bad” behaviour (I would prefer the term “problematic” behaviour) and promote a positive, supportive environment for students:
Some children will struggle to adapt to new routines and rules this term, so they’ll benefit from Teachers modeling the new behaviour and showing them how to relate to their classmates, the curriculum and themselves.
Cultivate a compassionate and understanding atmosphere in the classroom with the Teacher as someone they can open up to and share their concerns with.
Some students may not have learned how to deal with challenging emotions in an appropriate way. Teachers can help by modelling problem-solving skills. Talk out loud, showing them how to weigh up and think through problems.
It’s important to reframe “bad” behaviour as “mistakes” rather than something fundamentally wrong inside the student. Do they have the necessary skills, or do I need to teach them? What is the function of this behaviour, are they gaining something or avoiding something? Teachers and Support Staff need to act as behavioural “detectives”. Also often a “behavioural mistake” can be a learning opportunity.
Students need to know that having anxious or angry thoughts is part of normal human life; they help us prepare for bad things happening. Acknowledge their negative emotions, then shift the focus to their positive emotions. Negative emotions lead us to turn in on ourselves, to self-protect, so balance this by focusing on positive emotions which lead us to go out and explore the world, such as gratitude (who has helped you today?), curiosity (what have you learnt?) and achievement (what was a new skill or success?).
It is important to recognise that schools today face even more demands on their time and resources. They therefore often don’t have the time to support students’ mental health problems to the degree they’d like to.
I encourage schools to make wellbeing a whole-school priority. Evidence shows that the more students feel belonging to a school, the better their emotional wellbeing. Feeling connected to their school results in less externalising and internalising problematic behaviours.
It’s true that there is a growing openness to mental health within the education sector – I’m seeing a “therapeutic” understanding approach to emotional health filtering down to schools and there’s more and more information and support out there. However, the Government needs to support, with resources, the importance of wellbeing and mental health in schools. We need to change the culture that turns students with added mental health needs away from schools because they can’t manage them.
Case Studies | Popular | School Operations
Moving MIS can feel like a daunting task, particularly as many schools only have experience of their current system. Even so, the last few years have seen many schools and academies review their tech and replace their legacy, server-based systems with more efficient, cloud-based solutions. We’ve put together two interviews with schools in Hampshire to
Moving MIS can feel like a daunting task, particularly as many schools only have experience of their current system. Even so, the last few years have seen many schools and academies review their tech and replace their legacy, server-based systems with more efficient, cloud-based solutions.
We’ve put together two interviews with schools in Hampshire to show that, when you choose the right provider, moving MIS doesn’t have to be an intimidating process.
1. What motivated your move to Arbor MIS?
We used to have a number of different systems that managed all the different operational aspects of a school (MIS, attendance, communication, assessment, medical, etc), and although individually these systems worked well, we found that you had to keep switching between them to get the full picture, i.e. linking attendance to progress, or emails home to confirm social media consent. This, coupled with the extraordinarily complex processes to get straightforward answers to simple questions (e.g. What is the absence trend of our PP children this term?) was becoming increasingly frustrating for us.
I had used Arbor Insight reports for a couple of years, and loved the clarity in which detailed information was presented. The charts and graphs were consistently user friendly, and I was able to get the data I needed swiftly. I did some investigating into Arbor MIS, and spoke to a couple of schools – who all spoke highly of the system. When we costed Arbor over a three year period and found that we would save just under £6k compared to the other systems we were using, the transition was a no brainer!
2. Did you have any concerns before moving?
There were a number of issues that I needed to be confident about before moving to Arbor. Obviously we checked their reliability, ‘uptime’ status over the past few years, accounts, customer service, compliance with GDPR and other relevant legislation. We were also twitchy about the actual transition and the physical moving of all our MIS data from one product to another! We knew that we were taking a leap of faith!
However, after the delays in getting the data out of the old system, the actual transfer into Arbor was slick with several layers of verification. Additional checks by the Arbor team continued to make us feel confident that our data was being well looked after!
3. What was your staff’s reaction to changing MIS?
The office team were instrumental in evaluating Arbor before moving over to it, so they had some idea of what to expect. They were very excited about the transition, especially with regard to us being a growing school and requiring a product that would grow and help us streamline systems and processes. We are still finding time-saving devices regularly in the product!
My Business Manager is able to put all the staff details in a single system, and add staff attendance, contract details and we are investigating transferring our Single Central Record over too. Teachers like being able to locate parent’s contact details quickly, alongside assessment and attendance data. All these features make for a happy staff!
4. How has Arbor transformed the way you work?
One of the most notable areas that has been transformed is the census return. Having our own maintained nursery (with its variety of Nursery 2s and 3s, 15 and 30 hour funding, irregular sessions, non compulsory attendance, paid for sessions, etc.) used to require multiple telephone calls to the previous system’s help desk. These were often painfully long, incredibly complicated and stressful days! However, the most recent census return was completed in under 20 minutes (and when help was required, it’s always clear and accurate!).
I love the automated reports – I’ve got two main ones set up at the moment; one for safeguarding, the other for attendance. These scheduled reports are automatically generated and emailed to the relevant staff. These save so much time!
For us, however, Arbor is the one-stop-shop for everything. During parents’ evenings, we load on the pupil’s page, and we have all the information at our fingertips. We can quickly see who is social media safe, or doesn’t have permission for the administration of paracetamol, who has a food allergy, or what they achieved in their Y1 Phonics screening. We used to waste so much time digging into separate systems to find all this – having it all on the screen in one place has been fantastic!
5. What would you say to a Local Authority maintained primary school in an area like Hampshire who’s thinking of moving away from SIMS but is nervous about it?
Do it! Don’t hesitate! There are better, more efficient and more effective ways of working. Arbor holds your hand all the way through the process (and beyond – they definitely do not “drop you once you’re in!”). The ongoing communication, support and training continually reassure and help you get the most from Arbor. They are continually developing the product (the Covid attendance summary page is brilliant for the daily DfE return!), and they listen to your suggestions for improvements too! Take the plunge – you won’t look back!
To find out more about how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could help your school work faster, smarter and collaborate more, join one of our webinars at ArborFest – our exclusive online event for schools across the country. You’ll hear how fellow school staff have transformed the way they work with Arbor MIS. Find out what’s on and book now – it’s free!
Read Part Two for our second interview with Kay Bowen, Headteacher at St John the Baptist CoE Primary
As hundreds of maintained schools are choosing to move to cloud-based systems, we’ve been speaking to schools in Hampshire about why they made their decision to move to Arbor. You can catch up on our first interview with Jason Anderson, Headteacher at Romsey Primary School here. In this blog, we speak to Kay Bowen, Headteacher
As hundreds of maintained schools are choosing to move to cloud-based systems, we’ve been speaking to schools in Hampshire about why they made their decision to move to Arbor.
You can catch up on our first interview with Jason Anderson, Headteacher at Romsey Primary School here. In this blog, we speak to Kay Bowen, Headteacher at St John the Baptist CoE Primary, who moved to Arbor in Spring 2020.
The cost of our previous system and lack of usage; feeling that it probably could do a lot but we did not have staff trained and experienced in using it over many years and thus we weren’t able to get the power from it. We wanted a system that everyone could use to quickly find out anything they needed to about a child.
We wanted to save time and make the office function more efficiently, have everything paperless, with all staff able to access all they needed themselves rather than relying on the office. We felt sure there was a more 21st Century solution to school data than the rather 20th Century system we had.
Cost was a concern as we could not afford to spend more (on training for everyone). We needed to find a really straightforward system so that everyone could do the basics and we would not have much time or money to train people. We also had the worry of losing data or things being complicated for parents at the start, thus them being disinclined to use it. I think I was also worried that a lot of these systems seem to be very “secondary centric” and would they understand that an average sized primary has different usage and needs compared to a big secondary?
They seem quite relieved, and hopeful! The office team we have are new in post in the last few months so they are keen to learn a new system that they will then know inside out.
4. How do you hope moving to Arbor will transform the way you work?
I hope that everything will be efficient and fast. The medical info will be shared more easily, and data should remain up to date every day without needing to be checked. We hope that it will be easy for parents to use to communicate messages from the school. We hope it will reduce the load on the admin team to do routine data work and they will be freed-up timewise.
5. How is implementation going so far?
OK – there has been a lot of work to tidy our current system which has been more difficult than for other schools as we have a new team and they had not learnt the old system, so it is time consuming. We are about to swap over systems, but we have had someone to talk it through with every week and check if we have any queries. Our Admin Staff have had their first training session and report that it all looks very straightforward to add information to.
6. What would you say to a local Authority maintained primary school in an area like Hampshire who’s thinking of moving away from SIMS but is nervous about it?
Don’t be afraid – having a system that everyone can use with ease as an end point to keep in mind makes it doable. Plus, financially we’re not losing out this year, even with the additional training costs of year one, when you add up all the systems we had for emails, payments, MIS – we will be saving money every year going forward and can see that we will be saving time too.
With the potential of an Ofsted inspection this term, we’ve been speaking to Arbor schools and MATs about how they’re feeling and preparing. Although Ofsted are calling this term’s inspections “interim visits” that will focus on supporting schools to welcome students back to full-time schooling, the inspections are still likely to cause upheaval for schools.
Ofsted may not be asking schools to do any formal preparation, however School Leaders will naturally want to present as much evidence as possible about how their students are doing this term.
To help you best prepare for Ofsted, we’ve gathered together some of the key questions they’ve been asking over the last few weeks, and how Arbor MIS can support you to prepare for each of them.
Gather your evidence in Arbor…
In Arbor, you can quickly pull together attendance data over time, and compare classes, Year groups, demographic groups, or Covid-19 bubbles:
Arbor’s Covid-19 Dashboard is your reference point for daily attendance across your school, split into the key DfE categories, including students with an ECHP, with a social worker and cases of Covid-19. Click into any measure to see a full list of students in each group:
For MATs, Arbor’s Group MIS gives you real-time attendance stats across your schools, allowing you to drill down from the trust-level data to the individual students:
Arbor’s built-in dashboards help you understand behaviour across groups of students (Year groups, Form groups etc.), and track how the types and frequency of behaviour has changed over time:
You can also add new types for Covid-19 related behaviour, such as pulling off another student’s mask during a lesson. Arbor will notify the relevant staff who need to know about the incident, and set up your follow-up actions automatically:
Track the effectiveness of your behaviour interventions groups by pulling together a quick report in Arbor:
Arbor’s new My Homepage gives your Teaching and Pastoral Staff live information about the student groups they look after, so they’ll never miss a new detention, pastoral or medical note. Easy filters also help them keep track of the behaviour, attendance and attainment of their key demographic groups:
Check out this interesting example from a mixed-phase MAT in Leicestershire, The Mead Educational Trust (TMET), about the methods they’re using to assess the impact of Covid-19 on their most vulnerable students.
In Arbor you can set up customised formative assessments which allow you to track how your students are developing during the year. Easy-to-use colour-coded dashboards will then help you monitor performance, and show you clearly where you need to intervene:
You can then filter your results to see how particular Covid-19 groups are performing:
Set up interventions to get certain students back on track, and review the cost and effectiveness of your interventions in one dashboard:
For guidance on how to utilise the Government’s Catch-Up funding, you might find this cheat sheet from The Key useful.
If you’re new to Arbor and want to find out how our cloud-based MIS can help your school work faster, smarter and collaborate more, join one of our webinars at ArborFest – our exclusive online event for schools across the country. You’ll hear how fellow school staff have transformed the way they work with Arbor MIS. Find out what’s on and book now – it’s free!
We spoke to Educational Consultant David Hughes about why such a large wave of schools have started moving to cloud-based tech in recent years (approx. 1,700 have switched to a cloud-based MIS since 2017). David Hughes is the author of “Future-Proof your School” and “Re-examining Success”, as well as the popular blog “Learning Renaissance’” He
We spoke to Educational Consultant David Hughes about why such a large wave of schools have started moving to cloud-based tech in recent years (approx. 1,700 have switched to a cloud-based MIS since 2017).
David Hughes is the author of “Future-Proof your School” and “Re-examining Success”, as well as the popular blog “Learning Renaissance’” He has over 40 years of experience in schools and Education Technology, with particular expertise in change management, professional development and flexible learning.
Read below for David’s advice for how schools can make sure large-scale technology changes support learning in a sustainable way.
The challenges of running a school remotely during Covid-19 have accelerated the cloud-based revolution – but this is a trend that was already well established.
There are two main drivers:
1. Economies of scale 2. School improvement
Schools now recognise that they can save money using cloud-based solutions, which place the technical support burden on the vendor, meaning schools no longer have to maintain costly servers on site. In times of stretched budgets, this is enough to encourage many schools to switch.
However, there are also deeper educational motivations at play. Although the first generation of EdTech products greatly improved the productivity of collecting, collating and presenting information, schools are rightly now demanding more intuitive and granular information.
For example, schools recognise that their Management Information System (MIS), not only saves time for office staff, can actually drive iterative school improvement. Where previous systems merely showed the “what”, they can now use their MIS to ask deeper “why” questions. They can use their own data to experiment and collaborate in the search for better learning outcomes for students and more effective professional development for staff across the school.
I think a lot of this comes down to negative past experiences with technology roll-outs. Schools often didn’t realise that a technology change isn’t just about installing a system and teaching staff what the buttons do – it requires a cultural change and a behavioural adjustment for teachers.
I’ve seen many companies who are too keen to make a sale and let schools skimp on training or rush through the implementation. This always leaves teachers exasperated that as well as their normal teaching load, they now have to incorporate a confusing new technology.
Instead, good technology providers take the time to demonstrate how they can drive up standards across the school, either by saving time, enabling better collaboration, improving teaching practice, or shining a light on successful strategies. Ultimately, schools and vendors need to be critical friends and share a vision centred around educational outcomes.
Companies need to realise that there’s no point in building a great piece of tech unless it’s totally aligned with the needs of your customers. Too often, companies are at risk of letting the “tail wag the dog” – making decisions based on what’s possible, rather than what’s needed.
One aspect of Arbor’s offering that greatly impressed me was the number of experienced former Teachers and Senior Leaders in the company. Hiring and consulting with Educators means companies understand their users’ context and can be more responsive to development needs in a timely and iterative way.
Having flexible, cloud-based systems is now a necessary condition for driving school improvement, but it’s far from the only thing you can do. There are a number of other dimensions that need to be addressed if technologies are to support learning in a sustainable way.
The most critical aspect, which is often least addressed, is to do with the dominant school culture, or “the way we do things in this school”. This will decide where, when, how and why change is initiated or stalled. School culture comes down to more than leadership – it’s a commonwealth of perspectives which drive behaviours in the school.
School Leaders should engage the whole school in change right from the start – this means involving people in the preliminary discussions, not just when unveiling the final plan. Leaders should also be clear about their goals, whether short or long-term (e.g. maximising exam performance in a particular year, versus a longer-term transformation).
Having worked in and with both high-achieving and struggling schools, a common theme that shocks me every time is that senior leadership teams often don’t think to audit what skills and experience staff have at the outset of a project. Change is done to rather than with them. This management-centred perspective limits the scope, success and sustainability of change.
With simple tools, such as a survey of “can do” statements, School Leaders can generate a complete picture of the skill level across the whole school before starting an initiative. Staff who consistently score highly become the “champions” of the project, developing materials and processes which other staff can then adapt to suit their own needs in the classroom.
Covid-19 has (understandably) forced schools to be far more reactive in their approach. There is much talk of the “new normal” which, in my view, is extremely premature. The current situation is not normal, it is transitional.
There is some truly transformational potential in determining not to go back to the “old normal” and instead exploring how the disruption of the pandemic has changed the way staff and students have shown they can learn. For example, both students and staff have found new ways of working in the disruption, and students have, to an extent, become independent and autonomous learners.
Here are a few ideas for how we could be more ambitious going forwards:
This blog post references materials developed in the books “Future Proof Your School” and “Re-Examining Success”, as well as the Learning Renaissance blog by David Hughes, which schools are welcome to incorporate into their staff CPD library.
To find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform the way you work, get in touch on tellmemore@arbor-education.com, arrange a demo or join a free webinar.
How will you present your schools’ performance to your board this year? Where will you pull the data from? As a MAT leader you’ve got the task of presenting what could be a very mixed picture of attainment this term, with each of your schools facing a unique set of challenges and a slightly different
How will you present your schools’ performance to your board this year? Where will you pull the data from?
As a MAT leader you’ve got the task of presenting what could be a very mixed picture of attainment this term, with each of your schools facing a unique set of challenges and a slightly different approach to “catch-up”.
So how can you best support your trustees with data this term? One of the most useful resources they’ll benefit from is a clear overview of prior attainment, which will help them contextualise the current situation.
In this blog we’ll show you how your newly updated Understanding Your MAT Report will give you a ready-made report to share with your board showing them a complete overview of your prior attainment data.
Created especially for your trust, your Understanding Your MAT Report brings together key measures like your schools’ ASP performance statistics, alongside your MAT’s size and local demographics, to help you understand the unique make-up of your trust compared to others in England.
This specialised combination of aggregated data is presented in a clear and compact report, with colour-coded charts and expert commentary in plain English, making it the perfect document to kick off discussions at your next meeting.
Your Understanding Your MAT Report is live now for you to download from your free Insight portal!
The Understanding Your MAT report will give your board a grounding in the socio-economic factors affecting attainment at your trust over the last three years. They’ll be able to assess at a glance your schools’ strengths and challenges, and how they compare to trusts in the wider national context.
Here’s an explanation of how your trustees can use the report in more detail:
1. Get a clear picture of student performance 2. Understand student performance in context 3. Shape smart strategy
The report uses your schools’ latest validated 2019 Analyse School Performance (ASP) data to show your spread of performance in key measures at KS4, 2 and 1, such as Progress 8, Achieving Expected Standard: Reading, Writing and Maths, and Working at the Expected Standard: Year 1 Phonics. We’ve also just updated your report to include ASP data for all schools who joined your trust up to 1st September 2020.
The report also compares all results against three key benchmarks: Trust average (the weighted average of all your schools’ results), National average (weighted average of all state schools in England) and National MAT average (weighted average of all academies in England) to help them see what makes your MAT distinctive.
You can also share with Trustees a login to your free Arbor Group Insight portal, where they can dig further into any data set to see student level figures. Here they’ll also be able to download 2019 reports for all schools in your trust for free, allowing them to drill down to identify the subjects and student groups behind any underperformance.
KS4 Progress 8 score, Understanding Your MAT Report 2020
Trustees might be wondering whether the pace at which you’re growing is normal compared to other trust. They might also want to know if your school demographics (e.g. the proportion of students eligible for Free School Meals, or with English as a Second Language) is higher or lower than other similar trusts.
As they’ll see from the report’s leading article “Breaking the link: Attainment, poverty and rural schools”, the relationship between disadvantage and attainment varies considerably between different parts of England, so it’s important for trustees to understand how this plays out across your mix of schools.
The Understanding Your MAT Report will help you answer these questions, by showing you how your MAT context compares to other trusts in the country.
Using latest 2019/20 GIAS (Get Information About Schools) data and information from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the report gives an overview of your MAT’s size, growth, blend of phases, pupil characteristics (% of FSM, SEN and EAL pupils), as well as the “Area Type” classifications for where your schools are located, including level of education and the unemployment rate.
Area Type Blend, Understanding Your MAT Report 2020
With the attainment gap for students from disadvantaged backgrounds potentially widening by up to 75% as a result of Covid-19, it’s more important than ever to be able to explain the link between your students’ performance and their contextual factors.
By understanding all the factors impacting achievement at your MAT, your trustees will be better equipped to help identify student groups in need of extra support this year.
Your Understanding Your MAT Report is ready to download from your Arbor Group Insight portal. If you’re not registered, don’t worry, you can sign up for free.
If you have any questions about your report, or if you’d like one of our team to show you around Group Insight, get in touch at insight@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Virtual ArborFest – the second instalment of our festival dedicated to schools and trusts using Arbor MIS. Only 1 month away, ArborFest is your chance to hear tips and tricks
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Virtual ArborFest – the second instalment of our festival dedicated to schools and trusts using Arbor MIS.
Only 1 month away, ArborFest is your chance to hear tips and tricks from fellow school staff using Arbor, as well as expert best practice from the Arbor Team. We’ll also give you a sneak peak of what’s coming up on our product roadmap.
Join us online on 12th-13th November for a two-day event with lots of talks, workshops and feedback forums to choose from. The best thing is ArborFest is completely free!
You’ll see that we’ve split ArborFest into three key themes, each with multiple talks inside it. Click the link above to see the full programme and book into the sessions you’d like to join:
For schools who are discovering Arbor for the first time, and don’t yet use our cloud-based MIS, we’re holding special sessions just for you so you can learn more about Arbor. Book your place here if you’re a primary school, secondary school or MAT.
We’re excited to announce a very special keynote speaker for ArborFest – Rachel Coldicutt. An expert on the relationship between social impact and tech, and former CEO of Doteveryone, Rachel will walk us through “The Glimmers Report” – a new, practical toolkit to help schools, trusts and other community organisations reflect on their rapid transformation, look ahead, and set new Key Performance Indicators.
We’ve put together a video showcasing our last ArborFest back in February of this year (when meeting in a room full of people was normal and exciting!) Take a look and see what ArborFest means to us:
When school systems are working well, you shouldn’t even notice they’re there. They should run in the background, helping you to speed through your daily admin and giving you all the information you need, when you need it. However, many schools find that over the years, they’ve somehow accumulated lots of different IT systems that
When school systems are working well, you shouldn’t even notice they’re there. They should run in the background, helping you to speed through your daily admin and giving you all the information you need, when you need it.
However, many schools find that over the years, they’ve somehow accumulated lots of different IT systems that only do one job each.
A messy network of systems which don’t “communicate” with each other, also leaves your student data in lots of different places. This puts an added burden on staff who have to enter data manually multiple times over, and added risk of errors or things going missing.
If you counted the number of hours your staff spend every day entering data or logging into various systems to find information – it would really add up. This is valuable time that they could be spending on tasks that matter – like speaking to a parent, or supporting students in the classroom.
By auditing your school systems, you’ll spot immediately where cutting down on your systems could save costs and give staff quicker access to the information they need. You might be surprised by the amount of overlap you have where two or three systems could be replaced by just one.
For MATs, using lots of different systems becomes especially unsustainable when they grow to 5-10 schools or more. At this scale, consolidating and centralising systems can not only hugely cut costs, but will also allow staff across the trust to work together more easily. Dave Noble, Director of Operations at Red Kite Learning Trust, has a great example of his vision for centralisation.
The most important question to have in mind when you start reviewing each of your systems, is Why do we need it?
And more precisely:
What does it do that another system can’t?
Do staff use it frequently? If not, why?
Do staff use every feature of it?
For example, a school might have been using a behaviour tracking software for many years, and are happy with how it charts behaviour points over time. But this is the only feature they use this software for. In cases like this, and with many other systems that are an added cost, it’s worth questioning whether you could do it all within one tool – such as your MIS.
We recommend tackling your systems audit using this four step process. Many schools find it helpful to work in an Excel template like this:
How you can approach a systems audit
Step 1
Start by listing out all the systems your staff use for their core tasks, like attendance, assessment, behaviour and communications. Remember to ask staff at all levels and from all areas across the school – don’t assume that one person will know what everyone is using!
Step 2
Move on to listing the annual costs of each system. If you don’t have to pay for something annually and you already have it, you can mark the cost as £0. Make sure to split out all software products even if they’re from the same company because you might find one is more useful than the others.
Step 3
Go back down your list and note each software’s functionality – not just what you’re currently using it for, but what it could do if you used every feature within it.
Step 4
You’ll probably have come across several overlaps by now. This is the tricky part: for everything that overlaps, consider which has the greater value, and which you could think about cutting.
This value judgement can’t entirely be based on price, although that is important. You should also question why you had several systems in the first place. Is one of them more user-friendly? Is it quick to train new staff on? Could you get a better deal and a better product by getting rid of both altogether?
If you decide to cut out some of your systems, this might require a change in mindset for staff who have been used to working in a certain way for years.
Working now with over 1,200 schools, most of whom chose to move to Arbor MIS to consolidate their systems, we’ve seen schools manage this change and come out the other side with much more efficient ways of working.
Arbor brings together all your core school tasks into one place, giving everyone shared access to information and a shared view of progress. Staff save time by only having one login to remember and no longer having to transfer data manually between systems.
Of course, your audit might have shown you that some systems are worth keeping alongside your MIS, and that’s great – now you know you’re making a good investment. At Arbor, we integrate with over 30 powerful external systems to give you the flexibility to use the ones that work for you, whilst making sure your data is all joined up.
To find out more about how Arbor could help you work faster, smarter and more collaboratively, join a free webinar or arrange a personalised demo.
Tellmemore@arbor-education.com | 0208 050 1028
It’s the time of year when most School Admin Officers have one thing at the top of their minds – census. With the end of October deadline fast approaching, and workforce census on the horizon, you’re probably somewhere deep into the process by now. Census can be a bit of a daunting task, and with
It’s the time of year when most School Admin Officers have one thing at the top of their minds – census. With the end of October deadline fast approaching, and workforce census on the horizon, you’re probably somewhere deep into the process by now.
Census can be a bit of a daunting task, and with so much unexpected admin to cope with this year, another lengthy, clunky process is the last thing your back office needs.
Here are five ways that Arbor takes the hassle out of census management, giving you valuable time back in your day:
Preparing and updating your data is quick and easy in Arbor, thanks to bulk actions. Update information about a group of students, such as attainment grades, UPNs, or student contact details at the same time, in just a few clicks.
Click the pencil to update all students in one click
In Arbor, you’ll always have the most recent DfE validation form for your school built into the system, so you don’t even have to think about it. This cuts out a major step in the process, allowing you to run the same checks on your census data as the DfE, all within Arbor.
Forget scrolling down endless tables and forms, in Arbor you can review your census data in an interactive dashboard, which means you can click into each category and easily check the students listed.
Click on any category and review which students are listed
You can then cross check which students should be in each category from your demographics dashboards:
Get quick access to demographic information for all students
Once you run checks on your data, Arbor will flag any errors or missing data so you can see what needs your attention at a glance. You can then amend and correct each line instantly from the same screen.
Spot an error and fix it right away without leaving the screen
We’re the first MIS to integrate with an HR platform (CoreHR XD) giving schools and trusts a smarter way to manage HR tasks like workforce census. If you’re using Core HR XD, integrating with Arbor means you’ll always have up-to-date information about your staff right when you need it, helping you complete your census in half the time.
Our Help Centre is full of handy guides and videos that help make your census process as smooth as possible.
But don’t just take it from us – here’s how some of our schools have found completing census in Arbor:
Interested in finding out how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS can help you work more easily collaboratively this term? Book a demo today, or join one of our webinars.
After the success of our MAT Conference webinar series in Summer Term, “Adapting to Change: Lessons from Leaders in a Global Crisis”, we’re excited to announce our new series “Building a Resilient Trust: Lessons from leaders 8 months in”. As the months quickly roll on in this new academic year, trust leaders are having to
After the success of our MAT Conference webinar series in Summer Term, “Adapting to Change: Lessons from Leaders in a Global Crisis”, we’re excited to announce our new series “Building a Resilient Trust: Lessons from leaders 8 months in”.
As the months quickly roll on in this new academic year, trust leaders are having to shift from crisis mode towards ensuring their schools and staff are getting back on track with their curriculum, attendance, systems and other areas of school life.
We’ve created this new webinar series to give you a safe space to hear from fellow CEOs, COOs, CFOs and Directors about what they’re doing to prepare for further challenges now and in the future.
In each 45 minute webinar you’ll hear from an established trust leader speaking with James Weatherill, Arbor’s Co-Founder and CEO, on areas such as leadership, remote learning, financial management and software procurement. They’ll speak openly about their experience and how they’re future-proofing their trust, giving you practical ideas and strategies to take back to your own trust.
To sign up for individual webinars, or for the whole series, simply follow the links below.
Sign up for the MAT Conference Webinar Series here (and be the first to hear when we add new webinars!)
Friday 23rd October, 11am How to Build a Centralised Approach to Financial Management that will Outlast Covid-19 – in conversation with Jason Brown, CFO at Bath and Wells Multi Academy Trust (BWMAT) and Will Jordan, Co-Founder of IMP Software
With 33 schools to oversee, Jason will explain how he re-examined and re-aligned budgets last year and how this affected the trust as a whole. Jason has been at BWMAT since it’s formation, so has a wealth of experience in scaling sustainably and challenges along the way. Find out how a centralised approach to Financial Management impacted BWMAT’s Covid-19 response and how the past few months will change the way the trust will operate in the future.
Will, Founder of IMP, also joins this webinar, to discuss IMP’s MAT forecasting solution that you can use for budgeting, automated forecasting and reporting. In the webinar, you’ll get first access to their free whitepaper on GAG-pooling.
Sign up here
Friday 20th November, 11am Is Blended Learning the Future of Education? – in conversation with Giles Hill, Digital Learning Lead at Aspire Academy Trust
Wondering what the future of education will look like and how you can build your teaching and learning initiatives across your trust to support this? Giles will discuss the benefits and pitfalls of both classroom and online learning and offer his advice for trusts now and for the future. Giles is part of the EdTech Demonstrator Programme, a government-backed initiative supporting schools and trusts to deliver remote learning during the coronavirus period – and to build the foundations of solid future EdTech strategies.
Friday 27th November, 11am Lessons Learnt From Procuring Systems During Covid-19 – in conversation with Jim Farquhar, COO at Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust
Moving from old to new technology systems will always be a bit of a heart-in-mouth feeling, and moving 27 schools to a cloud-based MIS is no different – especially during a pandemic. Jim will speak candidly on his first-hand experience of migrating systems during lock-down, and the lessons he’s learnt. He’ll share advice on how you can start this process if you’re thinking of a systems change and what should be on your checklist to ensure your trust us prepared for the future.
Friday 4th December, 11am Leading Through a Crisis: How to Keep your Staff Engaged, Motivated and Connected – In conversation with: Andy Buck, CEO of Leadership Matters
The coronavirus pandemic has placed extraordinary demands on leaders in education. With regional lockdowns and continued uncertainty, a focus on your leadership style and practices is as important as ever. Entering the winter months will be a test of character, and this webinar will provide you with some tools and top tips for leading through this period.
If you’d like to get a taste of what our last MAT Conference Webinar Series was like, take a look at the ebook we’ve put together featuring six of the best interviews with MAT leaders at the moment when the Covid-19 crisis took hold.
“Building a Resilient Trust: Lessons from leaders 8 months in” is brought to you for free by Arbor Education as part of our social mission to transform the way schools and trusts work, saving teachers time and improving student outcomes. We want to help you get the support you need during a time of unprecedented change so you can ensure students get the best start in life.
To hear more about how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS could help you and your schools work better today and be ready for tomorrow, join us for an MIS Demo Webinar, designed for trusts like you.
Over the last three years, there has been a big movement of schools choosing to replace their server-based school systems with more flexible, cloud-based ones. We’re proud to say that 1 in every 3 schools that switch MIS choose Arbor – that’s a new school every day! We’re now working with over 1,400 schools and
Over the last three years, there has been a big movement of schools choosing to replace their server-based school systems with more flexible, cloud-based ones.
We’re proud to say that 1 in every 3 schools that switch MIS choose Arbor – that’s a new school every day! We’re now working with over 1,400 schools and MATs across the country and since March 2020, we moved over 400 schools to Arbor completely remotely.
When thinking about moving your school to a new cloud-based system, it can often seem daunting, especially if you haven’t gone through a large-scale change at your school before.
That’s why we wanted to walk you through how we move schools to Arbor, from data migration, through to making long-term impact, and all the support we provide along the way.
The most common worries schools have about moving MIS are: that it will put a big burden on school time, that their data might get lost, and that staff might not get used to new processes.
We understand these worries, and that’s why we’ve designed the Arbor implementation process to make sure schools get the right support every step of the way.
Once you sign with Arbor, your Arbor journey follows three key phases. We work with you to make sure every stage of the process happens at the right time, and that everyone in your team is brought in when they need to be.
Generally, primary schools can go “live” with Arbor in as little as eight weeks, and secondary schools in a term!
Phase 1: Technical Migration
We first plan your implementation process around your needs and priorities. We then transfer your school’s data to Arbor and give you lots of opportunities to check everything is accurate. Meanwhile, your staff can take part in introductory training to help them get familiar with how Arbor works on a test site.
Phase 2: Getting Started
Your Arbor site is now ready to go “live”! Your staff can take part in training on how to use the core parts of Arbor, and customise it to your school needs.
Phase 3: Active (long term)
We offer lots of further training, consultancy and services options designed to make Arbor a success at your school and help you drive impact over a longer period of time.
Find out more: Download “How we make Arbor a success at your primary school” brochure here
Download “How we make Arbor a success at your secondary school” brochure here
Download “How we make Arbor a success at your MAT” brochure here
We believe that switching MIS is so much more than moving your data to a new system, it’s the start of a journey to change the way you work for the better.
For primary schools, we’ve designed a simple automated process that gets you set-up on Arbor, with guidance, hints and tips from the team every step of the way. Book expert training for your staff at a time that suits you, and put it into practice on your new Arbor site.
For secondary schools, we partner you with a dedicated Arbor Project Coordinator who gets to know how your school is set-up and what you want to achieve by moving to Arbor. They then shape every training session around your needs, and help you plan how to meet those goals over the long term. They’ll also drive the momentum of the project forward, take care of all admin, and keep you in the loop with regular progress calls.
If you’re thinking of moving to a cloud-based MIS, join one of our free webinars to find out if Arbor MIS is the right fit for your school. We run sessions for primaries, secondaries and MATs, as well as sessions dedicated to implementation. Alternatively, you can arrange a personalised demo here.
Schools are at the heart of Arbor. Hear from Arbor’s Head of Product, Hilary, all about how we use feedback from schools and the “RICE” framework to shape the vision for our MIS. At Arbor, we’re always looking for new ways to help schools work better. When we develop new features in our MIS, we
Schools are at the heart of Arbor. Hear from Arbor’s Head of Product, Hilary, all about how we use feedback from schools and the “RICE” framework to shape the vision for our MIS.
At Arbor, we’re always looking for new ways to help schools work better. When we develop new features in our MIS, we design them to be intuitive, and to help school staff work faster and collaborate more at all levels.
The vision we work to in our Product Team is made up of three core objectives:
1. Provide staff with meaningful data they can use to identify and act on trends 2. Design a truly school-focused MIS which helps speed up daily tasks and save staff time 3. Develop ways for staff to work better together, creating more joined-up school communities
The way we achieve these objectives is by working hand-in-hand with school staff to make sure everything we work on makes a measurable difference to their working life. It’s also important to us that everyone who uses Arbor up and down the country has the same quality of experience.
That’s why our product roadmap is public-facing and we welcome Arbor schools to contribute their feedback to it. Our Product Managers keep an eye on the roadmap regularly for comments which feed directly into how we prioritise the products we’re developing.
We also gather feedback from schools via termly feedback forums, surveys and our customer festival – ArborFest.
In the Product Team, we use a method we’ve adapted from the “RICE” framework in order to prioritise our roadmap. This helps us plan what we work on next, from feature improvements, to new integrations with popular platforms like TimeTabler, to big new ideas like our all-in-one classroom management tool – My Classroom or the Arbor App.
Using the RICE framework helps us prioritise our roadmap to make sure we’re developing the products that will make the greatest possible impact to the greatest number of school staff in the shortest or most appropriate time frame.
The framework is a calculation – we plug into it all the customer feedback, market analysis and suggestions we’ve gathered, plus how beneficial the new features will be to schools. We then weigh these up with other factors like how long it will take us to build new features.
Here’s how RICE breaks down:
We really value the insights we receive from our Arbor schools. Comments on our product roadmap are really useful in our product development process, but we’re also piloting new ways of gathering more detailed feedback from schools to help us measure the impact we’re having more widely. We’ve launched several channels for this:
Termly Feedback Forums
Once a term, we hold feedback forums tailored to different staff roles and school phase (e.g. Teachers, Business Managers, Trust Admin Staff) to gather feedback on the new product features we’re working on. These intimate sessions with one of our Product Managers are a great way for us to hear how our ideas are going to impact everyday school life, and how we can improve them to help you work even more effectively.
If you’d like to find out more about the feedback forums we’re running this term, get in touch with your Arbor Account Manager.
NPS survey
We send an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey to Arbor schools every term, which helps us understand how Arbor is helping you save time, understand your data better and improve school life overall. Measuring the impact we have on schools is a core part of what we do – it’s also what our investors ask us to demonstrate.
Last term, our schools told us:
Following the really successful event we hosted earlier this year, we’re taking ArborFest online! Arbor schools are invited to join us for a two-day virtual programme on 12th and 13th November packed with talks by the Arbor Team and fellow schools, and product feedback forums where you can find out more about what’s on our product roadmap.
Arbor schools – check your email inbox for your invitation and link to sign up for all sessions!
It’s great to see from our recent feedback that Arbor schools feel that we’re listening to their needs – that’s what motivates us every day.
Discover how Arbor could help you work more easily and collaboratively this term – either by booking a demo, or joining one of our webinars.
Today we’re announcing Arbor’s biggest product release ever, with seven new features designed to help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more across your school or trust. Working hand-in-hand with school staff like you, we’re constantly improving and evolving Arbor to meet the new demands facing staff. This wave of brand new tools forms part
Today we’re announcing Arbor’s biggest product release ever, with seven new features designed to help you work faster, smarter and collaborate more across your school or trust.
Working hand-in-hand with school staff like you, we’re constantly improving and evolving Arbor to meet the new demands facing staff. This wave of brand new tools forms part of our vision to make a measurable difference to the working life of school staff everywhere.
With schools facing perhaps the most challenging term for decades, we’ve designed these features specifically to give a boost to everyone – from Teachers, to Office Staff, to Chief Executives.
My Classroom is our brand new, all-in-one classroom management tool. Build flexible seating plans, take the register and record behaviour incidents all from one place for this first time (no other MIS does this!)
My Homepage will be a new personalised space within Arbor for Teaching Staff which keeps you up-to-date with all your students at a glance. Plus, live alerts and to-do lists will help you speed through admin between lessons.
To help you get started on your school improvement planning this term, we’ve released a complete set of our popular past performance reports (worth £300-400) exclusively for free.
With no new DfE performance data this year, free access to Arbor’s most popular reports from 2019 exams will give you a reliable picture of your prior attainment data to help you see where to focus your efforts this year.
For Academies, we’ve also created a few Academies’ Financial Benchmarking Report to help you kickstart your budget planning.
Sign up to get your free reports here.
The latest version of the Understanding Your MAT Report will contain the most up-to-date contextual information about your trust. Together with your past ASP performance measures, your trust’s size and local demographics will help you understand your MAT’s unique strengths and challenges compared to others in England.
As schools and MATs have grown in size and complexity over the past few years, we’ve been building out our product and support to help School and MAT Leaders deal with the challenges of scale:
With Advanced Support, you’ll be able to speak to a Success Analyst who knows your set-up intimately so they’ll be able to get to the bottom of any technical issues you have faster, and give you tailored solutions. Plus, they’ll save you valuable time by setting up automatic reports for you with exactly the information you need to see regularly, such as a weekly attendance report.
Introducing a brand new toolkit designed to help you simplify your system setup and get more insight from your data at scale.
With Single Sign On and Two-Factor Authentication, staff will be able to log in securely to their email, virtual learning environment and Arbor MIS at the same time – with only one password to remember! With the possibility of local lockdowns or staff having to isolate, these features will free staff up to access their systems from wherever they’re working.
We’re committed to working with our schools to make sure that with Arbor, schools really do work better. This new release is packed full of features to take the hassle out of admin, give your staff time back, and ultimately help your school be ready for whatever tomorrow brings.
We’d love to speak to you about our new features, so get in touch if you want to find out more.
To find out more about moving to Arbor MIS, get in touch on tellmemore@arbor-education.com, arrange a demo or join a free webinar.
Find out more about our brand new features from your Account Manager on accountmanagers@arbor-education.com.
As the fastest-growing MIS provider in the country, we’re learning and changing all the time. As we grow further, Arbor’s Talent Acquisition Manager Sophie, explains why Diversity & Inclusion is one of our top priorities. Striving for a wide range of perspectives Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) is a very important topic at the moment, both
As the fastest-growing MIS provider in the country, we’re learning and changing all the time. As we grow further, Arbor’s Talent Acquisition Manager Sophie, explains why Diversity & Inclusion is one of our top priorities.
Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) is a very important topic at the moment, both here in the UK and across the world. The recent Black Lives Matter protests have brought the issue to the fore, and shown just how important it is for people to come forward to tell their stories around discrimination.
Diversity doesn’t just relate to visible characteristics such as gender, ethnicity and cultural background, it also includes a wide range of non-visible differences such as religion, social background, sexual orientation, personality, thinking styles and ways of working.
At Arbor, we’ve always thought of ourselves as a forward-thinking, innovative and authentic company, but as we grow we’ve been thinking more and more about how to make sure we’re creating a diverse and inclusive workplace for all our employees.
It’s important to us that we have a wide range of types of people and perspectives represented. Diversity is proven to increase creativity, innovation, efficiency and productivity in the workplace as well as employee engagement and as a growing tech company this is exactly what we are striving for.
We have some way to go to achieving a full balance of diversity in our offices, and it’s not something, unfortunately, that can happen overnight. To maintain a diverse and inclusive culture takes real, practical actions and commitment across the board.
First and foremost we need to understand the make-up of Arbor. We are proud of our commitment to diversity and inclusion but without data we won’t be able to measure how successful our efforts are. We’re in the process of gathering data on the backgrounds, ethnicities and demographics of both our employees and applicants to our job openings. This will help us understand where we’re under-represented so we can work to improve diversity.
We’ve created a dedicated D&I Guild internally, made up of people from different backgrounds and teams across the business, who bring perspectives from lots of different industries. We’ve also made D&I a measurable part of our objectives and key results for the People team, so we have real ownership over these actions.
The D&I Guild has been setting up “lunch & learns” with presentations from both internal and external speakers, including Crayola The Queen who spoke about LGBTQ+ and the difficulties she has experienced in the workplace, as well as Sophie Elwes who shared how disability has affected her working life. I recently spoke about being aware of unconscious bias during the recruitment and interview process, with transferable lessons for the wider world too.
We’ve got lots of initiatives coming up, with more talks and promotion of awareness months including Black History Month and National Disability Employment Awareness Month. We’re also going to be partnering with leading organisations at the forefront of the D&I field.
This is a very exciting time of growth for Arbor, so if you wish to join a company with with employees at their heart, check out our careers page here: https://careers.arbor-education.com/
Here are our current open roles:
Billing Manager – Leeds/London/Remote
Software Trainer – Remote/South
Account Manager (6m FTC) – Leeds/London/Remote
Senior Marketing Manager – London
Product Engineering Lead (PHP) – Leeds/london/Remote
Senior Product Engineer (PHP) – Leeds/London/Remote
As the DfE advised in their letter to schools last February, it’s a good idea to re-procure any large contracts (such as Management Information Systems (MIS)) when they come to an end. When procuring systems like your MIS, going through an approved framework allows you to search a range of accredited suppliers for one which
As the DfE advised in their letter to schools last February, it’s a good idea to re-procure any large contracts (such as Management Information Systems (MIS)) when they come to an end.
When procuring systems like your MIS, going through an approved framework allows you to search a range of accredited suppliers for one which matches what you’re looking for.
A framework is the simplest route to buy off-the-shelf software, without limiting personalised support through the buying and delivery process. It saves you spending hours drafting requirements, researching companies and going through the tender process – instead giving you all the information you need to choose the most competitive, reputable and safest provider all through one platform.
You’ll also have peace of mind that due diligence checks have already been carried out on the products and companies, and that you’re complying with buying procedures and applicable procurement law.
Today, we’re excited to announce that Arbor has been added to the DfE’s latest G-Cloud 12 framework for approved cloud suppliers!
Find out below how you can use the G-cloud 12 framework to procure a cloud-based MIS for your MAT.
The G-Cloud framework, available on the DfE’s Digital Marketplace, contains 31,000 cloud services for cloud hosting (services for processing and storing data), cloud software (internet applications) and cloud support (helping you set up and maintain your software).
All companies on the framework must go through multiple legal, financial and social responsibility checks on the way they work and the services they provide.
You can find the DfE’s guidance on using the G-Cloud framework here.
1. An important first step is to work out exactly what your trust needs from your system or service before you start. For example, it might be important to you to have built-in communications and meals management, or you might want to customise the system to your bespoke assessment framework. You will likely want a system that’s compatible with multiple internet browsers and devices, and gives you secure logins.
The DfE provides this requirements list to help you start (though it’s from 2014, and most English MIS have developed new capabilities since then).
2. Go to “Cloud software”
3. Search for keywords that are relevant to what you’re looking for, such as ‘Primary MIS’, ‘Secondary MIS’, or ‘MAT MIS’, to find the list of relevant suppliers. Remember to download this list for your audit trail once you’ve found what you’re looking for.
If there are too many results after putting in your keywords through, you can click a filter, e.g. “2-factor authentication” to see the suppliers that provide that feature.
4. Read each supplier’s product and pricing information
5. Send any clarification questions to the suppliers or host a demo day to confirm which supplier best meets your needs
6. Award your contract using the G-Cloud contract template
Arbor MIS helps over 1,200 schools and 100 MATs work more easily and collaboratively, with intuitive tools designed to make a difference.
Arbor’s Group MIS is the only true MIS for MATs, allowing you to see the bigger picture across your trust. Designed with trusts like yours, Arbor helps you work more collaboratively, with tools that make working together easier at every level.
100 schools have joined Arbor through G-Cloud so far! You can find us on G-cloud 12 here:
If you want to see Arbor in action you can book a free demo or join a webinar here.
In our popular “Adapting to Change” webinar series last term, we invited MAT leaders to share how they were adapting their strategies to navigate the Covid-19 crisis as it unfolded. We’ve collated six of the best interviews into a special book which we hope will give MAT leaders useful advice for how to support your
In our popular “Adapting to Change” webinar series last term, we invited MAT leaders to share how they were adapting their strategies to navigate the Covid-19 crisis as it unfolded.
We’ve collated six of the best interviews into a special book which we hope will give MAT leaders useful advice for how to support your schools through constant change and prepare for whatever the future brings.
You can download your copy of the “Adapting to Change” ebook here
Here’s a bit more about the book from Arbor Co-Founder and CEO James:
As MAT leaders there has never been a moment where so much change happened in such a short period of time. In the past six months every trust has been forced to adapt almost all processes overnight to safeguard and support staff, students and the wider community. Whilst this has been an incredibly tough time (I hope you got a break over the summer), it’s also taught us a lot, including how agile, bold and resilient schools could be.
At Arbor we’ve seen a lot of new ideas and practices emerge over the Spring and Summer terms from the 100+ MATs we work with, and have been holding weekly webinars with MAT leaders on strategies they’ve put in place to help adapt to this change.
This book is a concise write-up of practical tips and tactics from MAT CEOs centered on the broad topics of Leadership, Student and Staff Wellbeing and Online Learning. You’ll see how others have wrestled with pivoting their organisations quickly, defining how much autonomy to give to schools, making sure staff don’t burnout and how to ensure quality when teaching online. Hopefully it will stimulate a few new ideas as you look ahead to the future.
I’d like to thank all the authors and those on our webinars for being so open and brave in sharing their experiences as they happened. No one’s pretending they have all the answers, but if there’s ever been a time to experiment with new ways of working it’s now, and I’m encouraged by what I see.
Our mission at Arbor is to help centralise your insight, improve your communications and streamline how you work across your trust. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help, please get in touch.
I look forward to seeing you online in our next series of MAT webinars this term, or even one day in person!
James Weatherill
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
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
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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”
Great lessons don’t necessarily call for cutting-edge technology. Teachers make great lessons, not apps. What teachers do best is motivating their learners and creating a safe, engaging environment in the classroom. But sadly, time-consuming admin and clunky systems are holding them back from time with their students. We believe great tech can actually help teachers
Great lessons don’t necessarily call for cutting-edge technology. Teachers make great lessons, not apps.
What teachers do best is motivating their learners and creating a safe, engaging environment in the classroom. But sadly, time-consuming admin and clunky systems are holding them back from time with their students.
We believe great tech can actually help teachers in the classroom. The right tools take the hassle out of your daily tasks, freeing you up to get back to what matters: delivering great lessons.
With lots of new challenges this term, we’ve put together a list of three people-friendly classroom management apps that will help simplify how you manage safeguarding, behaviour, attendance, seating plans and blended learning:
Banishing paper logbooks and filing cabinets from over 13,000 schools all over the country, CPOMS is an intuitive app for monitoring child protection, safeguarding and pastoral issues. It cuts down paperwork for staff, while ensuring incidents are properly reported, details are shared securely and students are kept safe.
Arbor MIS integrates seamlessly with CPOMS, so you won’t have to worry about transferring data between the two systems to keep them up-to-date. Your sensitive data will be safe and secure in CPOMS, while Arbor looks after the rest.
Take the hassle out of organising your lessons with My Classroom from Arbor. Our new all-in-one classroom management tool has been designed by teachers, for teachers to help you manage your class seamlessly – giving you your time back to focus on teaching and learning instead.
My Classroom brings seating plans, registers and behaviour management into one place for the first time. Create interactive seating plans using easy drag-and-drop blocks, then add attendance and behaviour points directly onto your plan throughout your lesson on your tablet or desktop. You can share your plans with colleagues too!
The best thing about My Classroom is that it’s powered by Arbor MIS, so you’ll automatically see photos and contextual data about each of your students on your seating plans. Plus, everything you capture in My Classroom shows up on each student’s profile, helping you to tell the full story of each of your pupils lesson-to-lesson.
Many schools in the Arbor Community are planning to continue with a blended learning approach going forward, even when most teaching has returned to the physical classroom. Making lessons available online means students can catch up or reinforce their learning remotely outside of school. Using a virtual learning environment such as G-suite or Office 365 is also a great way to encourage sharing of resources between staff.
The DfE are providing funding for all UK state schools to get G-suite or Office 365 set up and get ongoing support for free. Arbor is working with 14 of the Government’s accredited suppliers on the scheme – for a full list and more information on the scheme, check out our blog!
Of course, technology can only go so far – the real challenge this term is how to support both students to adjust to new routines and rules, and process some of the difficult experiences they might have had during lockdown.
To discuss this in more detail and share some practical advice, we’re bringing together an expert panel for a webinar on “Best Practice: Classroom Management Post-Lockdown” on Thursday 24th September at 11am. For more information and to book your place, click here.
When you’re putting together your School Improvement Plan, an important first step is to gather evidence of your school’s performance. Understanding your attainment in depth, including the attainment gaps between different student groups and the factors that cause them, will help you identify the areas your improvement efforts could have the most impact. Since there
When you’re putting together your School Improvement Plan, an important first step is to gather evidence of your school’s performance. Understanding your attainment in depth, including the attainment gaps between different student groups and the factors that cause them, will help you identify the areas your improvement efforts could have the most impact.
Since there are no performance tables or ASP data from the DfE this year, the best place to look is at your prior attainment data (averages over three years are ideal) as a starting point.
To give you a full picture of your school’s attainment from the last three years, we’ve released a bundle of our most popular Arbor Insight reports (usually worth £300-400) exclusively for free. Find out more below or go straight to download your reports here.
Gathering full and reliable prior attainment data could mean lengthy searching through DfE performance tables, and pulling together internal spreadsheets and student records.
To save you time this term and help you kickstart your school improvement planning, our exclusive bundle of our Arbor Insight reports will show you the full picture of your students’ progress and attainment over the last three years, giving you the context you need to see where to focus your school improvement strategy.
You can download your reports from your free benchmarking portal – Arbor Insight – used by over 10,000 schools in the UK to dig deeper into their results and benchmark their performance.
Here’s what the reports will help you to achieve:
Your reports are waiting for you in your free Arbor Insight benchmarking portal – sign up here and download them today!
Vulnerable Students
The Mead Educational Trust (TMET) is made up of ten primary and secondary academies in Leicestershire. In the first week of Autumn Term, Arbor’s Senior Partnership Manager Daniel Giardiello spoke to Mark Oldman, Director of Inclusion and SEND at TMET, to find out how they’re addressing the post-lockdown learning gap, particularly for their most vulnerable
The Mead Educational Trust (TMET) is made up of ten primary and secondary academies in Leicestershire. In the first week of Autumn Term, Arbor’s Senior Partnership Manager Daniel Giardiello spoke to Mark Oldman, Director of Inclusion and SEND at TMET, to find out how they’re addressing the post-lockdown learning gap, particularly for their most vulnerable students.
In the first few weeks of term, we’re going to re-baseline students using assessments that are very similar to what they took last February. From this, we’ll be able to assess if there has been lost learning, and if so, we’ll restart the curriculum from the point that they need us to, and ensure that deep learning is still able to take place. This is going to be particularly important in the formative primary years.
In order to chart the impact of Covid-19, we’re going to use a “vulnerability index” which, rather than assessing age-appropriate attainment, looks at where each student is compared to where we expected them to be, so we can plan best how to get them back on track. This term we’re applying it to all students so we can gather more information about the situation for each individual. Once each student catches up to where we expect them to be, we’ll move them back onto the usual way of reporting.
We’re also going to use the Covid-19 Wellbeing Questionnaire from ImpactEd to ask KS2+ students across trust what their experiences were during lockdown, with a focus on wellbeing. Using this structured, universal method will allow us to test the temperature of the whole trust, and gather more reliable data than what Teachers could observe in the classroom. The first questionnaire will happen in the first few weeks back, followed by a second in early October. The second point of assessment will give us our first real data drop of academic attainment, which we’ll be able to compare with the wellbeing assessment at the beginning of term.
This combination should begin to show us the impact of Covid-19 because it could reveal sets of students who have become vulnerable whom we might not have known about.
Interventions Assessment: Assessing students’ circumstances
Yes, we’re predicting that Covid-19 will have created a new set of vulnerable students who, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t have been considered vulnerable. Due to having lost six months without the rigour and routine of regular schooling and socialisation with peers, gaps will appear across the board.
It’s important that we don’t start term with assumptions of who our “disadvantaged” and “vulnerable” students are, but we work out who is vulnerable now. Those who are already acknowledged as vulnerable are at an advantage in some ways because we already know about them and they’ve had tailored support throughout lockdown.
During school closures, the vast majority of our SEND children were coming in – for our schools in very disadvantaged areas, this was a large number of pupils who needed wrap-around family support. In many ways our relationships with these pupils has strengthened as a result, and we hope to use this to our advantage when closing the attainment gap.
First and foremost, we need to assess the wellbeing of our SEND cohorts – particularly how they’re feeling being part of their class. Although they might not feel vulnerable in the first few weeks, if their classmates are able to catch up faster than them, they may begin to struggle. To combat this, we’ve employed an educational psychologist to come in two days a week to help properly diagnose what our students are going through, such as digging into difficulties at home. We’re also putting our most vulnerable students into smaller “mini” bubbles to make sure they don’t get excluded or marginalised from their wider classes if they present new challenging behaviour.
In KS1, we’re planning an in-depth focus on the formative skills such as literacy and maths in order to make sure they have strong foundations to progress through the rest of school. We’ve also hired an SEMH Primary Intervention Teacher to work with rolling carousels of children on social and communication skills, so as to quickly fill the gaps that could have developed.
Going into lockdown, we have a well-developed blended learning policy but what we realised was that not all children’s homes were equipped. We first sent a questionnaire home to assess the access to devices, making sure that we were clear of what we expected, for example “has access to a laptop for at least two hours each day” rather than simply “has access to a device” which could have meant borrowing a parent’s smartphone.
We bought 1,200 Chromebooks and distributed them across the trust. We also invested in a Microsoft learning platform and appointed digital champions to help roll it out. We plan to keep our online learning programme going post-Covid-19 as a means of aiding progress. It will allow students to do extra learning remotely outside of school. Our wide-ranging intervention strategies and expert teaching has been further invested in, and will be the key to ensuring a secure and successful start in our primary schools, and to helping Year 6s transition to Year 7.
Covid-19 has forced us to collaborate and think more as a trust. For example, it’s given us the opportunity to improve how we transition students between year groups and between schools, particularly from Year 6 to 7. Our Primary and Secondary Leads have been working effectively together and by recognising the strength in each other’s practice, have been able to influence trust improvement plans even further.
For our most vulnerable students, we’ve learned that this transition needs to be even more personalised, recognising that the effects of lockdown could be far reaching and impact their wellbeing for a sustained period of time. We know that happy schools with meaningful relationships will underpin our approach to intervention in ensuring successful pupil returns.
We’re going to be catching up again with Mark Oldman in October to see how his recovery and catch-up strategies are working out. Watch this space!
With constant changes to Government guidance, family situations and the wider national picture, schools and trusts certainly learned a great deal last term. Where there were huge challenges that meant working in totally new ways, schools has also taken some positive lessons from the crisis. It gave schools the opportunity to pivot fast to work
With constant changes to Government guidance, family situations and the wider national picture, schools and trusts certainly learned a great deal last term. Where there were huge challenges that meant working in totally new ways, schools has also taken some positive lessons from the crisis.
It gave schools the opportunity to pivot fast to work more efficiently and find new ways to reach out to parents and guardians. It also put the spotlight on student and staff wellbeing issues, bringing them top of the agenda.
We recently caught up with Jon Ward from The Parks Academies Trust who told us about the ways he and his staff adapted their ways of working during the crisis. Moving their secondary schools to Arbor MIS in April – right in the middle of partial school closures – meant they saw right away the new and better ways of working with a cloud-based MIS.
Staff across the trust felt Arbor allowed them to collaborate and align over their work. Plus, it took the hassle out of important Covid-19 related tasks like tracking attendance and following up with hard-to-reach families.
To read more about the measurable differences Jon and his team have measured since moving MIS during Covid-19, download their full case study here along with other feedback we’ve received from schools during Covid-19 crisis.
Arbor helps schools of all sizes work faster, smarter and more collaboratively, with intuitive tools designed to make a difference.
With over 1200 schools and trusts, we’re proud to be the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community. Join in and book a demo today, or join one of our webinars.
Schools in the Arbor Community have been sharing with us some of their questions and thoughts about reopening this term. Some wonder how social distancing is going to work and if there will be more last minute changes to DfE guidance. Others worry about students adjusting back into full time schooling, and how to catch
Schools in the Arbor Community have been sharing with us some of their questions and thoughts about reopening this term. Some wonder how social distancing is going to work and if there will be more last minute changes to DfE guidance. Others worry about students adjusting back into full time schooling, and how to catch them up on lost learning.
However the “new normal” is going to look for your school this term, we’ve put together a list of the most important things you should be thinking about this week:
1. Go through your social distancing checklist
2. Prepare communications your parent and guardian community
3. Evaluate your catch up plan for students
4. Prioritise student and staff wellbeing
Depending on the size and layout of your school, and staff capacity, there’s no one solution to keeping students apart. Here are some top tips to consider:
Staggering
Timetabling
Hygiene
Find out how Wykham Park Academy is planning their timetabling and social distancing this term here. Arbor schools – check out our Help Centre for lots of guidance on setting up flexible timetabling arrangements.
At the start of term, you’ll be sending your parents lots of updates on the new protocols you’re putting in place. But you should also think about how you can start strengthening relationships with your parents and guardians after their children have been at home for so long. Here are some more top tips:
After months of disrupted learning, students’ progress is likely to be set back, with the most vulnerable and disadvantaged students hit the hardest. Getting learning back on track will be a big challenge, but here are some suggested first steps:
a) Assess where students are at: You might want to run low-stakes assessments to identify gaps in students’ knowledge this term. The Key has some useful guidance on this and there’s a good school case study here
b) Compare with past performance: Once you have a baseline of performance post-lockdown, comparing this with prior attainment will give you a better sense of how students’ progress has been affected.
To save you time pulling together data, we’re giving schools free access to Arbor Insight reports this term, which will give you a full picture of your students’ progress over the last three years. The reports will be out soon but join the waiting list to be the first to get yours!
c) Identify your most at-risk students: In order to use the Government’s catch-up fund most effectively, it’s important to assess which of your students will benefit from it the most, such as vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Bear in mind that the “vulnerable” category might include more students now as situations have changed.
Arbor’s built-in reporting will allow you to quickly analyse the attainment of your key student groups across subjects, and instantly spot the biggest gaps. Our free performance reports will also help you understand how these attainment gaps have changed over time and the impact of socio-economic factors on your attainment.
It’s likely that students will be dealing with some difficult emotions when they return this term. Teachers might see some new and challenging behaviour in the classroom, but as Educational psychologist, Dr Rob Long, explains, it’s important to understand the anxiety causing the behaviour so they can best manage it. SecEd Magazine has some great guidance on how to support students’ mental health and wellbeing this term.
Remember not to overlook your staff wellbeing; they’ll need support adjusting to the new term as well. Check in with your staff at the beginning of term and think about ways to allow staff to collaborate with and support each other.
With over 1200 schools and trusts, we’re proud to be the UK’s fastest-growing MIS community. Join in and book a demo today, or contact us on tellmemore@arbor-education.com | 0208 050 1028.
Assessment
GCSE and A-Level Results Days are going to look a little different this year. Some schools will be sharing results with students in-person in bubbles, while others will be managing the whole process remotely. However you need to run your Results Days this year, we know your top priorities will be making sure the day
GCSE and A-Level Results Days are going to look a little different this year. Some schools will be sharing results with students in-person in bubbles, while others will be managing the whole process remotely.
However you need to run your Results Days this year, we know your top priorities will be making sure the day goes smoothly, the results get to the right people at the right time, and students get the support they need.
That’s why we’ve made it simple and straightforward to import, share and analyse your results with Arbor. Check out our overview below of all the ways we’re supporting you this year to manage your Results Day successfully.
Our Support Team is full of secondary and exam specialists who will be on hand throughout both Results Days, as well as the days before, on phone, webchat and email. This year, they’ll also be available from 6.30am on 19th August to give you extra support with preparing your GCSE results.
We’ve added lots of materials on our Help Centre to support you with preparing, organising, sharing and analysing your results. We also hosted a webinar last week walking you through the basics – you can catch the recording here.
The Arbor Community is always buzzing around Results Day with Exams Officers, Office Managers and SLT sharing tips and best practice. If you haven’t already, join the forum for free today!
As soon as results are available, importing them into Arbor is quick and easy. Your results dashboard will flag any errors in your data so you can resolve them straight away. Plus, you can also reverse the results import if you need to.
We’ve teamed up with industry-leading analytics tools that schools love, including 4Matrix, SISRA and ALPS Connect, to make it easy for you to analyse your results in depth. Simply export your results from Arbor into a spreadsheet for quick upload into your chosen platform.
When it comes to releasing results to staff, you can easily set up your embargo time and date, and control who has access to results before and after this time.
On Results Day, you can choose from lots of different options for sharing results with parents. You can download results both in bulk and as individual PDFs, which you could either print out and distribute in person, or share electronically (note, we’d advise adding password protection to each student’s PDF statement). Share your results in a way that’s right for you:
Since there may be a mixture of some students collecting their results remotely and some in-person at staggered times, it could be a challenge to make sure every student gets the right support from staff on the day. To help you keep track of the contact students receive and the follow up needed, we recommend setting up a log sheet in Excel/Google Sheets to record key points of contact and resolutions on the day. This will also be a useful reference if you have to process any appeals.
Add key student details (e.g. name, SEN, PP, EAL, CLA), then add columns for the milestones you want to record, for example if the student has had communication from staff and how (e.g. email/telephone), if they have requested their teacher-assessed grades and if a follow-up is needed.
Here’s an example of what this log sheet could look like:
Top tips:
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform the way you work, our team would be happy to show you around in a virtual demo – simply book here. Alternatively, give us a call on 0208 050 1028 or email hello@arbor-education.com.
We’re proud to announce that United Learning, the largest mixed-phase MAT in England, has just chosen Arbor MIS for its 72 state schools. More schools switch to Arbor than any other MIS, and we now support the two largest primary and secondary MATs in the UK! From Autumn Term 2020, 34 secondary schools and 23
We’re proud to announce that United Learning, the largest mixed-phase MAT in England, has just chosen Arbor MIS for its 72 state schools. More schools switch to Arbor than any other MIS, and we now support the two largest primary and secondary MATs in the UK!
From Autumn Term 2020, 34 secondary schools and 23 primary schools in United Learning will move to Arbor – joining the 15 United Learning schools who already use us. Together they’ll join our growing community of over 1,000 schools and 100 MATs who have all chosen Arbor to help transform the way they work – including REAch2, the largest primary school MAT, who moved to Arbor in 2018.
As a large mixed-phased trust, United Learning chose Arbor to help them analyse information across all their schools simply and effectively, automate repetitive administrative tasks and operate remotely at scale all from one system.
Dominic Norrish, Chief Operating Officer at United Learning said: “United Learning are excited to realise the benefits that a modern cloud-based MIS such as Arbor will bring to our schools – resilience, mobility, security and the reduced costs of a single, highly capable tool.”
We’ve taken the time to build out features tailored to each school phase:
United Learning is the latest MAT to choose Arbor – joining trusts like REAch2, Aspire, Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust, Red Kite, LEO Academy Trust, Wellspring, and Hoyland Common Academy Trust who have all moved to Arbor in recent years.
320 schools started using Arbor between January-December 2019, joining the growing movement of schools switching to the cloud to transform the way they work. Recently we’ve been focused on helping our schools work flexibly and remotely during Covid-19, with over 250 schools having moved to Arbor during lockdown! We’ve built out our MIS to help schools manage staff rotas, communicate with parents, and set classwork remotely (see more on that here).
You can read more about our cloud-based MIS in our brochures for primary and secondary schools (click here), and MATs (click here).
Interested to see whether Arbor could be a good fit for your school or trust?
We’d be more than happy to arrange a remote, personalised demo for your team – just click here, or reach us at hello@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
As part of our “Adapting to Change” webinar series for MAT leaders, Dave Noble, Director of Operations at Red Kite Learning Trust, shared with us how the trust have been dealing with the Covid-19 crisis. Dave explained the vision he’s building for a centralised and collaborative IT infrastructure across the trust. Embracing new technology has been
As part of our “Adapting to Change” webinar series for MAT leaders, Dave Noble, Director of Operations at Red Kite Learning Trust, shared with us how the trust have been dealing with the Covid-19 crisis.
Dave explained the vision he’s building for a centralised and collaborative IT infrastructure across the trust. Embracing new technology has been vital in responding to the challenges of the pandemic, from maintaining business critical operations like payroll, to reaching out to vulnerable students, to managing the quality of remote teaching and learning.
Check out Dave’s webinar and presentation below.
To find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform how you work at your school or MAT, we’d be happy to give you an online demo. Get in touch or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com. Alternatively, you can call 0208 050 1028.
The summer break is usually a chance to step back, reflect on the last Term, and gradually start preparations for Autumn. This year, with so many new timetabling and curriculum arrangements coming in September, there’s likely to be even more planning to do in July and August. Whilst you’re preparing for the new Term, you
The summer break is usually a chance to step back, reflect on the last Term, and gradually start preparations for Autumn. This year, with so many new timetabling and curriculum arrangements coming in September, there’s likely to be even more planning to do in July and August.
Whilst you’re preparing for the new Term, you and your staff can access Arbor MIS from home so you can look back at last year’s data, set up your new classes, assessments and registers, and send vital communications to keep parents in the loop.
Whenever you need during summer, you and your staff can access our online support resources for a refresher on how key parts of Arbor work. You can also share tips with fellow Arbor users on the Arbor Community. And don’t forget our expert Support Team is on hand to answer questions too!
Find out below more about all the free support you can access over summer.
Building relationships with colleagues and learning from each other has been especially valuable during the Covid-19 crisis. The Arbor Community has been a great forum for schools and MATs to share their experiences and get advice on the best ways of working.
Over summer, as you prepare for Autumn, you’ll be able to use the Community to chat with colleagues from other schools and compare plans. You’re bound to meet someone who does the same role as you who can show you tips and tricks that you might not have thought of to save you even more time next Term.
We celebrated the positive impact of the Arbor Community at our first ever ArborFest event earlier this year. 100 School Leaders, Business Managers, Teachers and Admins using Arbor across the country came together for a fantastic day of demonstrations on topics across the school landscape – from assessment, to parental engagement, to running an effective school office.
To mark the success of ArborFest we put together a video of the highlights. We’re planning another virtual ArborFest in Autumn Term so keep an eye out!
Whether you need to complete essential admin tasks to get everything set up for September, or you want to give your staff training resources they can use in their own time, the support resources on our Help Centre and our expert Support Team are here whenever you need them.
*Between 24th July and 28th August our Support Team will be available 9am-12pm on Fridays.
If you’re new to Arbor, you can find out more about how a cloud-based MIS will help you run your school or MAT flexibly next term in a free online demo. Alternatively, get in touch with us at hello@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
With planning arrangements and timetabling at the top of school leaders’ minds right now, we invited expert timetabler and curriculum planner Jan Hetherington to join our webinar series “Adapting to Change” to share her solutions for September. Jan is Vice Principal and Specialist Leader of Education for Curriculum Leadership at Wykham Park Academy, a secondary
With planning arrangements and timetabling at the top of school leaders’ minds right now, we invited expert timetabler and curriculum planner Jan Hetherington to join our webinar series “Adapting to Change” to share her solutions for September.
Jan is Vice Principal and Specialist Leader of Education for Curriculum Leadership at Wykham Park Academy, a secondary school which is part of the 15-school Aspirations Academies Trust. As well as developing the timetable for her school, she also coaches senior leaders across other trusts on how to create more effective timetables.
Jan shared with us some of the plans Wykham Park Academy is putting in place to keep students socially-distanced and to help maintain teaching and learning standards in September. She explained that above all, she wants to ensure that the new arrangements don’t sacrifice students’ full learning experience.
You can read Jan’s conversation with Arbor’s CEO James Weatherill below.
What I mean by that is students need a variety of rhythms across the school day and week to get the highest quality experience. The right timetable should put together the right groups of students with the right teachers. Every lesson slot has a currency; some are lower value than others, for example nobody wants Friday Period 5, or Monday Period 1. Staff need to appreciate that if they get any of those lower value slots, they’re going to have different pedagogical challenges. The timetable should also be suited to the age of the students. I worked once with a MAT which completely restructured their day based on teenage sleep patterns with a staggered day.
As we went into lockdown, we decided that KS3 would have four lessons a day – English, Maths, Science and Humanities – and Year 10&11’s would have five lessons a day. We didn’t synchronise these in the school timetable, we simply uploaded them onto Google Classroom. Our staff skill set has grown exponentially in terms of using online platforms. We had been using Google Classroom already for about a year for setting homework, but we’ve had to learn rapidly over the last few months how to use it for much more.
At first, when we didn’t know how long school closures would last, we wanted to keep a normal lesson format as far as possible. But after Half-Term, we shifted to project-based work for KS3. Year 10 moved away from new learning into consolidatary learning, and for Year 11 we put on four lessons a day only to support those students who were at risk of achieving a 4 or above.
The quality of pre-recorded teaching and learning was mixed at first, so we started to give live lessons to KS5. We chose not to do this for the rest of the school due in part to union advice, plus we wanted to protect staff given potential safeguarding issues and uncertainty around best practice. Instead teachers uploaded pre-recorded lessons – some with audio, some with video.
A key lesson was wrongly assuming that simply uploading a Powerpoint will do. We quickly realised that students need more support; they need a full learning experience with learning modelled by the teacher. For example, we started to use videos showing the teacher writing or demonstrating. It’s also important in pre-recorded lessons that the teacher still engages with the students personally, for instance calling out student names as though they were live in the classroom.
We’re going to use the same lesson timetable we would have used in the normal course of events. The location of lessons might change but the timings won’t. We’re also going to offer a full curriculum. This is because we want to keep things as normal as possible in terms of what is being taught in order to give students’ the richest experience possible. We worry that if they had only a “partial diet” they might easily disengage. We also don’t want to stagger lesson start and end times too much because this would lead to unsupervised time.
We’re going to split the student body into different physical zones, with their own entrance exit and toilets. On the Banbury Aspirations Campus (which contains an Academy, a Studio School and a Sixth Form), we have the unique advantage of a massive site with lots of different buildings housing lots of different specialist areas, so this makes it easier for us to keep students apart.
We’ve got the potential for three different entrances into the school site. Students will have their own route to their zone, and within the zones, they’ll be able to move around into new spaces in order to maintain a rich and varied school day. KS3 will be kept in a “bubble within a bubble”, having all their lessons in one classroom. They’ll only leave their zone as a class to do specialised activities like Drama. KS4 will be zoned as a Year Group “bubble” so all their lessons will be in that zone unless they move for specialist activities.
We’re going to have a reduced menu and students will place an order, then pick it up and go. We’ve got two dining room spaces and we’ll have staggered slots so two “bubbles” can use the room but be separated by time slots. We’re going to continue the breakfast clubs we run for disadvantaged students by keeping them in a “bubble” with each other.
We’re still waiting for advice from the Government on what “enhanced cleaning” means. In the meantime, Headteachers are looking at what pubs and restaurants are doing right now to inform our plans. IT and Food Tech rooms are tricky because they’re used by every Year group and they’re available to book. The plan is to timetable them so there’s at least one lesson period in-between usage so we can clean down surfaces before the next group of students. We’re also going to limit use of those rooms to practical lessons, keeping theory based lessons elsewhere. Cleaning is of course going to be a big expense. We’re looking to the trust to support with that.
Breaks are easier because students will use the outdoor spaces within their zones. We won’t be serving food at break, but students are welcome to bring their own break time food. We will be offering snacks and keeping an eye on known vulnerable students to make sure they are fed.
I’d recommend staggering lesson times and movement times. Also assess what size of “bubble” you’re comfortable with. Some schools I’ve heard of are doing Key Stage “bubbles” which can include 600 students! Some are using online platforms to teach different lessons to classes that stay in one room.
On his blog recently, James Duran gives a range of options for Teachers to consider to balance “catch-up” content and new material. We’re planning a parallel approach of new learning with some revision along the way. We’ll review the content and progress regularly, and define “threshold” concepts within the curriculum students need to understand to move forward.
We plan to make all lessons digitally accessible if needed, making use of the online platform skills staff have learned. We’ve found pre-recorded videos are not just convenient but have the additional benefit that students can pause and rewind which can actually help to reinforce learning. If there’s another lockdown, we’re going to commit to doing live digital lessons because we don’t want to sacrifice the face-to-face element again going forward.
We’re still working out our quality assurance processes. Some schools have been doing live lesson evaluations but we don’t want to do that. In September, we’ll first of all carry out an audit of the technology students have at home to avoid the situation we’ve had where 600 students had to have paper lesson packs because they couldn’t get online. We’ll also do a RAG rating so we’re taking into consideration student preference and learning style.
We’re going to put a digital learning policy in place so students know what we expect of them. In terms of teaching, we expect the same high quality as in the classroom. We want to maintain the learning structure we use normally, with a balance between guided practice and independent practice.
The structure will look like this:
1. Live guided practice: 15 mins or more (live or recorded) where teachers model what they want from students. We’ll encourage the use of audio for this, rather than video, because we know that audio doesn’t split students’ attention in the same way video can
2. Live Q&A and dialogue, encouraging peer interactivity,
3. Independent offline practice, then students upload the work they’ve achieved
We also want to encourage a variety of different learning experiences (e.g. app-based and flip learning). In terms of assessment, we’re still working this out and looking into a system that allows live online assessment. We’ll definitely be including low stakes testing (e.g. using Kahoot). We’re also looking into functionality which allows students to put their work up on the screen rather than asking the teacher to come over and have a look.
If you look at the research after the 2011 earthquake and lockdown in New Zealand, it showed that students did better than expected when they returned. John Hattie (2020) says rather than focusing on “gaps” and content students have “missed”, you should focus rather on what students actually need.
In this vein, we’re not expecting the new arrangements to have a huge effect on students because they’re going to be in a group that’s good for their learning and they’ll be with the right teacher. The sequence of learning may change over the year but they’ll achieve it all by the end of the year.
If you’re new to Arbor, we’d be happy to give you an online demo. Get in touch or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com. Alternatively, you can call 0208 050 1028.
During Covid-19 and partial school closures, schools have been adjusting their timetables, rules and plans along with rapidly changing DfE guidance. Since there’s now more clarity from the Government about the return to school in September, it’s a little easier to put plans in place for the new Term. There are a lot of things
During Covid-19 and partial school closures, schools have been adjusting their timetables, rules and plans along with rapidly changing DfE guidance. Since there’s now more clarity from the Government about the return to school in September, it’s a little easier to put plans in place for the new Term.
There are a lot of things to consider when planning for September – from how to create a “bubble” timetable, to helping students catch up on lost learning, to drawing up your new school improvement plan.
With the help of some of the schools, trusts and education experts we work with, we’ve put together a list of six key things you should think about to help you get everything in place for Autumn:
1. Have you planned for different scenarios? 2. Can you quickly adapt if new DfE guidance comes out? 3. Can you communicate easily with your school community? 4. How are you going to support your students and staff? 5. Have you got good online learning tools? 6. Have you set up your systems for next Year?
When you’re writing risk assessments, you should consider a few different scenarios that could happen in September, and make sure you’ve got the resources and policies in place to cope. A we’ve all learned from the past few months, the Covid-19 situation can change suddenly, so you should build flexibility into your plans.
Take a look at this useful example of a “Covid-19 Exit Strategy” document that Mark Lacey, CEO of Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust, has helpfully shared with us. It outlines various risks, such as the rate of infection rising or large numbers of students having to work from home, and how the trust would address each of them.
Once you’ve planned for lots of different scenarios, you should also make sure your systems can adapt and support you if the DfE suddenly introduces new guidelines. For example, could you quickly gather key attendance or demographic information to report to the DfE? Could you quickly adjust your timetable if a local lockdown was introduced in your area? Could your staff access the student information they need from home?
In Arbor, you can log all attendance and absence on your Covid-19 dashboard, and access all the data you need wherever you’re working. You’ll also have key stats to hand, such as everyone who is expected in school that day, and you can directly follow up with any parents/guardians if you need to. Arbor also takes the hassle out of planning staff rotas, creating flexible timetables and arranging classroom layouts for social distancing.
Want more support in creating your September timetable? Join our webinar today (Thurs 9th) at 2pm “Structuring your schools’ timetable: what you need to know as a trust leader for Autumn Term” with Jan Hetherington, Vice-Principal at Wykham Park Academy.
Once you’ve planned your new timetable and daily logistics, it’s a good idea to make sure you’ve got a cost-effective communications system that can cope with all the various updates you’ll need to send out to parents, staff and students. You might also want to think about innovative and uplifting communications you can send out to motivate your community. We found this great example from Hackney Primary using videos to show students what school will look like when they return.
In Arbor MIS, you can send emails, texts and Arbor App messages (which are great to share updates with parents directly on their phone) from wherever you are in the system. You can also share information on the Parent Portal or Student Portal that parents and students can log in and see. Check out our top 3 tips for keeping in touch with your school community.
As students and staff return from six months of partial lockdown, it’s going to be tricky to adjust to the “new school normal”. We’ve seen school and MAT leaders bringing wellbeing to the top of their agendas recently, by introducing things like “Wellbeing Days” and appointing new members of Pastoral staff. You can read here how Dan Morrow, CEO at Woodland Academy Trust, nurtures his staff wellbeing.
When planning how to look out for your most vulnerable families and staff members, bear in mind that the “vulnerable” category may include more people now as situations have changed. In Arbor, you can quickly produce reports on key demographic groups such as children with EHCP, child protection status, FSM, and children of key workers at school and MAT level.
With students coming to school in “bubbles”, you may need to continue a blended approach of face-to-face and remote teaching. During partial school closures, online learning has taken lots of different forms, some using systems like Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams to set assignments and hold video lessons. But depending on the technology students had at home and how prepared schools were, remote education has had varying degrees of success.
Think about what you can learn from this Term and how you can improve your online provision going forward. As The Harris Federation found, it’s a challenge to measure the effectiveness of online learning by just looking at quantitative data, like the number of lessons or assignments. Instead, try gathering feedback from staff and students on how they’ve found remote learning so you can see where to make improvements.
You should also make sure your staff are confident using online teaching tools. Did you know the Government is offering a grant for support with Office 365 and G Suite? Find out more info here.
Before the Summer Holidays, it’s vital to set up your statutory enrollment information, calendar, courses and assessments in your Management Information System (MIS), so your staff can hit the ground running in the new Term. In Arbor, we have a dedicated section in the system which walks you through the steps you need to complete so Arbor can get everything ready for you when you return.
Don’t forget, over summer you can access all our free support resources in the Help Centre if you want a refresher on parts of the system before September. If you’d like to arrange any training for new members of staff, get in touch with your Account Manager at accountmanagers@arbor-education.com.
Since the pandemic began and schools have been working flexibly and remotely, we’ve welcomed over 400 schools and MATs to Arbor who we’ve onboarded, migrated and trained 100% remotely. Most of these schools chose to move to Arbor MIS (Management Information System) to replace their server-based system which was preventing them from managing their schools
Since the pandemic began and schools have been working flexibly and remotely, we’ve welcomed over 400 schools and MATs to Arbor who we’ve onboarded, migrated and trained 100% remotely. Most of these schools chose to move to Arbor MIS (Management Information System) to replace their server-based system which was preventing them from managing their schools remotely, and meant they weren’t able to adapt to the new DfE guidelines quickly.
We use a simple, personalised process to move your data to Arbor and to get staff ready to use the system confidently, with expert guidance every step of the way. If you’d like to see a brochure about the support we offer from signing with Arbor and throughout your journey, leave your details here and we’ll send you a copy.
Rather than take our word for it, it’s often most helpful to hear how real schools and MATs have found the experience. Recently we caught up with the team at Woodland Academy Trust, a Primary MAT in Bexley and North Kent, who have moved to Arbor during lockdown.
You can read our conversation below with Dan Morrow (CEO) Sue Ashton (COO and Deputy CEO) and Yvonne Bruce (School Business Manager).
Our MAT Programme Manager Joanna has been very supportive and approachable from the start. She and her colleague Kate have ensured that we have been on target in the run up to the data migration, with regular calls being made to our Arbor Champions and School Business Lead.
There was a level of nervous excitement during our Discovery Day. Being a SIMS user for so many years, it was difficult feeling 100% about moving to a new system. Again, Joanna was very supportive and explained each step from the Trust & School’s priorities, operational priorities, module role out, training and data migration, going live and third party applications, ensuring that we understood the information we needed to provide.
The Discovery Day was very useful as it allowed us to really look into the applications we were using, and to look at the key successes and challenges we were currently facing when it came to deciding on which applications to migrate over.
The migration was very smooth and lived up to the expectation I had from the seminar I attended, when other users assured me that this process was seamless. The response from other members of our team has been that they were able to find the answer to their queries through your help page and only needed to speak to a trainer on very rare occasions.
Whilst this is clearly a structured process, there was some clear anxiety from our executives and data users over it. The security and assuredness of the project framing from Arbor’s side ensured that these could be addressed and the actual delivery was without any issue whatsoever.
The training has been very thorough and relevant to our needs. The trainers have made their way through the areas at a good pace for everyone on the call to take in and understand. They have each encouraged questions and answers after every section to make sure that everyone on the call understands what has been said. The recording of the training sessions has allowed us to reach out to other members of staff to review.
In a number of our sessions we have had different groups of staff with different focuses and areas of interest. The training has meant that the universal concepts can be delivered and that more bespoke training is then brokered and arranged as needed. The clear respect for people’s time and the subsequent thought and care put into the whole training programme has been a clear win, as it’s meant that our whole team have then engaged with the training.
The response from our Office and Business Management teams across the Trust has been very positive; with comments that Arbor is easy to navigate, especially around reports and is a far superior system to what we were using previously. Setting up the new academic year has also had positive responses; with many of the team saying the step-by-step guide was the easiest they’ve come across, that it’s quick and time-saving and the ability to save as you go has ensured confident use of the system.
The permissions around business roles has taken some getting used to as not all roles in Arbor have the permissions for the business roles we are used to, but again, your help centre has been on hand to show that we can add ad hoc permissions to specific roles.
I would say this has been the perfect time to move! Firstly, It has allowed more personnel to sit on training sessions than perhaps would have been possible under normal circumstances.
Equally, to have a positive change project that has been so well scoped and framed has given us a boost to be able to “control the controllable” and see robust and rigorous systems introduced to further underpin the care that our children and communities deserve.
The news bulletins from Arbor have been helpful with regards to tips for setting up the new academic year and the attendance information required by the DfE.
It has provided a “blank page” to reconsider the way we collect, store, monitor and report our information and at a time when we are looking to reimagine as well as return within education, the timing has been far from a threat; it’s a golden opportunity.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could help you manage your school or trust flexibly next Term, you can book a free online demo or contact tellmemore@arbor-education.com. You can also reach us on 0208 050 1028.
As you begin strategic planning for Autumn Term, you may want to dig into your data from the last three years in order to shape your new improvement plan. Arbor’s out-of-the-box dashboards make this easy, helping you quickly access meaningful data so you can make the best decisions. You can drill down into key attendance,
As you begin strategic planning for Autumn Term, you may want to dig into your data from the last three years in order to shape your new improvement plan. Arbor’s out-of-the-box dashboards make this easy, helping you quickly access meaningful data so you can make the best decisions. You can drill down into key attendance, behaviour and attainment metrics and easily spot useful patterns, all without the need for any special training (and no need for a complex setup process!).
We’ve been working with schools and MATs recently who want to customise how they analyse and visualise their data even further using BI (Business Intelligence) tools, such as Microsoft Power BI, Google Data Studio or Excel. We make it easy to export your Arbor data securely into BI tools if you want to, so you can dig even deeper into your student measures.
Using BI tools are great for:
So what does using BI look like in practice as a MAT? Andrew Mackereth, Arbor Senior Partnership Manager, caught up with Empower Trust in Shropshire about how they created a custom dashboard in Google Sheets using their Arbor data. Find out why they wanted to create it and how they built it in five easy steps below.
1. Share information with the Board
As the Board of Trustees is accountable for the performance of the Multi-Academy Trust and its Academies, a key issue for Ian Nurser, Empower’s CEO, was to provide them with a breadth of accurate, timely information across a range of key performance indicators (KPIs). This would allow the Board to understand the trust’s strengths and development issues, assess progress and review future risks and priorities.
Pulling everything into a single live dashboard would give the Board a single source of truth. At each meeting, the data would automatically refresh, updating the current picture, or monthly/termly trends at the same time.
2. Make sure everyone has the same information
It was important to Empower that the CEO, the Trust School Improvement Officers and local governing bodies (LGBs) had access to the same Academy-level information to allow them to question, support and appropriately challenge Academy leaders to build on their strengths and continually improve.
3. Bring together a range of live data sources
Empower wanted to bring together real-time information across a broad range of KPIs including attainment and progress for all year groups, pupil attendance, exclusions, SEND, safeguarding and staff absence (as an indicator of staff wellbeing). Using Google Sheets would enable the reports to automatically update as each Academy entered data.
As well as providing real-time information, they wanted to increase efficiency and save leadership time by compiling the content for their termly CEO and Headteacher reports to Trustees and LGBs automatically. They also wanted this information to be available to other groups of Trust and Academy staff such as SENCos and EWOs, so they could better monitor SEND, attendance, staff wellbeing, etc.
Empower took the following steps to plan and build their Google Sheets dashboard:
1. Agree the data they want it to show 2. Find the sources of the data 3. Plan the structure of the dashboard 4. Export the data they want from Arbor 5. The dashboard is ready and will refresh automatically!
The main process involved in creating a dashboard in Google Sheets is exporting data sets from Arbor using “Live Feeds”. Empower pulled the majority of their data from the data tables in Arbor and the other information (such as the number of days of absence caused by holiday) using Arbor’s unique Custom Report Writer.
For each data set (table) they wanted to export from Arbor, they created a “Live Feed” for it, then inserted it into their custom dashboard using the Google Sheets add-on. Then they selected the graph type they wanted to use to illustrate the data (like the bar chart below).
It’s important to be confident that your data is safe when you export it out of your MIS. That’s why in Arbor you can add authentication to your “Live Feeds”. This means that anyone accessing your new custom dashboard (whichever BI tool you create it in) must enter a password. You can also track when each Feed was last accessed. Read more about how Arbor keeps your data secure here.
Microsoft Power BI is becoming a popular tool with School Data Managers for creating custom visualisations of their MIS data.
This year, we launched a brand new Microsoft Power BI Connector which pre-loads your key Arbor data into Power BI, allowing you to explore it further in creative new ways.
Check out the top five ways to use Microsoft Power BI as a Data Manager from expert Ed Cadwallader.
If you’d like to find out all the ways Arbor could transform how your school or MAT works, join one of our free webinars this term to see the system in action. Looking forward to meeting you online!
Schools have had to adapt how they operate at a rapid pace over the last few months, and change isn’t always easy, particularly for a large, complex school or MAT (we’ve written on this subject before). As schools begin to look forward to September, flexibility and adaptability will continue to be part of life. Like
Schools have had to adapt how they operate at a rapid pace over the last few months, and change isn’t always easy, particularly for a large, complex school or MAT (we’ve written on this subject before).
As schools begin to look forward to September, flexibility and adaptability will continue to be part of life. Like many schools, you might be considering switching to cloud-based systems so you can manage your school more flexibly next Term.
Whatever change you’re considering, Arbor’s Partnership Manager, Mark Maitland, has some advice below for how a change in mindset can help you make change a success.
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve been helping individuals, schools and companies work through change. I started out in my career as a Teacher in special needs before moving into psychotherapy and change psychology. When faced with new ways of working, behaviour and new technology, I’ve seen people react in lots of different ways, some finding it more difficult than others.
I was once worked with GP practices to help them change to a new cloud-based system which would free up GP time and improve patient safety. Even when they could see the benefits, staff were reluctant to change their ways of working because it was what they were used to.
This “fear” of change is hardwired in our brain from the past when change was dangerous. Nowadays, when we face a change, our brain’s first reaction is to hesitate! It’s a very emotional reaction to protect ourselves and play it safe. Familiarity is a comfort.
In times of national crises like the pandemic we’re living through right now, two things happen. Society looks to retreat and wait for a return to normal. Then, once we get over the initial shock and accept that “normal” isn’t returning as quickly as we hoped, we begin to reflect and think about what we might do differently in future.
I’ve definitely noticed a shift in mindset from some of the schools I’ve been speaking to since Covid-19 began. Before the pandemic, the demands of normal school life would often get in the way and make staff less open to changing how they’d always done things. They were fearful of yet another burden on their time, and a potential threat to them being able to do their jobs properly.
What we’re seeing more of now is School Leaders stepping back, reflecting on lessons they’ve learned over the last few months, and looking at changes they can make to prepare themselves for the future.
At the top of their minds is asking themselves if the systems they have in place can cope with flexible ways of working going forward.
A crisis can often clarify our minds and allow us to make practical decisions in order to get through. Switching systems like your MIS (Management Information System) during such a busy and challenging time might feel too daunting, but lots of schools have found that by finding something that’s within their control that will help them deal better with the crisis can feel really positive.
At Arbor, we believe you should be able to rely on your tech when you’re pulled in lots of different directions. But if you’re still using a legacy, server-based MIS, you’ll find it difficult to run your school flexibly next term.
Our cloud-based MIS lets you run your school however you need to, giving all your staff the student information they need wherever they are. In Arbor, you can easily plan your rotas, set up flexible timetables, log and manage attendance and keep track of vulnerable students easily with in-built reports.
Read about how both Hoyland Common Academy Trust and LEO Academy Trust moved to Arbor during lockdown, along with more than 225 schools since March!
To find out more about how Arbor’s cloud-based MIS can help you future-proof your school during Covid-19 and beyond, join one of our free webinars or book an online demo. You can also call 0208 050 1028 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
We’ve been working hand in hand with schools and MATs to help them adapt to change and work flexibly during the Covid-19 outbreak. Because Arbor is cloud-based, staff can continue to access all the student information they need to do their daily tasks remotely, without worrying about having a VPN or patches. There’s lots of
We’ve been working hand in hand with schools and MATs to help them adapt to change and work flexibly during the Covid-19 outbreak. Because Arbor is cloud-based, staff can continue to access all the student information they need to do their daily tasks remotely, without worrying about having a VPN or patches.
There’s lots of uncertainty about what school life will look like in September. Schools don’t know how many students will be on-site or what social distancing arrangements will be in place. What they do know is they’ll need to prepare for lots of different outcomes.
Trying to plan flexible arrangements is difficult if you’re still relying on a server-based MIS. That’s why lots of schools are switching to a reliable cloud-based system which will allow them to manage their school flexibly over the next few months.
Over 600 schools have moved to Arbor since March 2020. Here are three reasons why moving to the cloud now will help you manage your school during Covid-19 and beyond:
There’s likely to be more challenges to come next year, so you need a school system that automates your essential daily admin and frees you up to focus on supporting your students and staff.
Whether all students come back, or you have split-populations, Arbor’s cloud-based MIS will allow you to easily plan your rotas and set up flexible timetables. You’ll be able to log and manage attendance from wherever you are, plus track key demographic groups such as children with EHCP, child protection status, FSM, and children of key workers easily with in-built reports.
Having a cloud-based MIS in place makes it easy to adapt to rapid changes in regulation, like socially distanced timetabling, new attendance and absence codes or key worker status. This is because whatever the DfE introduces, Arbor can update within 24 hours, meaning you can keep on top of new requirements from the next day. No more patches or workarounds!
With staff working in different ways, and in different locations, their jobs are much more difficult if they have to come into school to access the information they need. That’s where a cloud-based MIS like Arbor comes in, which gives staff all the student data they need wherever they are.
Having instant access to data about the children in your school also reduces the safety risk. Staff can see immediately if something doesn’t look right and follow up immediately with their Teacher or parent directly from the same page. No more switching systems or downloading contact lists! You’ll find more tips for keeping in touch with your school community here.
In our latest webinar for MAT leaders, we were joined by Derek Hills, Head of Data and Andy Meighen, IT Director from The Harris Federation. In our previous blog, we explained Harris’s unique approach to IT and how they were able to enable remote learning for their 36,000+ students when the Covid-19 crisis hit. In
In our latest webinar for MAT leaders, we were joined by Derek Hills, Head of Data and Andy Meighen, IT Director from The Harris Federation. In our previous blog, we explained Harris’s unique approach to IT and how they were able to enable remote learning for their 36,000+ students when the Covid-19 crisis hit.
In this blog, Derek and Andy share how they analysed their data across the trust using Microsoft Power BI, so they could measure how well students and staff were engaging with the online learning tools they’d put in place.
Once remote lessons got underway at The Harris Federation, questions soon arose around how it was all going; how many Teachers and students were engaging and what the quality of the interactions were. It was easy for Teachers to get insights about their classes from Microsoft Teams, but it was difficult to get useful information at a departmental, academy or trust level. To combat this, the IT team developed reports using Power BI to analyse usage data across the trust.
Report 1
Below is a standard Power BI template they used to see all trust digital activity over a period of time, such as where users were logging in from and which files they were accessing. This was useful as it meant they could look at huge quantities of log data (10 million rows a day) during lockdown.
Report 2
This image shows a different report they used to look at log information showing all online student activity. This allowed them to easily see the peaks and troughs over time, which helped them identify anyone they should follow up with.
Report 3
The below report showed them usage of systems during the Covid-19 period. Office 365 is orange, SharePoint is pink, OneDrive is grey, purple is Teams and yellow is Exchange (email) (not many students).
They could see that in March, there was a big increase in email use as students and staff needed to communicate more than ever before, but Teams soon overtook email as remote lessons became regular. Use of Onedrive dropped, potentially because students and Teachers were storing and accessing assignment files within Teams instead.
Report 4
They also used Power BI to get important demographic information for safeguarding purposes. They also had to keep Governors and the Board of Trustees up-to-date with stats such as attendance.
Covid-19 has drawn attention to just how important having a strong IT infrastructure has been for teams across Harris. It has allowed the IT team to continue business as usual for the large part, and respond to the huge number of data requests they’ve received during lockdown.
Though they’ve been able to learn a lot about the quantity of their online learning data, e.g. the peaks and troughs of usage, which parts of the system were being used and by whom, but what they haven’t been able to analyse is the quality of what was actually going on in the classroom.
We’d be interested to know how and what you’ve learned from your online learning data at your school or trust, and the lessons you’ll take forward as you continue with a blended learning approach. Post a comment here or on the Arbor Community forum.
You’re invited to join us for the next webinar in our “Adapting to Change” series tomorrow (Friday 19th) where we’ll be demonstrating how to use benchmarking and performance analysis to drive smart strategy at your trust. Sign up for free with the link below.
Friday June 19th 2020, 11:00am
Using Arbor’s benchmarking and performance analysis to inform data-driven decisions for your trust
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Recently we invited Derek Hills, Head of Data and Andy Meighen, IT Director from The Harris Federation – a trust of 48 academies in London and Essex – to talk about how they rolled out an online learning programme for their 36,000+ students. They explained how when Covid-19 hit, their flexible, cloud-based setup allowed them
Recently we invited Derek Hills, Head of Data and Andy Meighen, IT Director from The Harris Federation – a trust of 48 academies in London and Essex – to talk about how they rolled out an online learning programme for their 36,000+ students.
They explained how when Covid-19 hit, their flexible, cloud-based setup allowed them to quickly and easily give all students access to online education, which would not have been possible using a legacy, server based system. You can read more below about Harris’s unique IT approach and how they responded to Covid-19.
Check out our next blog to find out how they analysed their online learning data!
With 4,500 staff and 36,000 students across primary and secondary, Harris uses a centralised and standardised IT set-up designed to give everyone the same experience across the trust.
The focus of Derek and Andy’s roles is making IT work for everyone across the trust with systems that are as efficient and cost effective as possible.
The key principles of their IT approach are:
The IT team at Harris manages data centrally through a combination of their own data warehouse and cloud-based systems. They created a data warehouse so that they could hold all their MIS (Management Information System) data on premises and develop systems on top of it.
Using a data warehouse also means that when they bring in a new system, for example Microsoft Teams, it can set up user accounts for all students and staff automatically. Admin Staff simply add the student names, then the data warehouse puts them into the right groups, saving the central IT team time.
Whenever they design new systems or processes, Derek and Andy ensure they can be used across all academies. They want to make sure all staff and students have the same technology options at their fingertips. At the same time, it’s also important to give Teachers the freedom to use digital tools in a way that suits the particular lesson they’re giving. For this reason, the IT team doesn’t advise that staff teach in a certain way, or use a certain VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) such as Google Classroom. From experience, without top-level buy in from trust leadership, initiatives like these are rarely successful.
Harris uses Microsoft systems across the trust which are set up to communicate with their data warehouse. These are some of the key parts of the puzzle that help the systems interact:
As schools began to close and remote working became necessary, Harris was able to respond quickly, using lessons they’d learned from a recent snow day. On that day, phone lines couldn’t cope, staff ran out of SMS credits and the web connection crashed. They therefore had already solved these issues, and increased their supply of laptops for students and staff to take home when Covid-19 hit.
Setting up remote teaching and learning was also a smooth transition because staff were already using Microsoft Teams and Show My Homework to record lessons and set assignments. The only difference was that staff had to adjust to doing much more on Teams such as leading live lessons. The IT team also needed to set up lots more users on Teams – in March alone they set up 20, 000 accounts which took two weeks as Microsoft struggled to cope!
Click here to see the four steps the IT team took to set up users on Microsoft Teams using their data warehouse
Although they were smooth to set up, remote lessons brought some challenges. IT worked quickly with Teachers to adapt the ways students interacted with Microsoft Teams. For example:
Check out our next blog to find out what Harris has learned about their online learning programme from analysing their data in Microsoft Power BI.
During our webinar series “Adapting to Change”, we’ve been hearing from lots of Multi-Academy Trust leaders about how they’ve shifted their strategy to deal with the Covid-19 crisis. Dan Morrow, CEO of Woodland Academy Trust, shared how he’s looking out for staff wellbeing, whilst Mark Greatrex, CEO of Bellevue Place Education Trust, spoke about the
During our webinar series “Adapting to Change”, we’ve been hearing from lots of Multi-Academy Trust leaders about how they’ve shifted their strategy to deal with the Covid-19 crisis. Dan Morrow, CEO of Woodland Academy Trust, shared how he’s looking out for staff wellbeing, whilst Mark Greatrex, CEO of Bellevue Place Education Trust, spoke about the balance between school autonomy and trust centralisation, and Mark Lacey, CEO of Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust shared some lessons for leaders in a global crisis.
Our latest speaker in our Adapting to Change series, LEO Academy Trust gave a brilliant talk about how they’ve rolled out cloud-based technology and consolidated their systems across their trust. They shared how they had to rapidly step up their rollout as the Covid-19 crisis began to kick in. They also explained some of the ways Arbor’s cloud-based MIS has helped them work flexibly during lockdown since they moved in March.
LEO’s Director of Technology (Learning) Graham Macaulay and Chief Operations Officer Nicky Gillhespy shared some great advice for fellow MAT leaders, particularly if you’re planning on updating your trust’s digital strategy in light of the demands of Covid-19.
We’ve summarised their talk below – we hope it gives you some useful tips to take back to your trust when thinking about how to manage the coming weeks and months.
Our Trust is built up of six academies, 3550 students, 415 members of staff across seven sites, but we wanted to bring in one digital strategy which drives our use of technology across the board. It was really important to us that we aligned all our key stakeholders in a clear direction before thinking about how we would actually roll out new systems.
When we began planning our new digital strategy in September 2017, we had five challenges we needed to overcome before moving forward:
To solve these problems, we had two options. The first was to carry on doing what we’d always done and “fill the holes and paint over” so that on the surface everything looked like it was working. This would have been the easy option, as it would involve no new staff training, no new risks, costs or demands on staff time.
Option two was to innovate and think differently. We had to realise that the world was massively changing and that we as an organisation needed to embrace that change. Sometimes the quick wins don’t always produce the best outcomes in the long term.
Defining what we wanted to achieve
The digital vision has to come from the top and you have to have the support of the Trust Board. You also have to have input from various different groups. The key to our success was setting up Digital Working Parties with key stakeholders from across the trust, including Trustees, the CEO, the CFO, COO and Director of Technology. We asked key questions such as “What do we want out of the system?”, “What do we need?” and “What are we doing now that we could do better?” Then we tasked the IT and Technology departments to devise new solutions. Having input from every single area within our trust helped to manage knock-on effects of initiatives and make sure they worked for everyone.
Planning is essential
During the journey, there have been highs where we’ve made progress and delivered change, but of course, there have also been challenges along the way. We learned quickly that the key to success, as with any change management project, was setting essential milestones along the way. Then as the plan began to change, we could default back to our core objectives in order to manage expectations.
We spent a lot of time thinking about long-term development, for example the sort of organisation we wanted to be and the opportunities we wanted to provide to our staff and pupils. But we also needed to deliver short-term projects where staff could see the benefits immediately. What was important was to position these “quick wins” within the longer term direction.
Communicating the strategy
We initially took a “dissemination approach” to communicating the changes to staff. Centrally, we communicated in the Digital Working Party, then Headteachers and Principals passed on the message to their teams. We reflect now that this process could have been improved because it meant those messages weren’t always delivered on time or accurately, and this generated a feeling of hearsay between schools. It would have been better if we’d have taken on some of that responsibility centrally.
Changing mindsets and empowering staff
We wanted to ensure that every staff member had the core skill set they needed to make the changes we were putting in place. We therefore spent almost a whole academic year preparing support materials for staff and delivering CPD on everything from beginner’s Google, to creating forms, to managing files.
Running a staff development programme was essential to making the digital project a success. And this work is ongoing – as we evolve our digital strategy, we will regularly review our provision for our staff and their capabilities, and change the way we deliver our CPD accordingly.
Although most staff have adapted to the new technology we’ve introduced, there was some reluctance and fear of change. We found the most important thing was to build their confidence. Our Office Staff have enormous skill and so we asked them why they liked working in certain ways so we could make sure our new ideas suited them and made their workload easier. By encouraging them to take part in our Digital Working Parties, and demonstrating their particular skills, they started to flourish.
The impact of technology on teaching and learning
Since we moved to the cloud, we’ve been able to change our pedagogy and the way we deliver teaching and learning. We’re running a programme to provide all KS2 children with a Chromebook to use in school and to take home. This has enabled us to move from a passive approach where teachers talk and children do an activity, to having a lot more strategies that enhance the teaching and learning. Pupil engagement has rocketed as a result.
We’re also really proud that one of our schools has become a Google for Education Reference School which means they regularly host visitors from around the world to look at the impact that technology is having on pupil experiences and outcomes.
Supporting remote learning
During these unusual times, we’ve used technology to maintain a sense of normality as much as possible. One of the ways we’ve supported teaching and learning has been through setting up a simple Google website for schools to upload activities. The vision was to provide fun opportunities for children and help families support their children with their education from home. The site is massively helping not just our children, but children across the world, with around 15,000 visitors every day!
We’ve also set up Google Hangouts for our classes, as well as sessions for our “Digital Leader” pupils with speakers from Google and Adobe sharing words of wisdom and ideas for how they can develop their computing knowledge. We’re also holding virtual discos with staff acting as DJs which we’re streaming live.
We moved to Arbor on 16th March – midway through the start of the Covid-19 crisis – but the timing worked out perfectly. Moving to a cloud-based MIS meant that our Office Staff could do all of their admin work at home. From the operations side we have been able to continue business as usual since the crisis hit, since all of our payments and orders could continue, and we could set up staff to work from home easily.
Moving to the cloud has changed how we work for the better and put us in a really strong position, especially for the demands of distance learning. From one computer we can access all areas across the trust, such as the MIS, our data stores and our finance systems. As soon as we decided to close our schools, we created a form to find out from pupils and staff whether they had access to a device or the Internet at home. We then made sure that every pupil and member of staff went home with a web-based device.
Look out for more webinars with MAT leaders in our series “Adapting to Change”. You can also check out our Summer schedule of webinars all about how to manage your school or MAT flexibly with a cloud-based MIS. With sessions specific to primaries, secondaries and MATs, and managing assessments, meals and payments, and more, find the session that’s right for you and book here. See you online soon!
Just before half term, lots of schools joined us for a webinar hosted by The ONTO Group all about designing a new school timetable in line with social distancing. It was a great opportunity for schools to discuss the challenges of their settings with timetabling experts and MIS providers. Lots of important practical and technical
Just before half term, lots of schools joined us for a webinar hosted by The ONTO Group all about designing a new school timetable in line with social distancing. It was a great opportunity for schools to discuss the challenges of their settings with timetabling experts and MIS providers. Lots of important practical and technical questions were raised, including “How could I split my school into two populations?” and “How can we keep students separate when they arrive and depart from school?” TimeTabler had some useful advice that you can find on our blog.
Since then, the conversation has continued on Facebook, with school leaders sharing the solutions they’ve found. You’ll find some great example timetables that members have shared in the “files” section on the page.
With schools now starting to open up to more year groups, the questions now are “How are you putting your new timetable into practice?” and “What is working well and what have been the challenges?”
To discuss all this and more, join us for another free panel discussion next Tuesday (9th June) in partnership with The ONTO Group and with contributions from Edval and TimeTabler. Sign up for free here to join fellow Timetablers and School Leaders and share best practice.
The main topic we’ll be discussing is “Should you put your new timetable into your MIS?” The answer to this will look very different depending on your school setting. We’ll dig into this in the webinar, but beforehand we’ve put together some of the things you can think about to help you make the right call for your school:
If you’re using Arbor MIS, you can find all our guidance on how to set up your new groups and classes, and complete your New School Year Setup on our Help Centre. You’ll find everything we’re doing to support schools during Covid-19 here. You can also discuss with fellow Arbor schools on the Arbor Community.
As we all know, schools have had to rapidly change the way they work in the last few months – adjusting their processes to meet the needs of children and families in and out of school. In turn, IT teams that support schools have also had to change the way they operate. At Arbor we’re
As we all know, schools have had to rapidly change the way they work in the last few months – adjusting their processes to meet the needs of children and families in and out of school. In turn, IT teams that support schools have also had to change the way they operate.
At Arbor we’re proud to work in partnership with more than 30 IT teams across the country, who collectively support thousands of schools. Teaming up with support partners means we can give schools freedom and flexibility so they can get the support that’s right for them.
Over the past weeks, we caught up with some of our support teams (Agilisys in Sefton, ICT Schools Team in Buckinghamshire, Cantium in Kent, HertsForLearning in Hertfordshire, iCT4 in Cornwall, and Orbis in East Sussex) to get their perspectives on the challenges schools are facing and how they’re helping.
We thought we’d share this insight into what’s being going on behind the scenes. Look out for links to some useful blogs and webinars to support you with wider school opening.
Up and down the country, our partners have been working hard to help schools get used to a new way of working, whilst dealing with working remotely themselves. For many it’s been the busiest period they can remember, with teams pulling together despite, as Richard May from Orbis puts it, having “relocated to a variety of spare rooms and kitchen tables”, and as Sheryl Everett from Buckinghamshire Council adds, with the companionship of “pets, offspring and partners.”
Whether putting their own business continuity plans into action, or reacting quickly to help schools with the latest government guidelines, it’s been a time of constant adaptation for our partners. They’ve moved their usual consultancy services online and redesigned their summer training programmes so they can deliver them digitally. However, it has been important to the majority of teams to provide continuity and business as usual as far as possible. Maintaining familiar working patterns has not only been vital for schools, but it has been helpful for IT teams too, as they adapt to the new climate.
For the first few weeks of lockdown, the biggest challenge for our partners was to make sure schools who didn’t have cloud-based systems (for example, if their MIS was server-based) could access the data they needed and get work done. This often meant many hours of work setting up remote access to locally hosted servers via VPNs. One of the most important focuses has been helping schools work securely without their normal networks.
Find out all about the new government grant that could save you thousands on tech support with your G Suite or Office 365 setup – and our Support Partners who could help you – on our blog.
Partners were also busy guiding schools through the rapidly changing government advice. The team at Cantium, for example, pulled together a dedicated resources page where schools could find all the information they needed on Covid-19 in one place.
Find all the support you can get from Arbor during Covid-19 here.
When plans were announced to open schools to more year groups from 1st June, partners began helping schools think about how to design a timetable that keeps students and staff safe. We attended a webinar hosted by The ONTO Group, EdVal Timetables and TimeTabler on how to adapt your timetable for social distancing. Check out our top tips from TimeTabler in our guest blog.
Join us for our next webinar all about timetabling on Tuesday 9th June when we’ll be sharing examples from schools of how to embed your new timetable. Sign up for free here.
More recently, the focus has switched to supporting online learning, helping schools through daily blogs such as those provided by Herts for Learning, or webinars on a range of distance learning topics and getting schools up-and-running with O365 or G-Suite. The team at iCT4 for example, have been running daily Q&A sessions on Microsoft Teams.
Richard Martin from London Grid for Learning (LGfL) wrote a guest blog for us recently with advice for schools on how to manage teaching and learning remotely, including links to digital training for staff.
Join us for a free webinar all about how to manage online learning on Friday 12th June. Derek Hills, Head of Data and Andy Meighen, IT Director at Harris Federation will be sharing how they rolled out their online learning to over 36,000 pupils during lockdown, and what they’ve learned from looking at the data from remote learning. Sign up for free here.
As we look to the future and the gradual extended opening of schools, our partners will continue to have an important role to play in both supporting schools with the technology and the pedagogy for a more blended learning approach. If we’ve learnt one thing from the current crisis, it’s that we can all operate effectively more remotely. Whilst our partners (like all of us) can’t wait to get back to a more normal way of working, elements of online training and service delivery will be here to stay.
If you’re an IT Support Team, School or MAT and you want to find out more about Arbor MIS get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education.com, or give us a call on 0208 050 1028.
Arbor Updates | Data and Insight
See your trust in a new light with our new free report Often serving a broad range of pupils from different backgrounds, and sometimes varying geographical areas, a big priority for Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) is ensuring their spread of provision gives every pupil an equal chance of success. There are lots of factors that play
Often serving a broad range of pupils from different backgrounds, and sometimes varying geographical areas, a big priority for Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) is ensuring their spread of provision gives every pupil an equal chance of success.
There are lots of factors that play a part in how pupils perform, such as where they live, whether they’re eligible for free school meals (FSM), or have special educational needs (SEN). As a DfE official warns that the attainment gap for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds could widen by 75% as a result of Covid-19, it’s more important than ever for trusts to look at their school performance in context. The problem is, it’s not always easy to gather all this data in one place without trawling online data tables or waiting on spreadsheets.
That’s why we’ve launched a brand new free report for MAT leaders – the “Understanding Your MAT Report”. Created for every MAT in the country, the report helps you understand your unique make-up in a national context, so you can shape smart strategy going forwards.
Designed in partnership with the Centre for Education and Youth, the Understanding Your MAT Report brings together your schools’ key performance measures, alongside your MAT’s size and local demographics, to help you understand your unique set of strengths and challenges. What’s more, the report shows you how your MAT compares to other trusts nationally for the first time.
Your Understanding Your MAT Report is live now for you to download from your free Arbor Group Insight portal (our benchmarking tool for MATs)! If you don’t have an account yet, sign up here for free.
What can you do with the new Understanding Your MAT Report?
We use your schools’ latest validated 2019 Analyse School Performance (ASP) data to show you your spread of performance in key measures at KS4, 2 and 1, such as Progress 8, Achieving Expected Standard: Reading, Writing and Maths, and Working at the Expected Standard: Year 1 Phonics.
Then we compare your results against three key benchmarks: Trust average (the weighted average of all your schools’ results), National average (weighted average of all state schools in England) and National MAT average (weighted average of all academies in England) to help you see what makes your MAT distinctive.
Plus, you can use your report as a companion to your free Arbor Group Insight portal, where you can dig further into any data set to see pupil level figures.
Image 1 – KS4 Progress 8 score, Understanding Your MAT Report 2020
You might be wondering “Is my MAT growing at the same pace as other trusts?” Or “Is our proportion of students eligible for Free School Meals higher or lower than other trusts?” The Understanding Your MAT Report will help you answer all these questions and more, showing you how your unique make-up compares to other trusts in the country.
You’ll get an overview of your MAT’s size, growth, blend of phases, pupil characteristics (% of FSM, SEN and EAL pupils), as well as the “Area Type” your schools are in, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) area classifications. The report also shows you the demographic factors associated with the areas your schools are in (such as the level of education and the unemployment rate) which helps you understand your pupils’ socio-economic background.
Image 2 – Area Type Blend, Understanding Your MAT Report 2020
By bringing together your demographics, pupil context and school attainment, your Understanding Your MAT Report will help you understand all the factors impacting achievement at your MAT. As you’ll see from the report’s leading article “Breaking the link: Attainment, poverty and rural schools” (preview here), the relationship between disadvantage and attainment varies considerably between different parts of England, so it’s important for trusts to understand how this plays out across their mix of schools.
Use this analysis to drive decision making at your next strategy meeting, and find new ways to improve results for staff and pupils.
Your Understanding Your MAT Report is live now for you to download from your Arbor Group Insight portal – we’ve also sent the link to you by email. If you’re not registered, don’t worry, you can sign up for free here.
In our webinar series for MAT leaders “Adapting to Change”, we recently heard from Mark Lacey, CEO of Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust, who shared his strategies for leading his trust through the challenges of Covid-19. Mark had some really useful advice for fellow MAT leaders around how having strong foundations through your strategic plan,
In our webinar series for MAT leaders “Adapting to Change”, we recently heard from Mark Lacey, CEO of Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust, who shared his strategies for leading his trust through the challenges of Covid-19.
Mark had some really useful advice for fellow MAT leaders around how having strong foundations through your strategic plan, business continuity plan and risk registers, as well as a strong set of digital tools, can help you pivot flexibly in a crisis. Most importantly, Mark highlighted the need for realism and compassion for staff.
As you’re planning your exit strategy from the current Covid-19 crisis, you might find it helpful to take a look at Mark’s planning document which he kindly shared with us. As you’ll see, the document addresses key risk scenarios and outlines the trust’s response, with space for the individual schools to complete their responses. Click here to download the PDF.
We’ve summarised Mark’s conversation with Arbor’s CEO James Weatherill below.
How well prepared were you for the Covid-19 crisis?
I don’t think anyone was prepared for what has happened, but what we benefited from is we have a clear strategic plan, business continuity plan and risk register which gives us a strong backbone and allows us to adapt and flex when external events occur.
We also pride ourselves on having an adaptive culture at the trust. We recognise that we don’t always have all the answers, but that it’s more important to share best practice, collaborate, and be open to admitting when we’re doing something wrong. This allows us to change direction fast.
How did you adapt to the crisis?
Earlier in the year, we had already experienced a large challenge – we went through 7 Ofsted inspections over a period of 10 weeks – which forced us to adapt quickly. This served as a test in some ways for what was to come with Covid-19 and we were able to learn important lessons so we could easily switch to a new rhythm of working.
Given our schools are spread over quite a wide geographical area, we made sure above all that we worked tightly as a Central Team and that we set a clear direction. It was important that we were responsive in relaying information as soon and as clearly as possible to schools, and that we were accessible for whatever schools needed.
What have you learned about being responsive in a crisis?
The speed at which we’ve adapted to ensure emergency provision has shown us just how much potential we have for change. It’s also proven to us the importance of building into our strategic planning a focus on people more than process. We know staff will continue to feel vulnerable sometimes going forward and we believe taking a compassionate approach and prioritising wellbeing is really important.
When you return to more normal operations, how will your “people over process” approach change the way you work?
Putting people first is a difficult thing to measure and be certain about, but there are some concrete measures we can put in place. For example, we’ve seen that easy-to-use shared IT systems like Office 365 take a lot of burden away from staff and can help them feel connected. We also try to gauge how staff are doing through sending out digital forms and bringing representative groups of staff together to discuss certain issues. We aim to use the feedback we get from staff to build into our policy making going forward. A big emphasis across the trust is also social and personal development.
How do you monitor wellbeing when working remotely?
A big focus of ours as a Central Team is looking after our Headteachers. Our Academy Improvement Team members have each taken responsibility for a group of Heads who they meet with every week using Microsoft Teams (video chat). Every meeting starts with questions about their wellbeing – it’s been important for us to understand all the different struggles Heads are dealing with at the moment, such as spouses who are key workers or having children at home. We’re learning a lot, and fast, about how to sense how staff are doing from their body language and tone over video. Many of the tensions Heateachers found with staff at the beginning involved miscommunications over email, so we’ve actively encouraged video chat to bring a personal approach.
Keeping regular lines of communication has also been really important. We’ve converted our monthly bulletins to weekly bulletins focused on wellbeing, in order to make sure everyone has access to helpful resources.
How has your leadership style changed during Covid-19?
The most challenging thing we’ve faced as a Central Team has been working remotely and not being physically in each school. Whilst my natural leadership style is collaborative and approachable, this has been essential to emphasise even more, making Headteachers aware I’m here if they need.
Of course, we’ve been direct and interventionist where it was necessary. For example, we felt it was important to bring some schools together into hubs so that we had greater control of emergency provision and more staff could shield, despite some resistance from Headteachers.
How have you been using tech to adapt?
Because we’ve invested quite considerably in digital tools over the last two years, we didn’t have to suddenly bring on lots of new systems to cope with remote working. This crisis has shown us the real value of having systems like Arbor’s cloud-based MIS and Office 365 in place to rely on. It’s meant we can share data within and between schools easily, and communicate with parents using tools staff are comfortable using already. Some of our schools weren’t using some of the communications features before the crisis, but Arbor switched these on swiftly for us.
We’ve also seen the benefit of Arbor in our financial management during the crisis. We were able to set up our own Free School Meal voucher scheme and get all the data we needed from Arbor.
Setting up students on Microsoft Teams has also made a lot of impact. Going forward, we’re going to ensure everyone has access to a remote learning platform.
Has this crisis challenged your expectations on how quickly you can implement change?
It’s shown us the importance of being clear about what we all need to do together and what will have the most impact. It’s given us conviction and belief to step into changes more boldly in future.
What are your future plans?
Having learned from this current situation, we’re going to be cautious about making too many plans going forward. Being able to adapt is much more important. We’ve got to be realistic about what can be achieved over the next year, given schools will need time to recover.
In terms of planning towards wider school opening, we’re trying to make neutral decisions by weighing up the polarised spread of views out there. We’ve put together a risk assessment and planning document for our exit from the Covid-19 situation* which outlines key questions and issues, and the trust responses to each of them. It also provides space for schools to add their responses.
* You can download Mark’s “Risk Assessment: Planning for Exit from COVID-19 Emergency Period” document here.
What are your key takeaways from the Covid-19 crisis?
I hope we will all go forward with a greater appreciation for what we have and more compassion for each other. I have been incredibly impressed with everything our staff have achieved and will not forget it.
As a Central Team, we will aim to take collective responsibility for who we are as a trust and move forward with a strong moral compass.
You may have seen that the Government has introduced a new grant that schools can apply for to get support to use digital learning platforms G Suite for Education or Office 365 Education. This is a great opportunity for schools – especially at a time when you’re having to manage at least some of your
You may have seen that the Government has introduced a new grant that schools can apply for to get support to use digital learning platforms G Suite for Education or Office 365 Education. This is a great opportunity for schools – especially at a time when you’re having to manage at least some of your lessons, and your staff and students, remotely.
At Arbor, we believe that you should be able to lean on digital tools to pick up the slack when you find yourself pulled in lots of different directions. That’s why we’ve designed our cloud-based MIS (Management Information System) to allow schools to work flexibly – with access to all your data, the ability to follow up with vulnerable students, plan staff rotas and communicate with your school community – wherever you’re working from.
Arbor MIS integrates with G Suite and Office 365, which means all your students, staff and classes will be automatically set up in your online learning platform – so you can get on with teaching.
The new government grant will help you get started with G Suite or Office 365 with free technical support and project management. We’ve summarised below everything you need to know about the grant:
Here’s the breakdown …
1. What’s the deal?
Although G-suite and Office 365 are already free for educational settings, you’ll need technical support and project management to get set up. This is where the grant comes in. To migrate all of your teaching and learning resources to the cloud you’d normally have to pay a supplier £1-2,000, but qualifying for this grant means the DfE will effectively pay the supplier on your behalf.
2. How much is the grant?
Up to £1000 per school for a Multi-Academy Trust (capped at £10k per trust), £1,500 for an individual primary school or £2,000 for an individual secondary school.
3. Who can access the grant?
The grant is available to both Local Authority maintained schools and Academies, but not to independent schools.
4. How do I sign up?
First of all, we’d recommend doing some research into the digital platforms available to make sure you choose the right one for your school or trust. Speak to other schools, your IT provider or your Local Authority, and read advice from The Key in partnership with the DfE.
Next, you’ll need to choose a supplier who will work with you to migrate your data and set up your new platform. Only certain companies are part of the scheme, so it’s worth checking first whether your local IT partner is involved, and if not, whether they could recommend another supplier. See below for a list of Arbor partners who are on the scheme!
Once you’re ready to go ahead, you can apply using these links:
Some level of remote working looks set to be part of the “new normal” going forward for schools, so this grant is a great opportunity to review your technology and make sure you have a reliable set-up in place for the future.
In an earlier blog, we wrote about how carrying out a systems audit at your school can help you identify where you could cut down on systems to work more efficiently and save money in the long run. Moving to a cloud-based MIS means you can complete all your daily admin tasks and access all your data from one place, rather than all over the place.
The same principle is true for how you manage your online teaching and learning. Choosing a cloud-based platform, like G Suite and Office 365, allows you to access your curriculum resources in one central place, wherever you’re working. They also open up exciting possibilities for more efficient, collaborative working.
Here’s just a few things you can do on G Suite or Office 365:
What’s more, when both your MIS and your learning platform are cloud-based, this frees you from having to have a server at your school, saving you thousands of pounds in maintenance and replacement costs. Working on the cloud also secures your data making you less at risk of losing your information. You can read more here about how Arbor keeps your data secure.
Having an MIS and digital learning platform that you can rely on is great, but the next step to working even more efficiently and saving your staff more time is when all your systems can communicate seamlessly with each other.
That’s why Arbor has integrated with G Suite and Office 365. You’ll have all your student data from Arbor at your fingertips when you’re giving your remote lessons.
Here are some of the benefits of syncing Arbor with G Suite / Office 365:
We work with IT support teams up and down the country who support our schools to get set up on Arbor, and any other technical issues they have. Many of our partners are part of the new government G Suite / Office 365 scheme, so they come highly recommended from us to help you manage your move to one of these platforms.
See below for a list of our trusted partners on the scheme, and the support they offer. Feel free to get in touch to hear more about how you could work together to get your digital learning platform up and running.
Vitalize IT
Can support you with: G Suite and Arbor MIS
“Training teachers is the key to success with digital learning and a big part of what Vitalize deliver to schools throughout the UK. We have found that schools that invest in training and have a clear digital learning strategy achieve the most impact from deploying cloud learning platforms. It is great to see the positive impact in a short space of time that Google for Education can provide schools with. This will not only help schools now, but provide the basis of a digital strategy for the future.”
123ICT
Can support you with: G Suite
“123ICT Computing Solutions specialise in working with primary schools to develop their digital education platform and our team of education consultants have trained and supported hundreds of teachers over the past few weeks. With our support and training, many schools have adapted well to the current situation and are now providing a reliable, engaging and easy to use digital education platform enabling daily lessons and activities to be delivered remotely.”
Computeam
Can support you with: G Suite and Office 365
“Computeam were delighted to be part of this new DfE scheme to level-up digital learning in England. While Covid-19 has been the trigger, we believe the benefits of cloud-based teaching and learning will extend well into the future. As both a Google and Microsoft partner, Computeam can offer deep expertise in either platform. We can also extend the initial service by offering enhanced training and MIS integration to drive benefits from these technologies after the crisis has passed.”
Computer Talk
“As a certified Google Partner with over 30 years’ experience within the education sector, we are delighted to be part of this joint initiative with Google and the DfE. Our EdTech Team are a fountain of knowledge and we pride ourselves on our ability to deliver new ways of improving on-premise or cloud learning which should be seamless, collaborative and engaging.”
Badger Computer Services
“Remote learning is not going away and digital platforms are the tools for schools to empower teaching and learning and connect with your students. The DfE funding is available for a finite time and our view is that we should be doing everything we can to ensure schools can continue to support our children’s futures and wellbeing even when away from the physical classroom.”
Turn IT on
Can support you with: G Suite, Office 365 and Arbor MIS
“Our mission at Turn IT on is to enable schools to get the most from their technology – and the last few weeks have shown that tech is an absolutely critical part of any school environment, whether in lockdown or “normal times”. This DfE initiative is a fantastic opportunity for schools, both in the short and longer term. Turn IT on is delighted to have been chosen to partner by both Google and Microsoft and we are looking forward to helping schools all over the UK take advantage of this great opportunity.”
Herts for Learning
“The Covid emergency has required a re-engineering of the education system overnight and the schools that were able to adapt fastest were those that had already adopted digital classroom offerings. At HfL, we believe that successful implementation is just as much about the process of change management with staff and students as it is about technology and this is at the very heart of our approach when we work with schools.”
JTRS
“During this challenging time, technology is crucial. At JTRS, we’ve been working hard to help schools achieve distance learning – we created a Distance Learning Resource Centre for parents, and we’re excited to be part of this DfE scheme to help schools who do not yet have a digital platform like G-Suite for Education. We can help you check if you’re eligible for the funding and apply for it, as well as implementing G-Suite for your school quickly.”
Joskos
“Joskos has been working closely with the DfE on the platform provisioning programme, which will support schools as they look to leverage the ever growing world of SaaS based EdTech solutions. The scheme will proactively support schools as they start to bring some students in, whilst others remain working at home. We believe that the programme is a positive step forward in making sure that every young person can continue to access learning.”
Other Arbor partners on the scheme and what they can support you with:
Once you’ve started your school’s cloud journey with G Suite or Office 365, the next step is to think about your MIS. The Arbor team is here to help with any questions you have about how your school could make an easy move to be fully cloud-based today. Get in touch hello@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
Data and Insight | MAT Operations
Preview of the new Understanding Your MAT Report – special article In partnership with the Centre for Education and Youth (CfEY), we’ve created a new free report for MATs across the country – the Understanding Your MAT Report – to help you see your trust in a new light. Built especially for your trust, your
In partnership with the Centre for Education and Youth (CfEY), we’ve created a new free report for MATs across the country – the Understanding Your MAT Report – to help you see your trust in a new light.
Built especially for your trust, your report brings together key measures like your schools’ ASP performance statistics, alongside your MAT’s size and local demographics, to help you understand the unique makeup of your trust compared to others in England.
The report is out soon but you can sign up to our waiting list to get early access to your report now!
As a preview, we wanted to share with you the leading article from the report, written by Loic Menzies, CEO of The CfEY. The article introduces you to the contextual analysis the report gives you and the kinds of conversations your report might bring up in your next strategy meeting.
by Loic Menzies
The relationship between disadvantage and attainment varies considerably between different parts of England. Combining datasets shows that poverty has a particularly pernicious effect on educational attainment in some area-types, particularly the rural areas shown in green, below.
Free School Meals aren’t the only ingredient
In recent years there has been increasing recognition that the relationship between deprivation and educational achievement is not as simple as we once thought. Researchers like Simon Burgess have shown that the interaction between disadvantage and ethnicity / migration status, for example, is often underestimated.
At LKMco we’ve had a longstanding interest in ONS area classifIcations (see “The Two Kingstons – what FSM does and doesn’t tell us” and “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner”). These classifications combine a range of characteristics of different areas, including industrial and employment data; demographics and qualification levels.
Combining these classifications with school data reveals striking differences between patterns of school performance in different area types.
Affluent England and London in the lead (surprise, surprise)
At the most basic level, we see that area types differ considerably in their attainment and deprivation levels.
Areas described as “Affluent England” achieve most highly, but “London Cosmopolitan” and “Ethnically Diverse Cosmopolitan” areas are not far behind – despite having two or three times the same level of deprivation.
However, once we plot FSM levels against attainment, the results get considerably more interesting – and the worrying situation in rural schools is revealed.
A variable picture
Firstly, notice how, apart from a small cluster of very-low-deprivation, very-high-attainment schools on the far left, pink dots dominate the top of the distribution. These represent “ethnically diverse cosmopolitan” areas (most of which are in Greater London). This shows that regardless of their deprivation levels, pupils tend to do best in these areas. Meanwhile, red dots are concentrated in the top right-hand corner. These represent high-achieving, high-deprivation central-London schools.
How strong is the link between deprivation and attainment…? It depends on the area
Switching our attention to the trend lines and R-squared values (representing the strength of the relationship between poverty and attainment), we see that the angle of the lines differs considerably – as does the strength of the correlation, even though all eight correlations are significant.
Notably, in rural areas, the relationship between poverty and educational outcomes is particularly strong. So although pupils in rural schools with low deprivation attain highly, schools in deprived areas are really struggling.
It seems that rural schools have particular difficulty breaking the link between poverty and low pupil attainment.
What about pupil progress?
Switching the measure to pupil progress paints an even starker picture of pupil outcomes in disadvantaged rural schools.
In general, the relationship between FSM and Progress is much weaker than when looking at attainment (r squared values of <0.2 in most area types).
This is unsurprising, since how well pupils achieve at KS2 (which is taken into account in Progress 8), already depends a lot on their deprivation level.
However, in rural schools, we find that a moderate relationship returns. It, therefore, seems that low attainment in rural, high-deprivation secondary schools is not just about pupils having low starting points. Instead, there is an important link between school deprivation level and progress rates.
Why is pupil progress in disadvantaged secondary schools worse in rural schools than in other parts of the country?
Implications
When considering how to break the link between poverty and education outcomes, it is crucial to take a nuanced view of poverty. Geography, demographics and community/economic context plays a critical role in moderating the relationship between poverty and educational outcomes.
Studies of the factors affecting schools in different area types are therefore urgently needed since these would help schools understand how best to respond to their circumstances.
Key factors to explore could include:
Find out more about this analysis in Schools Week.
Loic Menzies is Director of The Centre for Education and Youth (CfEY). He specialises in education policy and research, youth development and social enterprise. He was previously a tutor for Canterbury Christ Church’s Faculty of Education, an Associate Senior Manager and Head of History and Social Sciences at St. George’s R.C. School in North West London and a youth worker. He has authored numerous high profile reports and works with policy makers to communicate the implications of research, for example presenting to the Education Select Committee on White Working Class Underachievement or presenting to civil servants on teacher recruitment, retention and development. He is currently editing CfEY’s first book with Routledge entitled ‘Young People on the Margins’.
Methodology notes
For descriptions of all the area types in England, as defined by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), take a look at the ONS website.
Spring Term has brought a great deal of change for schools and trusts, with staff having to quickly adapt to every new challenge and requirement that came their way. As we move into Summer Term, change is set to be the new normal, and we’ll have to keep adapting in lots of new ways. Since
Spring Term has brought a great deal of change for schools and trusts, with staff having to quickly adapt to every new challenge and requirement that came their way. As we move into Summer Term, change is set to be the new normal, and we’ll have to keep adapting in lots of new ways.
Since partial school closures were announced, we’ve been working hand-in-hand with schools to build out our MIS (Management Information System) to ensure schools can continue to run flexibly. Because we can move schools to Arbor 100% remotely, lots of schools have taken this opportunity to get up and running on our cloud-based MIS to help them access the information they need wherever they are.
As experts in school operations and data, with many former teachers in the Arbor team, we’ve been sharing practical support and guidance over the last few months, designed to help schools adapt. In case you missed anything, we’ve put together a round-up below so you have one handy guide to managing your school flexibly.
1. Using Arbor MIS to manage your school remotely
2. Expert guidance on key topics on our blog
3. Advice from schools and MATs in our webinars
4. Hear from the Arbor Community
Here’s how to find everything …
We’re firm believers that you should be able to lean on tools like your MIS to pick up the slack when you find yourself pulled in lots of different directions. Arbor takes the hassle out of important tasks like following up with vulnerable children, planning staff rotas, and communicating with your students and parents, wherever you’re working from. Plus, we’re making updates every day to make sure you’re covering all the new government requirements.
Here’s a list of some of the features we’ve developed to help you manage your school or MAT during Covid-19:
You can find more detailed guidance and all the support you need from the dedicated Covid-19 page on our Help Centre. Don’t forget, our Support Team is always there for you on the phone, email and web chat.
Find out about the government grant you can apply for to get support with setting up G Suite or Office 365 at your school or trust on our blog.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been blogging about some of the top priorities for school leaders right now – from keeping in touch with students and parents, to nurturing staff wellbeing. We’ve gathered advice from across the Arbor team, guest experts, and schools and MATs in our network, designed to give some practical tips on how to adapt to change – whatever your role.
Check out the topics that interest you below, there’ll be more to come! Look out for links to useful resources in the blogs if you want to learn more.
From the Arbor team:
From guest experts:
From schools and MATs:
We’ve also been learning a lot from listening to our schools and how they’re coping during lockdown, and the strategies leaders have put in place. We’ve been asking questions like “How do you plan for change, support your students, and manage staff wellbeing when you’re working remotely?” and “How do you keep adapting as new guidance comes out?”
We’re running two free webinar series that have been really popular:
If you’d like to listen to the recording of any of our past webinars, get in touch at james@arbor-education.com.
Across our network of schools and MATs, we’ve seen some inspiring responses to an extremely challenging situation, with schools finding new and innovative ways to connect with their students. English Martyrs Catholic Primary School were straight out of the gate with their virtual PE lessons, as were LEO Academy Trust with their distance wellbeing sessions. Hoyland Common Academy Trust have been promoting mental health awareness and Avanti Schools Trust have been offering free yoga sessions!
As staff and students are working in totally new ways, it’s more important than ever to reach out and connect. When we shared some of our work-from-home stations and morning routines on Twitter, we were pleased to discover lots of our schools also wanted to share their creative ways to make the most of lockdown.
In what continues to be a difficult period, the Arbor team is always here to help and support where we can. We wanted to share a few pieces of feedback we’ve got lately from schools and partner organisations that we’re really proud of.
“Arbor’s been pretty essential to the distance learning program here and I’m confident we have a system that is really strong. We log daily checks with our students and have been able to use this to get to the stage where we can say we have contact with 100% of our students every day.” Phil Jones, Head of Academy Services at Pool Academy
As a school we could not have accomplished half of what we have with our previous MIS. Arbor’s cloud based MIS has not only allowed remote working within what is a challenging, time sensitive period; but also given the exact information required without the need for additional query templates to be set up.” Simon Brown, Headteacher at, Blaydon West Primary
“It’s refreshing to know that Arbor listen to what schools need and respond so quickly and also that priorities change depending on the current situation.” Susan Scott, Education ICT, Bradford Metropolitan District Council
“We wouldn’t have known what to do without Arbor this week, it’s been an absolute godsend being able to access school info from the Group and all the other inbuilt reports we can access, as well as accessing remotely!” Vicky Harrison, COO at Hoyland Common Academy Trust
“We just don’t know how we have managed before we had Arbor. We are all in this together and should ensure people know how much we appreciate Arbor helping us get through this difficult time.” Jackie Blaikie, Bursar at Acresfield Primary School
“I’ve found it great to be able to use Arbor while working at home. I’ve sent instructions for parents about how to resolve issues with students logging into Show My Homework and how the students can access their school email accounts from home.” Joanne Hedges, Data Manager at Manshead CE Academy
We’re moving schools to Arbor every day, 100% remotely. If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could help you manage your school or remotely and flexibly, get in touch at hello@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
Mark Greatrex has had a rich history in education; having held senior positions in three academy trusts and serving ten years at the DfE, his current position is CEO at Bellevue Place Education Trust (BPET), where he’s been for five years. BPET is geographically spread out, made up of eight primary schools in eight different
Mark Greatrex has had a rich history in education; having held senior positions in three academy trusts and serving ten years at the DfE, his current position is CEO at Bellevue Place Education Trust (BPET), where he’s been for five years. BPET is geographically spread out, made up of eight primary schools in eight different Local Authority regions across London and Berkshire.
Mark joined us for a brilliant webinar in our series “Adapting to change”, where he shared with fellow MAT leaders his strategies for leading a geographically dispersed trust, and how these strategies play out during the challenges of Covid-19.
You can read Mark’s conversation with Arbor’s CEO, James Weatherill, below. Here’s a quick summary of the three main strategic areas Mark talked about:
We’re very passionate about the breadth of provision we offer. We want the children to leave having real independence and confidence. Not only is the curriculum broad, but it’s delivered in an exciting, engaging and purposeful way.
The most important thing for us is educational autonomy. We create the culture of the organisation centrally, and do have some policies that are approved centrally, such as safeguarding, first aid, health & safety and HR. But all our educational policies are approved at a local level.
In the autonomy model, the role of the Headteacher is key. I’ve wanted to make sure that they have full ownership of everything that goes on in the institution they lead. It’s the middle leaders and the Teachers too, who are the engine room of the school. They own the curriculum content and the delivery of it. Because we serve schools across a diverse group of affluent and not so affluent areas, the curriculum needs to meet the needs of the local community that we serve.
The first thing I did as the CEO was put a very strong Headteacher performance management policy in place so that I can properly hold them to account, and that the metrics are shared and understood across the organisation. If we are pushing accountability, we need to reward so our Headteachers are eligible for discretionary bonuses every year of 2-8%.
Headteacher objectives and targets are linked to our trust goals: Learn, enjoy, succeed.
We make five two-day visits a year to review each of our schools. In the visits, we look at the school development plan, the safeguarding audit. The essential element is the learning review where we look at a particular piece of teaching and learning.
Our review cycle is modelled on “C.O.D.E.” (Challenge, Ownership, Dialogue and Engagement). Each school chooses one area to be reviewed on each year. For example, under “Ownership”, we review childrens’ engagement in their own learning. This drives a powerful teaching and learning conversation within our schools. I wouldn’t recommend doing the whole Ofsted review cycle, because if the Central Team has got leadership right, and we’ve got teaching and learning right in schools, everything else will fall into place.
Systems like Arbor MIS and Civica (our finance system) are invaluable to us as a Multi-Academy Trust, as they make those conversations a lot more focused. Five years ago, when I was going into schools with school improvement advisors, we’d spend a whole hour just trying to agree on a figure. Now we can immediately identify where the challenges are, for example persistent absences or behavioural issues. Arbor and Civia take us to the right places to focus our discussions and move the schools forward at pace.
As part of our school improvement strategy, we produce performance reports every term that are similar to the “school on a page” reports that some trusts use. These are two-page reports with RAG ratings covering attainment, quality of teaching and learning, leadership, attendance, safeguarding, behaviour, resources, staffing and engagement with the community. These consistent documents share the dialogue and increase visibility and accountability, bringing everyone into the conversation of improvement.
As a Central Team, we then plan strategic improvement interventions. As David Blunkett said “Intervention should be in inverse proportion to success.” We believe the system is improved by working on our worst performing schools.
Depending on internal capacity, we sometimes commission organisations such as Local Authorities or expert private providers to do a piece of work with a clear scope e.g. improve attendance in one of our schools.
We’re lucky to have an “Enrichment fund” which we use for certain passion projects across our schools, such as “Philosophy for Children” staff training, or hiring a Maths advisor five days a year for each school.
Our CPD offer is critical. We’ve developed new Headship, Senior and Emerging Leaders programmes. We run one trust-wide INSET day a year in one of our schools, with about fifty one-hour taster sessions in different areas e.g. having courageous conversations with parents. These really drive enthusiasm and give staff tools and techniques they can take back to their schools. They’re also aimed to continue to fire their enthusiasm for teaching and learning.
We also make sure we do safeguarding every year for new staff or those who need a refresher. It’s possible to do things centrally but you can’t do it as often and you need to use remote formats. Going forward, we plan to do 4 out of 5 of our collaboration sessions per year virtually.
Where we give our schools educational autonomy, the opposite is true in terms of how we’re structured financially. By managing finances centrally, I want to invest funds in the schools that need it the most. That’s not to say we pool school funding. Each school retains their budgets based on the school funding letter.
We’ve set three key financial performance indicators:
1) No school will go into deficit. Those who are in deficit have a goal to be out by the end of the year
2) Staffing should be no greater than 75% of each school’s budget. This has allowed us to prioritise our numbers of staff
3) 95% of invoices should have a purchase order. We want to ensure a formalised process where all committed spend at school level is raised in our finance system (Civica) as a purchase order. We then process all invoices centrally in weekly payment run across all schools. This ensures all our suppliers are paid against their payment terms
Since 2011, the MAT market has been growing and evolving exponentially. The question of proximity was only really brought up by Lord Nash when he recommended an hour’s journey time between schools. Hopefully the way we support our schools will give confidence that distance doesn’t have to be a barrier, but we take responsibility for our growth, not only in numbers, but in geography, and work hard to make sure we don’t have any true outliers.
A management consultant once introduced to me the rule of “10, 40 100”. If you think of these proportions applied to an organisation – it could be the number of employees, or the turnover – organisations with 10, 40 and 100 need to be run in very different ways and probably need very different CEOs. In our case, we think of this in terms of number of schools. Our aim is to grow to 15 schools, but if we’re successful at 15 and the trustees want us to grow to 40, that will be a very different business model.
However, where operational alignment works well for 15 schools, the question is, is it scalable within the 10, 40, 100 rule? I don’t know. If we grow, Regional Directors and hubs might be an option. We could also split the Finance Director role into four hubs. What we’d have to think about, however, is how we’d bring those hubs together to maintain consistency.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been thrown into web calls; we use Zoom for all of our conversations with Headteachers. Normally, having a meeting with a school can take two hours out of everyone’s time, so doing them virtually is really powerful. I think having a blend of the Internet and meeting in person is important – Zoom is something the finance and operations teams use quite a lot anyway, and have been for a few years now. But you can’t deny the power of personal contact. I think we’ll always continue our physical meetings with Headteachers four times a year.
Look out for more webinars in our series “Adapting to Change”, where we’re interviewing MAT leaders about how they’re adapting to partial school closures and all the changes that are happening at the moment. You can catch up on one of our recent webinars with Dan Morrow, CEO of Woodland Academy Trust all about “Nurturing Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing” here.
If you want to find out more about how Arbor MIS could help your trust work flexibly and remotely, get in touch at hello@arbor-education.com or 0208 050 1028. Or alternatively you can book a web demo here.
Over the last few months, schools have had to adapt to constant change, and keep their schools running without really knowing what the weeks ahead would hold. Although we still don’t have all the details, the latest Government plans suggest schools should prepare to partially reopen from 1st June, starting with Reception, Year 1, Year
Over the last few months, schools have had to adapt to constant change, and keep their schools running without really knowing what the weeks ahead would hold. Although we still don’t have all the details, the latest Government plans suggest schools should prepare to partially reopen from 1st June, starting with Reception, Year 1, Year 6, Year 10 and Year 12. A key question on everyone’s minds right now is how to design a school timetable that will adhere to social distancing and keep students and staff safe.
To help, our partners at TimeTabler have put together some practical advice on adapting your timetable for social distancing. Maggie, our Key Account Manager and former Timetable Manager at a secondary school, has summarised their advice below:
You’re also invited to join us in a webinar on Thursday at 3pm where we’ll be discussing timetabling in detail with our partners TimeTabler and The Onto Group. Click here to register!
If you just can’t get enough timetabling tips, you can read the full article on TimeTabler’s website. Otherwise, this blog should give you some food for thought.
1. Set different start and end times
Think about staggering your school start and end times to reduce contact in the school playground before and after school. This may seem straightforward, but bear in mind any implications for the local bus services, who may not be able to change their timetable. Instead of staggering by year group, you could even stagger by transport method, so that pupils who travel by bus arrive a little earlier or later than those whose parents drop them off in the car.
2. Set different break and lunch times
Spacing kids out at lunch might sound like a simple solution, but without careful planning it could mean that some staff end up going without a break. For example, if Mrs Jones teaches a Year 7 class before break and Year 10 class after break, but Year 7 now has a later break time than Year 10, Mrs Jones may have to go straight from one class to the next. (Note, if you’re using TimeTabler, you can use the ‘split-site’ feature to avoid this).
3. Limit group sizes by creating two school populations
As and when all year groups return to school, if social distancing is still a requirement, one option is to set a maximum group size (e.g. 15) so students can be spaced out in the classroom. However, in most schools, this would mean only 50% or less of the school population could be in school at a time, and therefore students would only receive 50% of their ‘normal’ teaching. In this case, schools could try splitting into two student populations and manage teacher coverage using a rota system.
Currently, the DfE is not expecting schools to introduce staggered returns or a rota systems, but without the ability to be flexible, many schools are concerned it will be impossible for them to follow social distancing guidelines.
If splitting your school into two populations is something you want to consider, we’ve put together some more detailed advice on this below.
There are two routes you might consider when splitting your student body:
Route 1: Split each teaching group within each Year in two At Key Stages 1-3, it should be fairly easy to split each class in two as students are generally all taking the same subjects. However, you might want to consider how you split the teaching groups, for example to maintain friendship groups, or to separate antisocial or disruptive pairs. Equally, you might actually decide to break up friendship groups to cut down on social interaction before and after class.
However, at Key Stages 4 and 5, it’s likely to be more difficult to create two populations of equal size by dividing teaching groups. With students attending lots of different combinations of subjects, each with different class sizes, it would be near impossible to coordinate options to have only one population at school at one time (see ‘Staggering populations’ section below).
Route 2: Group Years to make populations There are a number of different ways to do this, for example you might group Years 7, 9 and 11 into Population X and Years 8, 10, and 12/13 into Population Y. Alternatively, you might split by Key Stage – whatever makes the most sense for a balanced demand on specialist rooms, labs, equipment and so on. Note, with this option, individual teaching groups may still need to be split to stay within the size limit.
Staggering populations
Once you’ve split your population in two, you then need to consider how to manage how to timetable them. For schools considering reopening on a rota basis, there are a few different ways you could approach this:
If you go for B or C, you should bear a few things in mind:
Whatever your approach, it’s also important to consider whether there are sufficient transport links to get all populations to school on time, and whether parents’ work schedules are able to adapt.
TimeTabler is a fast, friendly and reliable computer program used by schools & colleges in over 80 countries to schedule their timetables. Designed to reduce the manual work involved in timetabling, TimeTabler leaves you with more time to apply your professional skill and judgement where it’s needed, to produce a timetable of the highest quality.
TimeTabler’s founder Keith Johnson is also the author of the standard ‘bible’ on Timetabling: ‘The Timetabler’s CookBook, which has now helped thousands of beginners to learn the Art of Timetabling, and many experienced timetablers to understand it in even more depth.
The good news is that TimeTabler integrates with Arbor MIS to give you the best timetabling experience. Use TimeTabler to schedule your timetable, then simply import it into Arbor’s MIS, using our inbuilt Wizard that guides you through the steps. Once your timetable is imported, you can make any changes or tweaks you need to in Arbor, so you don’t have to keep going back and forth. What’s more, as a trusted TimeTabler partner, Arbor customers can receive a discount on their TimeTabler licence.
If you’d like to find out more on the topic of timetabling for social distancing, Arbor and TimeTabler are taking part in an online debate hosted by our partners The ONTO Group on Thursday 21st May at 3pm. Click here to register!
Because Arbor MIS is cloud-based, you and your staff can work from wherever you need to. Find out more about the ways Arbor can help you work remotely and flexibly in our free webinar series today – check out the schedule here. You can also get in touch to book a virtual demo with one of our team – simply email hello@arbor-education.com or call 0208 050 1028.
LGfL (London Grid for Learning) is a not for profit organisation that provides secure internet connectivity and digital services to over 90% of London schools and many others nationwide. Special Projects Lead at LGFL, Richard Martin, has put together this blog with advice for schools on delivering remote teaching and learning during lockdown. Richard was
LGfL (London Grid for Learning) is a not for profit organisation that provides secure internet connectivity and digital services to over 90% of London schools and many others nationwide. Special Projects Lead at LGFL, Richard Martin, has put together this blog with advice for schools on delivering remote teaching and learning during lockdown. Richard was previously the CIO for the ARK academy group and Head of IT for the Girls’ Day School Trust. He is also a governor for a small primary school in Surrey.
Learn more about our cloud-based MIS
The challenges presented to schools during the Covid-19 lockdown have been diverse and complex. In my role as the Special Projects Lead for LGfL, I get to speak to many schools directly and have regular contact with organisations who provide on-site technical support for schools through the LGFL Digital Transformation Partner Programme that I run.
This has brought to the fore real challenges for schools that go beyond traditional teaching in the classroom. I am aware of many school heads and school leaders spending their time delivering lunches to vulnerable and disadvantaged pupils and regularly checking in with families to help them through the crisis. Schools also stayed open during the Easter holidays to look after children of key workers.
The challenge to move to new ways of working and delivering remote teaching and learning provisions almost overnight introduces a level of organisational change that would break most large corporate organisations, let alone a small primary school! At LGfL we have been supporting our schools and the wider education community as best we can, and have set up a website – coronavirus.lgfl.net – to provide advice, guidance and useful links.
As someone who has been promoting the use of tech, especially cloud-based tech, in schools for years, I am aware of the vast differences in approach and progress with digital tools across the school community. Some schools have embedded technology in their organisation very positively, whereas others for many reasons have made slower progress. A small but not insignificant minority of school leaders just did not see that tech would add any value. This view has not been helped by a multitude of failed IT initiatives in schools that were poorly thought out, highly expensive with little or no thought given to teacher training and effective, sustainable ongoing support.
Unsurprisingly, what we have seen in the schools we are engaging with during lockdown, is that those who had already started down the road to the cloud were the ones who have had the greatest success in sharing online content, lessons and materials. Schools starting from scratch in the few weeks before lockdown have struggled. One large London academy group who had already invested heavily in setting up and providing training on Microsoft 365 were quickly able to expand operations, including setting up 25,000 MS Teams sites in the days after the announcement of lockdown.
Similar successes were had with Google G-Suite in schools such as Poverest Primary in Bromley who were quickly able to switch to online provision. Paul Haylock, the Deputy Headteacher, explains below what they have achieved during lockdown:
“As a school already set up with Google accounts for both staff and children, we found the transition to online learning very easy to do. Within those last two days of school we managed to be completely set up and ready for the Monday lessons. […]
All our teachers have become so much more confident using Google Classroom and now using many features they weren’t before. Using Google Meet we have had staff meetings and year group planning meetings. Teaching presentations sourced from a whole host of website-based companies are shared in the classroom for pupils and parents to read, tasks are also shared in the same way and blank documents (mainly docs and slides) are given to each pupil for them to share their learning. This is then remotely handed in and reviewed by the teachers. Those who can only access on phones and small devices read the information but complete learning on paper and upload photographs for the teachers to see.
Teachers are preparing work as year group teams and posting on the Google Classroom so that each new learning is posted at 9am each morning. This is done via a time stamp so learning for a whole week can be prepared at any time but only appears to the child at 9am each day.
As school leaders we are using Google Forms with our parents to identify when children are coming into school and what the weekly free school meal arrangements are for each family. This means we can staff the building with the minimum number of staff for the children we have in the building, helping our staff to work from home and isolate as much as possible.”
Paul Haylock was able to achieve this comprehensive provision because he had put in the groundwork previously and worked closely with an engaged and competent support partner. You can see more on how LGFL work with schools here.
Another challenge amplified by remote learning is digital connectivity for disadvantaged children at home and ensuring there’s a solution for pupils who do not have access to a device or whose only internet provision may be via a parent’s mobile phone. Upon request from the DFE, LGfL are looking to procure devices and provide a safe, secure route to the Internet for those that need it.
The Covid-19 outbreak has been a horrible time for everyone and a tragic loss of life both in the UK and around the world. What we once perceived as normal is unlikely to return for a very long time, if ever, but I hope that some positive change will come out of our experiences in the past few months.
This time will teach us the true power of tech – if staff have the right support, tech can free them up and help them to adapt. If implemented in the right way, tech can improve and transform the way schools work so they can weather any storm. For example, the ability to set and mark work digitally should, in the long term, save teachers’ time and effort, and provide analytics on engagement far more easily. Teachers will now be much more confident using tools to teach children who are incapacitated, or for whatever reason cannot get into schools once they are opened. Sadly, for many of us, snow days will now be a lot less fun!
If you want to get up to speed with digital tools to use in your classroom, click the links below to access online learning resources from:
Arbor’s Head of Support, Emily Copsey, shares top tips for communicating with your school network during Covid-19 and partial school closures Our schools have been sharing with us that keeping in touch with parents – particularly the most vulnerable families – is top of their minds right now. School staff are relying more than ever
Arbor’s Head of Support, Emily Copsey, shares top tips for communicating with your school network during Covid-19 and partial school closures
Our schools have been sharing with us that keeping in touch with parents – particularly the most vulnerable families – is top of their minds right now. School staff are relying more than ever on parents and guardians to engage in their children’s education. Ensuring you can help parents to support their children starts with having a strong line of communication in place.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve worked with our schools to make sure they have everything they need in Arbor to keep in touch with their school community. Because Arbor’s MIS is cloud-based, staff have up-to-the-minute data about all their students and guardians at their fingertips, so they can communicate with the right people at the right time, from one place.
We’ve put together three top tips for engaging with parents – particularly during lockdown:
1. Make sure it’s not all doom and gloom
2. Plan your content in advance
3. Get something in the diary
Let’s break that down …
Alongside essential announcements, share some content with parents that might lift their spirits. This could be some fun weekend activities, craft projects or TV recommendations. We’ve seen some really uplifting posts from schools on social media – like this wonderful “We miss you” video from the Knockhall Primary Staff, and free yoga sessions from Avanti Schools Trust. You could even put a short newsletter together with a weekly roundup. We’re also delighted to share this poem sent by English Martyrs Catholic Primary School in their newsletter to their Year 6 students due to start their SATS this week. This is a great example of giving parents a way to talk about this difficult time and all the emotions surrounding it with their children.
Over the last few weeks, you’ve probably been sending parents lots of updates as you react to daily changes. But as we adapt to a new way of working, it’s a good idea to plan a schedule of content you want to share with parents. Whether it’s a weekly round up of the work set for each class, or a regular prompt to parents to send in their details, creating a content calendar can help your team to prioritise their workload, and make sure information reaches parents at the right time.
Many Arbor schools are having success with planning regular communications. Baxter College send weekly key worker surveys in Arbor so they can keep track of who to expect the following week. Find out more about how Baxter College use Arbor to send automated reports here.
Remember, one channel might not work for everyone in your community. In Arbor there are lots of different options you can use to share information with parents:
With less in-person contact with parents, it might be easy for some parents to drop off your radar. It can be useful to get a contact slot in parents’ diaries so they can plan around it. In Arbor, you can use Guardian Consultations to book one-on-one check-ins at a time that suits everyone.
For parents who you know are not online, you’ll have to contact them in a different way. In Arbor, you can keep these parents separate in a custom group so you can plan how to reach them separately – maybe through a phone call or a physical letter. Staff can pull up parents’ phone numbers easily in Arbor, or quickly create a letter template, which will automatically populate with each parents’ details, that they can print and send out.
To find out more about communicating with parents remotely, we’re running a series of practical support webinars on parental engagement, kicking off with a session all about using the Parent Portal on Monday 18th May – sign up for free here. The Arbor Community is another great place to find advice and best practice from fellow Arbor schools – join today for free.
For full guidance on how to use Arbor to manage your school during Covid-19, check out this guide on our blog.
Arbor’s CEO James Weatherill caught up with Vicky Harrison, COO at Hoyland Common Academy Trust (HCAT), about how she’s adapted to change over the last few weeks Why did you decide to move to Arbor? Last year we had significant growth, acquiring a large secondary school with over 2000 pupils and two more large primary
Arbor’s CEO James Weatherill caught up with Vicky Harrison, COO at Hoyland Common Academy Trust (HCAT), about how she’s adapted to change over the last few weeks
Last year we had significant growth, acquiring a large secondary school with over 2000 pupils and two more large primary schools, as well as working with a school in Barnsley as an associate MAT member. We were previously using Capita SIMS but it wasn’t working for us as an expanding trust, so that was the main reason we decided to move to Arbor in February.
In general, it’s not been about challenges, it’s been about successes. There were a lot of unknowns, so we had to react to the daily information from the Government. We’ve used the central team really well, which has freed up our schools to concentrate on the key worker kids, student wellbeing and chasing up vulnerable children.
Arbor helped us alleviate some of the burden on teachers and admin staff having to create staff rotas and track free school meal pupils, because we could access all the free school meal data via the MIS from our central office, and upload it to the Edenred site. To get the FSM data, I could easily log into everybody’s Arbor and create a simple report with the names of pupils, their contact numbers, addresses and email addresses, then send out a blanket message to them asking them for the supermarket of their choice. We’ve also created a whole raft of letters and emails centrally that we’ve rolled out across the trust. That just wouldn’t have been possible before.
One of the things we’ve found useful is that Arbor has been very reactive to the situation. You react as soon as something happens, and being a cloud-based system, updates are instantaneous. Like with the free school meals report, for example, it was there ready to go within a day. Also, initially we were doing the registers at a trust level – logging on every day and putting the hashtag code in but Arbor soon created a fix in the system that automatically put in the hashtags, which saved us another thing to think about.
The ability to use Arbor at home has been especially helpful to our teachers and headteachers. On Capital SIMS, we had to rely on something called Forticlient which teachers had to have installed on their laptops and didn’t always work. With Arbor, teachers have been able to log on at home to contact their class through a safe portal. It’s also been really easy to use for any staff who are “anti-ICT”.
It was really seamless. We made the decision to move to Arbor in February because we still had until the end of March with Capita SIMS. This was so if anything had gone wrong, we could still use Capita. Initially I was kind of dreading it. I was thinking all our data was going to be lost, and that we wouldn’t be able to find anything but it’s been really straightforward and simple and really supportive from the Arbor team as well. We were using SchoolComms and Parent Pay and initially planned to roll Arbor out in phases, but because staff found it so easy to use at a school level, we decided to roll with it from day one. Even if you’re not particularly ICT-savvy, it’s so straightforward and you can see where you’ve got to go to get the information you need. If you don’t, Arbor’s live chat and the Arbor Community forum have been really useful.
When we were using Capita SIMS, we relied on our local authority to write reports because it was so difficult to work out where you needed to go to get the information. Then when we wanted to send a communication to a parent, we had to log into a separate text messaging service and there was no log of communications. With Arbor, staff are able to readily access children’s contacts without having to rely on somebody back at the office. You can track what you’ve sent out (for example the messages to FSM families I’ve sent during Covid-19) and see if they get back to see you – and parents can see too. Then if you do need to chase it up, you can send a text out again.
Because the system is so easy to use, they’ve not needed much training. When we first rolled it out, we did initial training on core things like how to take the register, how to manage dinners etc. And they all picked it up. Then we just sent an easy, simple crib sheet to staff with how to contact Arbor if they needed. Prior to school closures, we did a staff briefing on how to contact parents and how to get the information they needed.
Our associate school is local authority maintained and still on Capita SIMS at the moment but because we’re having to keep contacting them to get all the information we need, we’ve decided to roll out Arbor for them while Covid-19 is going on. So it won’t really be a barrier to rolling out Arbor any further.
I don’t think so. If we’d have known about Arbor sooner, we’d have moved sooner!
At the moment everything is unknown. We don’t know what Boris is going to announce when he does. If he decides, for example, to send back families, Arbor will give us that ability to quickly find out what families we’ve got in school and what year groups they’re in, so we can concentrate on the timetabling. It’ll also mean we can do rotas flexibly, for example if staff are in on odd days.
If you’d like to hear from more MAT leaders about how they’re managing their schools remotely, we’ve got lots more free webinars coming up. Check out our schedule of remote working webinars here. We’ve got a special webinar this Friday with Jonathan Bishop, CEO at Cornerstone Academy Trust. Jonathan will be discussing how to make online education a success at scale. You can sign up here for Friday.
For all the guidance on how to use Arbor during Covid-19, it’s all here.
During this time of constant change for schools and trusts, we want to support schools with practical advice for adapting to new ways of working. Becca Watkins, our Operations Executive, has put together her top 3 tips to bear in mind for working remotely As an EdTech company, with almost a quarter of our employees
During this time of constant change for schools and trusts, we want to support schools with practical advice for adapting to new ways of working. Becca Watkins, our Operations Executive, has put together her top 3 tips to bear in mind for working remotely
As an EdTech company, with almost a quarter of our employees already used to working remotely, we’ve adapted quite well over the past few weeks, all things considered. Many things haven’t changed – our schools and trusts can of course still access Arbor’s cloud-based Management Information System (MIS) from anywhere. And our internal systems at Arbor are no different.
As we prepare to strap in for another few months of remote working, we’ve been reflecting on lessons we’ve learned so far and how we can keep up momentum and morale.
Whatever organisation you work for, whether that’s a school, trust, local authority or private company, you’re probably finding yourself working remotely or in a completely different routine now. From our experience at Arbor, we wanted to share some tips and tricks for working together in this new way.
Bear in mind – these are not just tips for working remotely – they’re tips for working remotely during a pandemic. There’s a big difference. Situations change daily, so you should allow your outlook and mood to change too. If you take just one tip from this blog – be kind to yourself.
My top tips for adapting to your new, virtual workplace are:
Something not many companies have faced before is how to keep their employees’ morale high during a time of widespread strain. The key to this is having a strong company culture and great communication. Most importantly, and the easiest thing to introduce, you can’t underestimate the value of having a laugh together. Here are some ideas to bring a little light-hearted relief:
Remote working is a new experience for us all, and being kind and thoughtful will go a long way, whatever your role or company. So take a breath, take a pause, and remember this is temporary. How we adapt to this crisis will serve us not just right now, but in the long term as well.
If you have any tips to add to Becca’s list, share them with us on social media using #ArborCommunity or on our Community Forum if you’re an Arbor school.
We’re running a webinar programme called “Adapting to Change: Managing Your Schools and Staff Remotely” for MAT Leaders to share strategies during lockdown and beyond. You can sign up for free by clicking the link.
As part of our programme of webinars – “Adapting to Change: Managing your Schools and Staff Remotely” – we invited Dan Morrow, CEO of Woodland Academy Trust, to share his strategies for staff mental health and wellbeing across his trust Dan discussed the responsibility of trust leaders to their staff, particularly during the Coronavirus crisis,
As part of our programme of webinars – “Adapting to Change: Managing your Schools and Staff Remotely” – we invited Dan Morrow, CEO of Woodland Academy Trust, to share his strategies for staff mental health and wellbeing across his trust
Dan discussed the responsibility of trust leaders to their staff, particularly during the Coronavirus crisis, and how he’s shaped policies around what makes a real difference to staff. We’ve put together the key takeaways from Dan’s fantastic talk and also included his slides below.
His main tips were:
The philosophy that guides Dan’s strategy is that “wellbeing isn’t something you can just tack on – it needs to be based in culture and action”. Since arriving at Woodland Academy Trust, a trust of four Primary schools in North Kent, Dan has brought wellbeing and mental health onto the agenda, replacing the previous “compliance mindset” which he says did not treat staff “as people first”.
He’s introduced initiatives such as wellbeing dogs, paid wellbeing days and CPD pathways staff can shape themselves, which have turned around the trust’s previously high level of staff absence, sickness and turnover rate. They’ve achieved this, Dan explains, by shaping wellbeing policies around their staff – which makes them feel heard and creates a reciprocal culture where “people want to get out of bed and come to work every day.”
“A contract is very important but as you see at the moment, it isn’t a contract that’s driving behaviour – it’s relationship, it’s duty, and it’s need”
The last few weeks have proven to Dan that the most important thing for his employees is their families and home life. As a leader, he believes you have to work your decisions around the reality of peoples’ lives. “It’s important we understand that sometimes life happens”, Dan says. With this in mind, the trust has re-examined their bank of policies to make them family-friendly and focused on workload. Making these adjustments has cut down on the number of staff calling in sick because of dependency issues or an issue that would have previously forced them to take unpaid leave.
In shaping wellbeing policies across the whole trust, Dan sent out surveys to his staff to make sure they were on board with everything he was proposing. “The worst thing you can do in wellbeing” according to Dan, “is to announce a strategy which you’re effectively doing to your staff and they may not actually want”. The surveys helped Dan’s team understand what would really make a difference to staff. For example, they had proposed wellbeing workshops but staff said the most valuable thing for them was more time. Dan’s team took this and introduced the idea of paid wellbeing days which staff can use for something that’s important to them, whether that’s to “attend weddings, the first day of their children’s school or a spa day with a friend they hadn’t seen for 30 years. Why not?”
An essential part of Dan’s leadership strategy is listening to his staff. When he started as CEO, he met with every member of staff to get to know them as individuals, ask them how they are and what they need. The aim of these conversations was to build the relationship on “a shared sense of culture and vision”. In a trust the size of Woodland, it was possible (and important to Dan) for the Executive Team to hold these conversations, but for larger trusts Dan suggests this may be done on a Division or Director basis. Dan plans to check in with staff in this way again when schools return after the Coronavirus crisis.
Woodland’s people-first approach extends to staff development, where Dan ensures that initiatives are geared towards what staff actually need and want to work on. Staff can now create their own CPD pathways and take secondments or work experience opportunities, which gives them “a voice in where their development is going”. Staff are also encouraged to take part in networking and to be active in discussions within the education sector on social media. 3 out of 4 of Woodland staff are now involved in Twitter or LinkedIn which, Dan says, demonstrates how staff feel more ownership over their career.
“Being part of a broader narrative of education has been really important for colleagues to find their place within our sector”
As part of the overall strategy at Woodland “WAT CAIRS” (Woodland Academy Trust Care, Aspiration, Inspiration, Respect and Stewardship), they believe that leadership should be “part of the solution to problems” that staff face in their lives. For this reason, a free employee counselling service is available for staff, which has been particularly useful during the difficult few weeks since the Coronavirus outbreak. They also run a wellbeing dogs scheme, which has been incredibly popular, both with children and staff. Initiatives like these are relatively cheap and help to “lift the spirits and make it feel like work has an aspect of care to it.”
And those costs have paid off. Staff retention has risen to over 95%, saving over £ 300, 000 in recruitment costs over three years. Days lost to sickness has reduced significantly, too, falling from 11% in 2015-16 to 3.1% last year, which has cut the need for external cover.
As a result of the Coronavirus crisis, Woodland Academy Trust has taken many lessons which will inform their wellbeing policy going forward. In this challenging time full of anxiety, Dan’s attitude is “it’s incumbent on us leaders now to ensure that staff understand that their wellbeing is being prioritised.” One of the immediate practical measures he took to put anxiety to rest was to reassure his staff around pay. Communication was also key – teams are encouraged to check in with each other regularly and new protocols and practices have been produced so everyone is comfortable working remotely. They’ve also provided close support for the more vulnerable members of staff.
Dan predicts that following this crisis, wellbeing and mental health are going to be higher on the agenda so leaders should “ensure staff have the professional capabilities, the personal resilience and the team around them to be successful”.
You can look through Dan’s presentation below which includes useful links for teachers to resources, podcasts and blogs to access during lockdown.
We have lots more webinars coming up in our programme Adapting to Change. The next few will be conversations between MAT Leaders and Arbor’s CEO, James Weatherill. For more details on what’s coming up, check out our blog.
If you have any questions about the webinars, or about how Arbor MIS could help your trust, you can get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education.com, or give us a call on 0208 050 1028.
To find out how to manage and report on the Coronavirus situation in Arbor, you can read our latest blog, or find practical advice on our Help Centre.
We know that moving to the cloud can seem like a big job. The benefits of switching MIS might be hard to picture when you’ve never undergone such a large change at your school. That’s why we want to make sure you have the right support at every step of the way. Getting to know
We know that moving to the cloud can seem like a big job. The benefits of switching MIS might be hard to picture when you’ve never undergone such a large change at your school. That’s why we want to make sure you have the right support at every step of the way.
Getting to know the 1,000 schools who have chosen Arbor has shown us that each school works in a unique way. This is also true of support – different schools will have certain styles that suit them best. The Arbor Support Team of experts and former teachers will guide you through rolling out your new system, getting started with core functions, through to driving impact from Arbor over a longer period of time. However, many schools have an existing relationship with a local support partner and we think it’s important that a move to Arbor doesn’t mean losing these ties.
To give schools freedom and flexibility, you can either choose our direct support, or from our network of local support partners across the country, including SIMS Support Units, who provide schools with expert training and advice on the use of Arbor.
Each of the 31 organisations we work with goes through in-depth training to become an accredited Arbor Support Partner. This involves:
Training:
Accreditation:
We’re thrilled to announce the following 10 Support Partners who have recently gained full accreditation. You might spot one of the providers in your local area!
Buckinghamshire County Council
ICT Schools Team, part of The Buckinghamshire Council, became our very first accredited Support Partner in March 2019. They provide telephone support and remote assistance on Arbor, a comprehensive training schedule and consultancy visits, along with technical support on admin and curriculum networks.
iCT4
iCT4 has been providing ICT services to schools since 2002. Originally formed as part of the Cornwall Council Learning Partnership, they now cover all of the UK, delivering full service IT solutions to the education, business and charity sectors. Their aim is to empower users to make the most of ICT.
OSMIS Education
OSMIS is based in the North of England and delivers quality training, support and consultancy services to schools, academies, Local Authorities and Multi-Academy Trusts. Their dedicated service desk is staffed by experts with decades of experience of working in schools. OSMIS seeks to work in a genuine partnership to help customers to realise efficiencies and to achieve the very best from their MIS.
Orbis
Orbis is a shared services partnership between Brighton and Hove City Council, East Sussex County Council and Surrey County Council. Orbis strives to deliver greater value for their customers by generating efficiencies and exploiting the benefits of sharing resources and technology.
You can read more about our partnership with Orbis in this blog.
Connect-Up
Connect-Up Support Services, based in Leeds, have over 25 years’ experience working in the Education sector. They cover a wide range of MIS, Admin office, Curriculum managed services and training for primary schools and trusts in the Yorkshire Region.
Herts for Learning (HfL) is the UK’s largest schools-owned company, providing a broad range of education and business services that support schools and educational settings to deliver improved outcomes for children. They work with 99% of Hertfordshire schools and over 3,100 schools and educational settings nationally, deploying 450 staff across all phases. HfL provides training, support and challenge to staff and governors at all levels.
We are working together with Herts for Learning, ICT4, OSMIS and Orbis to launch Arbor Lite – our new, essential MIS package for primary schools.
School Business Services (SBS)
SBS is a leading global specialist in providing support services and products to the education sector. They offer consultancy, training, service desks and managed services to schools and academies. Their core specialisms are Finance & Business Management, ICT, Management Information Systems (MIS) and HR Support.
You can read more about our partnership with SBS in this blog.
With over 150 years of combined experience in supporting Management Information Systems (MIS), turn IT on provide expert support to help schools use Arbor as effectively as possible. Unlimited telephone and remote support is available, as well as a wide range of on-site consultancy services.
You can read more about our partnership with turn IT on in this blog.
Wirral Software Support for Schools
Wirral Council’s Software Support team provides training, support and installations for Management Information Systems (MIS) and software used by schools and academies. Their training programmes are tailored to each school.
Cantium Business Solutions
Cantium Business Solutions works with schools and Multi-Academy Trusts to provide insight-driven solutions and tailored back office support. From integrated HR and Payroll, to innovative ICT solutions, Cantium aims to help schools drive improvements and create efficiencies and savings to transform how they work for the better.
If you’re new to Arbor and want to find out more about the support we offer, or about working with one of our Support Partners, get in touch at myteam@arbor-education.com. You can also call 020 8050 2086 if you’re a Primary, or 020 8050 2087 if you’re a Secondary.
To find out more about switching to Arbor MIS, you can arrange a free demo here or call us on 0208 050 1028.
Pool Academy is a secondary school in Cornwall with 650+ students. We caught up with Phil Jones, Head of Academy Services, who told us about some of the ways life at school has changed for the better since they moved to Arbor back in 2018 Can you tell us why you decided to switch to
Pool Academy is a secondary school in Cornwall with 650+ students. We caught up with Phil Jones, Head of Academy Services, who told us about some of the ways life at school has changed for the better since they moved to Arbor back in 2018
Can you tell us why you decided to switch to Arbor?
Was having a cloud-based system important for you?
Which area of the system in Arbor has saved you the most time?
How did you find the migration and implementation process?
Are there any other aspects of Arbor that you have found particularly useful?
Do you feel you get the support you need from the Arbor team?
Would you recommend Arbor?
Click here to find out about ArborFest: The New Features Edition, taking place virtually on May 5th, 2022. Last week we welcomed 100 School Leaders, Business Managers, Teachers and Admins from schools and MATs using Arbor across the country. It was a fantastic day of keynote speeches, breakout sessions and discussions on topics across the
Last week we welcomed 100 School Leaders, Business Managers, Teachers and Admins from schools and MATs using Arbor across the country. It was a fantastic day of keynote speeches, breakout sessions and discussions on topics across the school landscape – from assessment, behaviour and reporting, to parental engagement, managing Ofsted inspections and running an effective school office.
It was brilliant to hear from some of our 1,000 schools (of all shapes and sizes!) about how they are integrating Arbor MIS into all areas of their day-to-day life. Schools had the opportunity to network with staff members in the same roles as them at other schools – and to learn from each other and share best practice.
Lots of exciting discussions took place throughout the day, and we overheard some fascinating ideas shared about ways schools have transformed key processes (like using automatic interventions and creating custom reports) in Arbor.
For Lewis Dinsdale, Headteacher at English Martyrs Catholic Primary, Arbor’s Parent Portal has allowed his team to reach out to parents more effectively, as well as better understanding their data. He told us, “we finally have data behind how parents are engaging with our school!”
Martyn Essery, Deputy Headteacher at The Reach Free School shared how Arbor made managing their Ofsted inspection easy, because he was able to quickly drill down into the data and pull out trends to make useful crib sheets for staff. Martyn says “with Arbor we can evidence that we know what’s going on with our students and the impact of what we’re doing.”
For Julie Smith, Senior Administrator and PA to the Headteacher at Park Royal Community Primary, being able to schedule the weekly reports and automatic follow-ups has saved her office a lot of time and hassle.
After the event, our online community forum was buzzing with ideas being shared. If you’re an Arbor user, sign up today for free and learn more from fellow Arbor schools!
It was great to have so many schools together in one room, who all shared a collective passion for improving the lives of students everywhere. We loved meeting so many of our schools and finding out how you’re using Arbor to transform the way you work.
It was also a chance for the Arbor team to hear your feedback and show you some of the exciting new features we’re releasing this year. We had some great feedback on My Classroom, our new all-in-one classroom management tool, which brings seating plans, attendance and behaviour management in one place for the first time. Look out for that later this term!
Hear what a few more of our schools said about the day:
To find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform the way your school works, you can arrange a free demo here or call us on 0208 050 1028.
With large student bodies, hundreds of subject strands and lots of different staff responsibilities, secondary school data can be a complex web. To tackle it, you need a Management Information System (MIS) that gives your staff access to clear, visual data so they can take action instantly. At Arbor, we have a team with deep
With large student bodies, hundreds of subject strands and lots of different staff responsibilities, secondary school data can be a complex web. To tackle it, you need a Management Information System (MIS) that gives your staff access to clear, visual data so they can take action instantly.
At Arbor, we have a team with deep secondary school knowledge who have designed our MIS hand-in-hand with schools. Arbor MIS not only takes the hassle out of daily admin – it can also transform the way you work. The number of secondary schools joining Arbor is growing daily – three times as many switched to us last year compared to 2018. And they’ve joined a growing community of 1,000 schools and MATs who rely on Arbor MIS every day.
We’ve put together the top four things that secondary schools really love about Arbor MIS. Read more below about our BI analytics, behaviour reporting, exam management and interventions.
3 in 4 of our schools say Arbor has improved their data analysis
At Arbor we care about democratising data – our MIS gives staff visibility of the data they need every day. We have built “out-of-the-box” BI (Business Intelligence) into the fabric of our MIS which means staff can easily go deep into their data without needing to be a data expert. Through clear, detailed dashboards, Teachers, Heads of Department and Admin Staff can access, analyse and action the data that’s relevant to their role. You can also keep using the BI tools you love by pulling your Arbor data into a password-protected Live Feed that you can upload to another application. You can read more about Arbor’s BI tools in our blog.
4 in 5 say Arbor has transformed the way they work
Arbor MIS helps you manage behaviour more efficiently, with smarter evidence, and in a way that’s right for your school. You have the flexibility to define behaviour types and frameworks, and to set up automatic actions in response to specific incidents or behaviour types, helping you cut down on workload.
Thanks to Arbor’s built-in BI, your behaviour data is more powerful. You’ll be able to build up a rounded picture of each student and compare their behaviour with their class, year group or a custom group you’ve created. To find out more about how Arbor can transform behaviour reporting, check out our blog “A day in the life” by our Senior Partnership Manager and former Headteacher, Andrew.
Managing exams in Arbor MIS is hassle-free every step of the way – from preparation to results day. Unlike other exam management systems, in Arbor there’s no need to search for basedata on exam board websites – we pull it in automatically for you.
Here’s a bit more about how we make exams simple in Arbor:
Exams offering
Set up your exams offering with precise awards and unit codes at the start of the year. This stops any mistakes down the line. You can manage your mock or internal exams in Arbor in exactly the same way as GCSEs or A Levels.
Inputting entries is flexible – either the Exams Officer can input directly or Teachers can propose entries. Easily create an EDI Entries file or an EDI Amendments file with any changes. You can also input coursework marks (Centre Assessed Outcomes) and Forecast Grades, and create an EDI Coursework file.
Everything you need to set up your candidates for the year is all in one place – from assigning candidate numbers, UCIs, ULNs and Exam Access Arrangements. You can assign candidates to seating plans, allocate them to one or more exam rooms and create candidate timetables. Students can see their timetable in the student and parent portals.
Have visibility over invigilator duties, see how many invigilators are already allocated to each room and assign more if needed, print timetables and easily arrange cover.
Manage your results centrally – simply import your EDI Results files into Arbor and see a dashboard of the results which you can print. You can set an Embargo Period and Embargo Date to release results to staff. Teachers can see results on the student profiles, and students can through the student and parent portals.
Arbor MIS has built-in analysis of exam results but you can also export your data to an external spreadsheet, or to SISRA and 4Matrix if you want to do your own deeper analysis.
3 in 4 say Arbor saves them time
We know how important pastoral and academic interventions are in secondary schools. That’s why we’ve made interventions flexible and easy to use in Arbor MIS. Whether your interventions are ad hoc and informal, or highly formalised and structured, you can build your interventions your way. Arbor MIS allows you to create, track, monitor and cost the breadth and range of your wider curriculum. You’ll always stay on top of your students’ progress, attainment and wellbeing – plus you’ll be able to track where extra attention is needed.
You can read more about creating interventions in our blog “6 Steps to Create an Effective Interventions Strategy”. To read how Kate Ferris from Baxter College tailored her behaviour interventions in Arbor, check out her case study.
Our secondaries have been sharing with us why Arbor works for them – read how Suzanne Pike, Vice Principal of Sir Robert Woodard Academy, leads a secondary school with Arbor and hear from Kate Ferris, Data Systems Analyst at Baxter College, about how Arbor has led to a culture shift at their school.
To find out why Arbor MIS is perfect for secondary schools like yours, click here to arrange a free demo or call us on 0208 050 1028.
Kate Ferris, Data Systems Analyst at Baxter College, a Secondary Academy of 865 students in Kidderminster, talked to us about how Arbor’s Management Information System (MIS) has not only made admin at her school simpler and easier – it’s transformed the way they work. Since moving to Arbor MIS almost two years ago, there have
Kate Ferris, Data Systems Analyst at Baxter College, a Secondary Academy of 865 students in Kidderminster, talked to us about how Arbor’s Management Information System (MIS) has not only made admin at her school simpler and easier – it’s transformed the way they work.
Since moving to Arbor MIS almost two years ago, there have been a lot of changes at Baxter College; but the biggest shift has been much more focus on data. Kate’s role – Data Systems Analyst – has also changed in two years, now being much more focused on the MIS. The school has expanded their IT team in order to work smarter across the trust (Severn Academies Educational Trust) by upgrading systems and creating efficiencies. To support this, Baxter College needed a smarter MIS that gave them access to live, detailed data that could be pulled easily into clear reports.
Kate shared with us the top four reasons she loves using Arbor MIS at her school:
Arbor MIS allows Baxter College to dig into their data and do more with it. Easy-to-use, visual dashboards present relevant data to everyone who needs it across the school. As Data Systems Analyst, Kate has an overview of what’s going on across different classes, pastoral groups and staff teams, which means she has all the information she needs to jump in if necessary. Kate says she’s seen a culture shift at her school – now that the data is easy to understand, teachers are much more enthusiastic about engaging with Arbor MIS than the previous, clunky system.
Seeing their data in new ways has led to new discoveries. According to Kate, Arbor MIS unlocked their behaviour data and helped them to understand trends and patterns for the first time. Arbor has given them a “360 degree view” of behaviour across the school so they can intervene where they need to and never miss anything. The flexibility to tailor interventions is essential for Kate; she can define metrics that are important to her – for example, if a student is late three times, Arbor automatically alerts the right pastoral leads.
Having attendance, behaviour and progress data all in one place has made a powerful difference to Baxter College. Providing outstanding, all-round care to students is a core part of the school’s mission and having data at their fingertips in Arbor helps them see exactly where extra attention is needed. Staff can now drill down into all the important areas of a student’s school life and take everything into consideration to see how they’re doing.
Thanks to communication through the Arbor App, Kate has seen teachers and parents/guardians come closer together. As a large secondary school, Baxter College is keen to keep regular touchpoints with parents (2-3 emails and SMS messages per week) and the Arbor App makes this easy. Setting up automated communications, such as weekly attendance reports, is a great way for staff to let multiple parents know what’s going on with their child without the hassle of sending individual reports to each parent.
Reaching out like this wasn’t possible before the Arbor App. Getting up-to-date, personalised information to parents was only really possible at parents’ evenings. Parents now have a personal connection to the school and a sense of belonging to the school community. The gap is narrowing – currently 53% of parents at Baxter College have the Arbor App – so Kate’s goal is to encourage more and more parents to engage and feel comfortable contacting the school.
As Baxter College has changed, Arbor has adapted to their needs. With the flexibility to add and customise features, they have shaped the MIS into a system that works best for their school. Kate and her fellow staff members have integrated Arbor MIS across their day-to-day life at school and it is now at the heart of what they do.
At BETT last week, Tim and Stephen from the Arbor team gave a talk in the Tech In Action theatre about how Arbor MIS can transform the way schools work. We were pleased to see so many new faces in the audience but in case you missed it, you can see their presentation below which
At BETT last week, Tim and Stephen from the Arbor team gave a talk in the Tech In Action theatre about how Arbor MIS can transform the way schools work. We were pleased to see so many new faces in the audience but in case you missed it, you can see their presentation below which includes some handy video demos.
Tim and Stephen talked about how Arbor MIS makes your essential daily admin more powerful and less stressful, so you can get on and focus where it matters most. They went through four key ways Arbor helps teachers in the classroom – these were:
1. Teaching a lesson using My Classroom
My Classroom is an exciting new feature of Arbor MIS that takes the hassle out of preparing for lessons. With this all-in-one classroom management tool, you can organise your lessons and manage your class seamlessly – giving you time back to focus on teaching and learning.
2. Sending letters home to your students’ parents
Communication with parents is quick, easy and automated in Arbor MIS. For example, if an after-school club has been cancelled, you can send a message to all relevant parents instantly. Parents will get the message on the Arbor App on their phone, which will also let them know if there’s another session they can book instead.
3. Preparing for a meeting with a parent
Arbor MIS gives you the whole picture for each student in a few clicks. Simply search for a student and you can see a breakdown of their behaviour history, attainment, important medical and pastoral notes, absence patterns and how they compare with their classmates. From clear, visual dashboards, you’ll instantly see the most important areas to focus on in your next meeting with their parent.
4. Reviewing your class at the end of the day
After lessons, data on your whole form or class group is at your fingertips. From the week’s behaviour incidents, to how many students have done their homework, to their attainment over time – you can use data to intervene where needed, like creating a booster group, or emailing parents.
If you’d like to find out more about how our hassle-free, cloud-based MIS could help you act on everything important fast, so you and your staff can focus on what matters most, contact us. You can also book a demo by calling 0207 043 0470 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
You might have heard of Microsoft Power BI, Google Data Studio or Tableau. But what is Business Intelligence (BI) and what does it mean for schools and MATs? We’ve put together this handy guide to help you navigate all things BI. What is BI? BI stands for “Business Intelligence”. In simple terms, this means the
You might have heard of Microsoft Power BI, Google Data Studio or Tableau. But what is Business Intelligence (BI) and what does it mean for schools and MATs? We’ve put together this handy guide to help you navigate all things BI.
What is BI?
BI stands for “Business Intelligence”. In simple terms, this means the technology used by companies (or schools and trusts!) to analyse their data. BI tools are used to do these things:
How is BI used in schools and MATs?
Schools are swimming in data. But data is only helpful when you can learn from it. Without a way to understand their data so they can turn it into actions, schools can find themselves “drowning in data” (Education Technology). This is where Business Intelligence tools come in – they help SLT monitor the health and progress of their schools (e.g. Which of my schools is performing most highly?), inform strategic decisions (e.g. Which subject should we invest in more next year?) and report to governors, parents and trustees.
Why are schools using external BI tools?
Schools and MATs are turning to external BI tools more and more in order to analyse their data. This is usually because their management information system (MIS) doesn’t give them an easy way of visualising their data in the way they need. BI tools free schools from having to manually build reports in spreadsheets which is time-consuming and doesn’t present an overall picture. For multi-academy trusts especially, BI dashboards allow them to see a “single source of truth” in order to monitor and assess the performance of all their schools, rather than having to piece together and compare the data themselves.
The size of your trust will affect the type of data analytics and BI tooling that’s right for you. Larger MATs may have the resources to employ data and software professionals to create a bespoke BI solution. We’ve put together a diagram below showing how the size, degree of centralisation, existing systems and data strategy of a MAT might affect what they need from BI.
The problem schools are facing with external BI products is they’re expensive, complex and require setup by trained staff. Many tools don’t work with schools’ existing management information systems, which means it takes a long time for staff to take actions on the data. Plus, as most tools are not suited to groups of schools, MATs have to rely on products such as Microsoft Power BI to bring all their data together.
Arbor’s BI solution
At Arbor, we have built “out of the box” Business Intelligence solutions into the fabric of our MIS through clear, detailed and relevant dashboards. This means there’s no need for configuration or setup – everyone working at your school can see and manipulate the data they need in a few clicks. Plus, you can go deep into the detail of your data and take actions without needing to be a data expert or to hire one!
What makes Arbor different?
Whilst Arbor provides detailed, powerful, “out of the box” analysis for schools, we also know that you sometimes need to analyse data outside of your MIS. That’s why Arbor MIS supports all major BI providers, giving you the freedom and flexibility to choose and define your own BI approach for your group. It’s easy – using Arbor “Live Feeds”, you can export live data from Arbor MIS into your external BI tool.
We’ve built powerful yet simple Business Intelligence into Arbor MIS, Group MIS and Arbor Insight. You can book a demo today or come and chat to us at BETT – we’re at stand NM30. We’re also hosting lunch (on us!) at Tapa Tapa restaurant (on the DLR walkway outside the ExCel centre) – sign up for your free spot here.
We’re delighted to announce that turn IT on is now an accredited support partner for Arbor MIS. Turn IT on’s team of experienced experts work in partnership with schools to maximise the potential of ICT for the benefit of pupils, teachers and management groups. Many of their team have been teachers and all of them
We’re delighted to announce that turn IT on is now an accredited support partner for Arbor MIS.
Turn IT on’s team of experienced experts work in partnership with schools to maximise the potential of ICT for the benefit of pupils, teachers and management groups. Many of their team have been teachers and all of them understand the huge challenges that modern schools meet in the face of an ever-changing landscape.
With over 150 years of combined experience in supporting Management Information Systems, turn IT on can ensure the effective and enhanced use of Arbor to give you peace of mind that your funding is correct, Ofsted data is ready and expert support is on hand whenever you or your team need it.
Turn IT on’s experts know every aspect of Arbor and their support covers key areas including census, attendance, behaviour, admissions, school dashboard, student & staff profiles, assessment & summative tracking, reports & dashboards, custom report writer, communications, teacher app, SEN, timetabling, exams, and cover.
Arbor MIS (Management Information System) is the hassle-free way for schools and trusts to get work done that schools and trusts love to use.
We’ve already helped more than 900 schools and MATs make the switch to our smarter cloud-based MIS. With human support at every step!
We completed a full-day accreditation test with turn IT on which included:
Following a successful day, we’re thrilled to say we are now working together to give schools the option to switch to Arbor MIS whilst keeping their trusted support team at turn IT on. Working with Arbor and turn IT on together gives your school:
To find out more about switching to Arbor with the turn IT on MIS team, contact turn IT on through their website, by email to office@turniton.co.uk or call 01865 597620 (option 6).
We often get asked by schools and MATs what’s better – choosing several ‘best-of-breed’ software tools, or one tool that promises almost all the functionality you need? Our CEO, James Weatherill, asks, are there any shades of grey in-between? Jack of all trades, master of none When software was in its infancy in the 90’s
We often get asked by schools and MATs what’s better – choosing several ‘best-of-breed’ software tools, or one tool that promises almost all the functionality you need? Our CEO, James Weatherill, asks, are there any shades of grey in-between?
Jack of all trades, master of none
When software was in its infancy in the 90’s and early 00’s, companies and schools tended to choose ‘one-stop-shop’ systems that could do virtually all the tasks a school needed to run itself. The advantage was lower cost, higher central control and simplified management. But this came at a cost of being tied to one supplier, meaning prices often went up with little product improvement, less flexibility and local variation on customisation. There is also the simple adage that whilst big systems have a lot of functionality, they tend to do more things less well than specialist tools.
Businesses and schools are now generally moving to best-of-breed strategies which pick a few core systems and integrate these with a wider suite of specialist apps, reducing implementation time, giving greater flexibility and higher levels of functionality. This has all been made possible by a shift to the cloud, where integration can be online and seamless (at least in theory). However, as we’ll show, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Your culture and strategy should dictate your systems choice
The answer to what type of system to choose in my view depends on what you want to achieve as a school or MAT, as well as the culture you’ve set. As I’ve written about before, MATs should be intentional about the culture they want to create, as this will often drive how they make decisions. This is no different for schools and how they select systems, as the diagram below shows.
A) Low need for control + Low complexity = define data standards If you’re a school or small trust that typically gives high agency to staff, then you might not need to standardise much except for how to use the systems you’ve procured and the data you want to get out. Choosing best-of-breed tools that fit the needs of your individual school (or schools) works well here, with the caveat that you’ll need a plan for how all the systems integrate (don’t forget or underestimate this step or you’ll be swimming in a data soup!).
B) Low need for control + High complexity = collectively agree core systems; staff choose bolt-ons If you’re a large school or trust, you may like to give an element of agency to your staff to choose systems that can be tailored to the local context of the school. Yet, due to your size, a certain amount of system standardisation is important or there would be chaos. For these types of schools or trusts, it works well to clearly define your non-negotiable core systems (often involving many staff in procurement decisions), then delegate non-core systems to staff to allow variation according to need.
C) High need for control + High complexity = several monolithic systems, centrally controlled If you’re a large school or MAT involving multiple phases spread across many sites or geographies, who needs high control of the systems staff use (perhaps due to cost or culture), you may prefer more monolithic systems. This approach involves selecting fewer, larger applications and perhaps even hosting them on-site.
The advantages of larger systems are simplified vendor management, cost savings, support simplicity and data standardisation. However, this is at the expense of flexibility (being tied to one vendor makes ‘rip-and-replace’ harder), functionality gaps (the vendor is likely to have less product depth in specific workflows) and more difficult implementation (more tools have to be replaced).
D) High need for control + Low complexity = standardised core systems; staff choose bolt-ons If you’re a school or MAT of medium size and scale, a hybrid approach of leadership works well with core non-negotiable systems being centrally defined and school staff choosing bolt-ons. This preserves an element of standardisation whilst allowing staff agency over the systems that might be more appropriate to their context. The trick is ensuring the core systems chosen (typically MIS, finance, HR, assessment) work well together so you can retain flexibility.
A bit about how Arbor can help…
Arbor MIS can tick all the boxes above, as we have a wide range of functionality that caters to primary, secondary, special schools and MATs of all shapes, sizes and cultures. However, we know that every school and MAT has their preferred and loved applications and we want to play well within that ecosystem.
We believe choosing best-of-breed software beats monolithic tools that are a ‘jack of all trades’ but master of none, so our focus is being the best MIS that provides all staff with smart information so they can make better decisions, whilst reducing unnecessary admin tasks.
To discover the hundreds of software partners we work with click here. Get in touch and find out how we could help your school or MAT by emailing me at james@arbor-education.com. Look forward to hearing from you!
Our CEO, James Weatherill, opened our fourth MAT Conference in Manchester by talking about the growing sense of confidence in the MAT sphere as trusts become better at coping with constant change. We’ve transcribed his presentation below! This is the fourth conference in a series we’ve run to try and bring together MAT leaders from
Our CEO, James Weatherill, opened our fourth MAT Conference in Manchester by talking about the growing sense of confidence in the MAT sphere as trusts become better at coping with constant change. We’ve transcribed his presentation below!
This is the fourth conference in a series we’ve run to try and bring together MAT leaders from all around the country to exchange good ideas. Today, we’ll talk about your successes, as well as advice on what to avoid, and you should take home some practical, implementable tips to share with your wider central team.
The reason why we do this kind of event is this: we’ve been travelling around the country and speaking to each of you, and we kept on finding that we were being asked the same questions. What this generally meant was that people weren’t exchanging ideas between each other. So, we want this to be a safe space for you to come together and hear about what different MATs are doing, both well and not so well, so you can avoid mistakes and exchange good ideas.
I think in the early formation of any industry, it’s really important that people get together and talk a lot, so that’s the basic format for today. Hopefully you’ll go away having learned something new, having met some peers, having built some good relationships and ultimately having new ideas to take back to help your MAT scale better and more sustainably. That is the goal of today.
We try and come up with a different theme for each conference, and for this I chose “getting better and coping with constant change” – I’ll run you through my rationale for that. This is a quote I came across that illustrates my point by Dorothy Parker, the American poet and author:
“In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.
But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.”
What’s nice about this is that I think of multi-academy trusts as a group, and as people we’re still at the start of a journey. I think that journey is now a few years in. The feeling I get from going around and meeting lots of multi-academy trust is that we’re at the end of the youth phase, where perhaps we were all finding our way, listening to what schools had to say and giving quite a lot of autonomy around decision making. I’m sensing a growing confidence in each of you about having tackled the basics.
We’re now moving on to some perhaps more cultural, personal things that you’re trying to tackle in your trusts – more specific issues. Some of the bigger,systemic problems are being tackled, like: “How do we scale? What size do I need to be? What do my staffing structures look like?” These issues are broadly being solved (though not completely) and we’re moving on to the second stage where there’s this growing confidence.
The last line of the Dorothy Parker quote perhaps doesn’t resonate with everyone. You can’t quite be that direct with everyone. And perhaps that’s too much confidence. But, nonetheless, I think we’re somewhere in the middle of those two verses now as trust leaders.
Coping with constant change
The MAT backdrop has been one of massive change, huge change, political change, funding change, technological change – so much more in the last five years than I’ve seen for a very long time. I think as CEOs, you’ve got better at coping with that. You start off with one or two schools, you get better, you get hit by a few problems and your goal is trying to stay on track without falling off (the GIF below illustrates this process quite well!). I think people are steadily getting better at riding that wave of change and pushing through progress in that way.
Group MIS: One system to streamline all data and workflows
So a little bit about Arbor: we’re a Management Information System for schools and trusts. We work with over 800 schools and 75 MATS. We have a group MIS which you can learn about here.
Fig 1: Arbor’s cloud-based MIS for MATs is the hassle free way for trusts to get work done
Our Group MIS pulls all of your data together into one one place and allows you to get a MAT-wide view benchmarked against national data as well. You can drill down all the way from a MAT level. It gives you out of the box analysis on regions, on your primary and secondaries and you can go all the way from MAT level to student level – with no setup required as long as your schools are running our MIS system. It also allows you to work on how you can operate better as a MAT. Group-wide workflows, for example, like setting assessment policy centrally and pushing them down to schools, mean you can get work done without having to go into each individual school’s MIS.
School MIS: A hassle-free way to streamline your schools
We also run a school MIS. This is a simple, smart system that brings all of your data together at the school level. This video shows us an overview of behaviour and reform:
Fig 2: Arbor’s cloud-based MIS for schools
So, you can start to see your data making sense, both from a student level and on a school level. Again, this comes with out of the box analytics and you can drill down and action things. The goal is about automating all of the admin in your school to save your staff time, bringing all of your data together and pointing your staff to the children who are most in need.
Over 1,000 schools will switch MIS this year
There’s been a lot of schools switching MIS. Over 1000 schools have switched this year. We’re slightly different as a company in that we care about the impact that we have. We have a board and it’s my responsibility to report to them. These are the metrics that matter to them:
The answers to all of these questions is shown in the data below, which is taken from the 800+ schools who use Arbor:
Fig 3: At Arbor, we have specific impact metrics that help us make sure we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing
Over 800 schools and 75 MATs have switched to Arbor
We work with lots of different types of MATS:
Fig 4: A slide from James’ presentation showing the different types of MATs Arbor works with
We work with MATs from the very large (over 60 schools) all the way down to the very small (1 or 2 schools). That’s where some of the learnings come from today. At different stages of the journey, you have different problems and there’s different ways of solving it. We’ve seen a lot of it. Take the Isle of Man, for example, which has its own government – they have very different problems. So hopefully, we’ll be able to play back some of these learnings today.
Centralising data and your back office
We also have lots of partners that we work with. We don’t just do the job ourselves:
Fig 5: A slide from James’ presentation showing how we work with our partners
We have two sponsors today: P.S. Financials and RS Assessment. We integrate with both and we’ll talk about that today. You’ll find out how you can get a holistic overview of all of your students and how you can see your benchmark assessment data alongside your attendance and behaviour in Arbor. The whole goal is around centralizing the back office, so that everything works seamlessly.
School Autonomy vs MAT Centralisation
In previous conference, we’ve talked about the general theme of, “Where do you sit on the balance between school autonomy and MAT centralisation?” and a few speakers today will talk about their experiences with this.
Fig 6: A slide from James’ presentation showing school autonomy vs MAT centralisation amongst different MATs
We’ve run surveys and some of you will have been called about where you sit on the scale. These green blobs show a sample of where this room sits on each of these different areas. I’ve also highlighted in light green where the moving average is. So, what about MATs across the country? How centralized are they across all of these different things? The picture that’s emerging is that it’s kind of settling down. People know what they know and now they’re moving forward more slowly.
The first few conferences that we did, when we benchmarked this data, it was all over the place. Some people were more centralized, some people were less. But what we can see now is that assessment models in primaries and curriculum in primary-led MATS are being more centralized.
In secondaries, it’s still a way off. Governance has been pretty highly-centralized across MATS, and there are different models for that. It’s the same with school improvement – sometimes there is a function set up for that centrally. Some MATS around the tables here are doing that particularly well. Pedagogy less so – left up to the schools to a degree.
But in terms of policy systems and back office, we’re moving towards greater centralization and control at the MAT level. And this is an evolving picture. So we keep on playing this back to the room, but I think the trend has always been more to the right. MATs are taking more ownership of the more non-teaching elements so that schools can focus more on the business of teaching.
Beacons of excellence
There are beacons of excellence in this room. A question we tend to ask you is: “What one thing you do particularly well in your MAT, and what one thing could others perhaps learn from?” These are a few snippets from the calls that we had with some of the people sitting here.
Fig 7: Quotes from MATs about what they do well
The interesting and quite rewarding thing here was that lots of people are talking about their culture being something that they do particularly well. Another common theme is being confident to share the collective idea of our Trust, not the Trust – a shared, authentic identity across all schools. Safeguarding is another one, and one MAT talks about their approach to people(i.e. how HR and talent management can be a competitive advantage). We’ve also heard about how culture can be used to attract schools.
The Biggest Challenges
So now, onto challenges. And there are loads. That’s also what today is about:
Fig 8: Quotes from MATs about some of the challenges they face
One challenge is around parental engagement amongst vulnerable students. Also systems, and integration in a general sense. Head teachers who are wedded to how things used to be done, rather than how things are done now, perhaps? And finance is an ongoing problem. These are some common challenges that I hope will ring a few bells with a lot of you. That’s why I want to give all of you time throughout the day to explore the challenges that each of you have in your respective trusts. That’s it for me – thanks for listening!
If you’d like to find out more about how our hassle-free, cloud-based MIS could help transform your MAT, contact us. You can also book a demo by calling 0207 043 0470 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
Ever wondered what secondary schools like about Arbor? We interviewed Suzanne Pike, Vice Principal of Sir Robert Woodard Academy, to find out why her school chose to switch MIS, and how Arbor helps with the day-to-day running of the school. What made you choose Arbor? We were previously a SIMS school and it wasn’t
Ever wondered what secondary schools like about Arbor? We interviewed Suzanne Pike, Vice Principal of Sir Robert Woodard Academy, to find out why her school chose to switch MIS, and how Arbor helps with the day-to-day running of the school.
What made you choose Arbor?
We were previously a SIMS school and it wasn’t online; we were constantly running updates, and it was quite clunky – we needed to streamline. It’s fair to say we were a fairly new leadership team, with a big job to do in terms of school improvement. We recognised that although we had a large amount of data, we weren’t using it as smartly, flexibly and efficiently as we could be. It was hard to interrogate. We were trying to set up the processes that really run a school, and those have to be based on data and reliable workflows. We recognised that Arbor could help us achieve that. The big benefit has been being able to hold much more information – around communication, assessments, everything – all in one place, and then being able to cut that data in different ways.
Could you give us a bit of your Trust’s background moving to Arbor?
We’re a part of Woodard Academies Trust – “WAT”. At the moment, two schools are on Arbor. When we moved we had a need to do it and told the Trust we wanted to, and the other school, Polam Hall, also had a need as their contracts were coming to an end. The remaining schools were happier than we were with the legacy system at the time, so we moved first understanding they might move later.
Polam Hall migrated after us, so they were able to come down and do some training with us before they moved. We have contact with them, not on a day to day basis, but there can be similarities and things to compare notes on. Ultimately they’re very different though, as a brand new all-through, so they started a bit smaller in terms of functionality and have been able to set things up in different ways.
We staggered how we adopted our modules to make things easier for staff, and are both now at the point where we’re looking into how we do our assessments and will do some joint training with them around that soon.
What are some of the best features you’ve seen in your time with us?
The App has been very successful. We’re trying to get everyone on board with that as part of our new communications strategy. We love the idea of sending a push notification to a parent’s phone, and if they haven’t checked the App after an hour they automatically get an SMS instead – that’s going to be very useful.
We fully utilise the behaviour system in all its glory – we use all the behaviour workflows, it’s so customisable. We’ve unfortunately had to do a couple of exclusions recently, which is never easy, but is much easier when you have all the right information. It’s also useful having all the information in one place for looked after children, when you’re dealing with so many different authorities.
We have got quite clever with the reports, live-linking them to pivot tables in Google sheets. Certainly in attendance tracking and behaviour we’ve got some funky ways of breaking down the information that’s really pertinent to how we work in our school. We want to get those going with our assessments too – in fact we have a meeting about getting that started later today!
What saves you the most time in your role if you compare it to your previous system?
Communication. Having parents being able to see everything live – report cards, timetables, interventions – makes my job that much easier in terms of raising standards. Now they can be involved as stakeholders in getting their kids to work harder.
We recently set up all of our extra-curricular clubs and trips on the MIS and that’s been great from the perspective of logistics, with registers and student lists all live on the site, and obviously the communication links as well so that parents can update permissions and know what’s happening. When Year 7 came in with 150 more students this year than last it was going to be a massive workload, but the Parent Portal made it a really smooth transition. No “oh when does sign-up for this open? How does this work?” – they can see everything they need.
Now we’ve set up academic interventions for year 11s and year 13s, and we’re going to move all our interventions into the MIS, as again, the links with communication are really powerful.
Do you have any advice for similar schools (or MATs with similar schools) who are switching MIS?
I would say map out all your integrations beforehand, and be very mindful of what you spend time on. If the essential functionality you want can be achieved within Arbor, you’re better off moving it in. Arbor can do so much – you should be clear on what you want to achieve, what is essential, and what is desirable. Scaling the system up over time and having waves of project planning was really helpful for us. Over time you can make your system more sophisticated, and Arbor or other schools that use it can help you prioritise. You might say, “I want this third party system; it gives us what we need,” but does it really?
There’s never a dull moment in Education, but this term really has felt action-packed. So as you settle into the season of Nativities, surrounded by paper cut-out snowflakes and glitter trampled so deep into the carpet it will still be there in June, let us give you a festive roundup of what’s new with Arbor’s
There’s never a dull moment in Education, but this term really has felt action-packed. So as you settle into the season of Nativities, surrounded by paper cut-out snowflakes and glitter trampled so deep into the carpet it will still be there in June, let us give you a festive roundup of what’s new with Arbor’s partner network!
We’ve got new names to introduce, milestones to celebrate, and a couple of teasers for what’s coming up in 2020. Starting with…
(Image 1: Our new badge for officially accredited Arbor Partners)
1. Three new partners became accredited to support Arbor MIS
We’ve been out and about this term, visiting partners from Leeds to Brighton to put their teams through their paces on Arbor MIS. It’s been fantastic to see the level of skill and knowledge they’ve all brought to their accreditation days and unsurprisingly, they all passed first time! Please give a warm Arbor welcome to:
The Orbis Partnership is a shared services agreement between Brighton and Hove City Council, and Surrey and East Sussex County Councils. The Orbis team have decades of expertise in finance, business operations, HR and IT – so schools and academies can get all your support from one place.
SBS is a leading specialist in school support services, offering a wide range of MIS services to suit schools’ finances, staff and vision. They work with over 1000 schools across England, with strong hubs in London, the South West and the North.
Connect-Up provide a wide range of MIS, Admin and Curriculum managed service support across Yorkshire. Everything from small cabling jobs to total, integrated support for Schools and MATs – and all with a friendly, local approach.
We’ve still got one more accreditation day to squeeze in this week – so good luck to the team at Turn IT on!
2. We welcomed 7 new partners on board
Our network is always growing and it’s been great working with so many new partners this term, including:
Keystone MIS – expert SIMS and Arbor support based in Hull, but with over 200 customers nationally
Education Lincs – Dedicated local IT and MIS support based in Lincolnshire
Code Green – the fantastic MIS support team working out of Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council
Pennine Education – Expert MIS support and training in Oldham and the North West.
3. We started work on deep integrations in areas like Safeguarding, Finance and Budgeting
We’re always looking for ways to make things simpler for schools, which is why we integrate for free with a whole range of well-loved apps, from door entry systems to payments providers (click here for a full list!). This term, we started working on a few new ones – here’s what’s coming up in 2020:
CPOMS – a user-friendly safeguarding app used by over 10,000 schools in the UK. Basic student and staff data already syncs from Arbor to CPOMS, but we’re now working to sync safeguarding notifications and statistics too. This will give you a single, clear picture of your students’ pastoral and education data.
PS Financials – the Finance system used by 60% of all Multi Academy Trusts. We’ve partnered successfully with PS Financials to deliver three national MAT conferences and we’re now starting work on a technical partnership too. No spoilers for now, but watch this space!
SBS online – our partnership with School Business Services got off to a flying start this year – we’ve not only teamed up with their software support team (see above), but we’re also planning to integrate with their intuitive web-based budgeting software used by over 1,000 schools.
4. Our partners co-hosted 5 local Arbor MIS events with us, from Kent to the Wirral!
As well as big national conferences like BETT, we also love to come and meet schools in their local area for smaller, more personalised events. For schools new to Arbor, this is a great chance to see a demo of the software, ask questions, meet schools already using it and get advice on switching.
We try to do this in partnership with local companies who understand what’s important to schools and can advise them impartially. We therefore owe a big thank you to JSPC, Educa IT, Studysafe and Wirral Borough Council for hosting sessions with us this term in West Sussex, Kent, Rotherham and the North West.
Look out for early 2020 events in East Sussex, Hampshire, Westminster and Northamptonshire.
5. We launched our BETT Partner Lounge
Earlier this week, we opened booking for our annual School and MAT Leaders’ Lounge and our Partners’ Lounge at BETT 2020. The main arena can be overwhelming, so if you want to have a more relaxed chat about moving to Arbor MIS or partnering with us, the Lounge is the place for you. Drop in for a glass of wine and a bite to eat at Tapa Tapa restaurant, just outside the Western Gateway entrance to the ExCel, from Wednesday 22nd to Friday 24th January. Book your free spot by clicking on either of the links above – look forward to seeing you there!
We’re really proud of everything we’ve achieved with our partners this term and look forward to even more exciting projects in 2020. Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more about any of the partners mentioned, or about becoming a partner yourself. And if you’ve read this far, thanks – treat yourself to a mince pie!
At Arbor’s MAT conference on 8th November in Manchester, Debbie Clinton, CEO, and Vince Green, Principal and Regional Director for Education, shared their experiences of turning around Academy Transformation Trust over the past year. To read part 1 of their presentation, click here. It’s scary, isn’t it? How these edifices can collapse really, really quickly in
At Arbor’s MAT conference on 8th November in Manchester, Debbie Clinton, CEO, and Vince Green, Principal and Regional Director for Education, shared their experiences of turning around Academy Transformation Trust over the past year. To read part 1 of their presentation, click here.
It’s scary, isn’t it? How these edifices can collapse really, really quickly in our sector. So how have we fixed it? What have we actually done? I suppose we’ve done a lot of obvious stuff, really. First, I went on a grand tour – it had to be done. I don’t know how you can do it any other way as a new Chief Executive. You’ve got to get into these academies and get to know them, smell them, breathe them – just to feel what they feel like.
So I said to the principals, “I’m going to carry out 22 section 8 inspections over a two term period.” That went down well. But it was actually really, really helpful. I did this because, with the absence of effective school improvement strategy and an effective MIS, I didn’t have intelligence I could trust. I didn’t feel that I could trust what I was being told across all 22 academies. On reflection it was useful because you see things that vary in quality from superb to rubbish.
It’s important to decide this: what are our priorities? A delivery plan was absolutely vital, because there was no culture to hold people to account whatsoever. While I am surrounded by lots of talent in the league of Vince, one of the problems that I had was that the absence of effective systems meant that quality assurance just wasn’t happening on a routine basis.
So the executive leadership team complete an annual delivery plan and decide the following: here’s our strategic priority, here’s what I am going to do and here’s what that will be. Now, if only getting the structure right led to rapid school improvement – wouldn’t we all be happy?
I appreciate that I’m now in year two. Year one was spent doing that. And now in year 2, my trustees will say, “Okay then. Let’s see the impact of these significant changes.” It’s a fair enough question. But I hope what you see is a coherence; an approach to regionalisation; an approach to mirroring directorates that look like each other, which helps in terms of becoming one entity.
(Image 1: A slide taken from Debbie Clinton’s presentation showing how she will act on her three year strategy to improve Academy Transformation Trust)
People development is perhaps an obvious thing to bring up, as is the urgent need for the assessment of safeguarding and risk. We’ve appointed a Director of Safeguarding because we didn’t have one before. One of our schools went into category last academic year on the back of a very serious safeguarding criminal case. We’ve moved on quite a bit since then, but one of the reasons for it was that we just really weren’t understanding the complexity and the vagaries of safeguarding. I think Ofsted upped their safeguarding game remarkably in the past 12 months (about time, mind) and we don’t always agree with them, but actually, in light of that, it means that someone’s got to be driving safeguarding.
Governance is also really important. Our governance trust board had been radically reformed with the DFE’s involvement before I got there. They’re very impressive. Local academies were all over the place – outstanding through to absent, basically, because there’s no approach to governance. There’s no coherent approach to understanding what governance means in our trust.
We appointed a head of corporate affairs which was crucial. Neutrality is also really important. I know that Andy will happily whistleblow about me at anytime because he’s very clear that he is accountable to the chair of the trust. So, although he’s a salaried employee, he operates in a neutral way.
We’ve taken a lot of time to think about the style with which we bring about the recovery. This is perhaps a bit blindingly obvious, but actually I’ve inspected too many MATS and schools to know it isn’t always: “What leadership technique and strategy will I use in this meeting, this workshop, this line management, this performance development compensation, etc.?”
(Image 2: A slide taken from Debbie Clinton’s presentation showing the style of her three year strategy to improve Academy Transformation Trust)
It’s also important to be humble. Humility: you can’t underestimate that. But you know that already. CEOs are famous for their egos aren’t they? I hope I park it as much as I can. There’s too much ego in our system already. We need to acknowledge that around us, we have so much talent. Tact: I’m mostly tactful, but I also don’t mess around. If someone’s not done a good job, they do know it.
I am patient mostly and ethical always. You can look at my expense plan. You can look at my salary. I’ve worked really hard and I spent a long time with my P.A. and one of our finance team talking about the management of my expenses accounts and how it was going to be; how it would be quality assured.
Then the other stuff is obvious. Communication practices: the most obvious thing. We haven’t got that right. In fact, we’re not very good at that yet. It’s getting better, but we need it. We do need an effective communication strategy. You can’t just by accident run a MAT of our size. You’ve got to be consciously thinking about how you get it all behaving as one entity. How will you constantly revisit what we are and what we say we are?
(Image 3: A slide taken from Debbie Clinton’s presentation showing how her strategy has started to improve outcomes for Academy Transformation Trust)
So as you would expect, there are some quantitative and qualitative examples of the impact of all of this activity so far. We ended last year with a £2.9 million deficit. We ended this year in surplus for £2 million. We still have a historic debt, which won’t be settled until summer of 2021. But in a year, we’re down to £2 million. So despite everything, despite ruthless financial leadership, we still did that because we were spending amounts like £200,000 on an army of goodness knows what. I’m out of time now, but I think that the rest speaks for itself.
At Arbor’s MAT conference on 8th November in Manchester, Debbie Clinton, CEO, and Vince Green, Principal and Regional Director for Education, shared their experiences of turning around Academy Transformation Trust over the past year. We’ve transcribed part 1 of their presentation below! Debbie: I’m Debbie Clinton, the Chief Executive Officer of Academies Transformation Trust and
At Arbor’s MAT conference on 8th November in Manchester, Debbie Clinton, CEO, and Vince Green, Principal and Regional Director for Education, shared their experiences of turning around Academy Transformation Trust over the past year. We’ve transcribed part 1 of their presentation below!
Debbie:
I’m Debbie Clinton, the Chief Executive Officer of Academies Transformation Trust and I have been in post since September of 2018. A bit about my background: Secondary headteacher (named in the House of Commons!) and all these accolades that actually were very precious to me at the time. And then I left all of that to join the dark side and become an HMI (forgive me!) but it was very useful. Then I went over to the Diverse Academy Learning Partnership in the East Midlands to be the deputy CEO and then acting CEO of a much smaller trust than the one I work with now. And then, obviously I mentioned that I started at ATT just over a year ago, and I’m loving it. But it’s also a bit loony, which we’ll come to.
Vince:
I’m Vince Green and I’ve been a principal within the Academy Transformation Trust since 2014. It’s my 6th year with the trust and I’ve really experienced the interesting journey that our trust has been on during the last 5 years – very much ups and downs all along the way. I was principal for 5 years at Bristnall Hall Academy in Sandwell. But this year, I’m in a fortunate position. Having worked with Debbie for just over a year, I’m now Regional Education Director for Secondary West and also Executive Principal over Bristnall Hall and two other academies in the West Midlands.
First, we’ll do the boring bit. So this is us. We are big. We have 22 academies, 10 primaries and secondaries, 1 special school and 1 FE College. We operate across 2 regions, 10 local authority areas, 10 lots of schools forums, 10 lots of CED funding models, 10 high-needs funding models. It’s just great. We have a turnover of over 8 million – not enough, but obviously a significant budget to manage. We have 13,000 students and around 2000 colleagues. If I had had my old HMI hat on – and there’s at least one other former HMI in the room – I would have put our multi-academy trust straight into category for all sorts of reasons, and we’ll come to those now.
(Image 1: A slide taken from Debbie Clinton’s presentation showing key stats from the Academy Transformation Trust)
The main reason is actually very simple: the multi-academy trust was not behaving as a multi-academy trust. It was behaving as a set of 22 individual entities, some of whom, like Vince’s old academy, were fairly high-performing and doing quite well. So, they kind of just got on with it and thought “the trust is just a pain so I’ll just park that to one side.” As a formerly strong Head, I would’ve done the same. But others, of course, were desperate for the structure and support and challenge that lies at the heart of an effective multi-academy trust – and they weren’t getting any of that. So, everybody lost.
There’s a theme we hope that you pick up running through our presentation: the need to behave as a trust, but then defining what that actually means. We had the following problems: significant debt, 4 CFOs in as many years, management that wasn’t fit for purpose (I’m not talking about the individuals, actually, because many of them are still with me – which is actually a great testament to how far we’ve come). But the structures were just all over the place. Very poor systems. We’re still unearthing things now that are news to some of my senior leaders. Very poor control. Almost absent control at all levels, actually.
Then there’s risk management. I can say this now, because we’ve got one. We didn’t have a risk register. Can you imagine my reaction when I arrived to that? And the trustees were being told that everything was actually tickety-boo when it certainly wasn’t. Some academies had a risk register, so they were compliant, and in some cases quite good registers. But there wasn’t one in the centre. This was a huge problem.
(Image 2: A slide taken from Debbie Clinton’s presentation showing key financial problems within the Academy Transformation Trust)
Can I just add from a principal’s point of view that within our trust during that time, it was quite a strange scenario. About a year in, lots of our academies with financial issues were in positions where there had to be restructures and redundancy processes. We very much did those off our own backs, because we had worked with principals or head teachers before who’d always done the right thing: cut their crop accordingly. If you haven’t got enough money moving forward, you have a redundancy process. But many didn’t, and it wasn’t imposed on them by the Trust at all.
At times, it would appear to most of us principals that financial people didn’t really know when these problems were coming. So, the only academies that were addressing this were those that had good financial systems and managers within their academy already. We realised this during a major redundancy process at my own academy at the time and I remember turning around to my SLT at one time and saying, “You know what? I reckon today we could go out and spend £100,000 on stuff for this academy and I think we’d get away with it.” Unfortunately, it’s taxpayers’ money, because otherwise it would be great fun. That was the kind of world we lived in at the time.
Absolutely. It’s a picture that I recognised from my inspection life as well. With regard to operations, you’ve got to think about the context. 22 academies, 10 local authority areas across East and West regions, massive geographical challenges and a massive geographical understanding that needs to be grasped that wasn’t. So, we’ve done quite a lot with H.R., which is getting there and ICT, which wasn’t regionalised – I mean how do you not regionalise IT and MIS? How can you not actually make sure that the very architecture on which you build your MAT has been properly regionalised?
We also had poor procurement leadership; there was a Procurement Director. I have no evidence of the impact of that job at all. We had poor MIS leadership – absent, in fact. When you’re looking at areas like risk management and control systems, you need to be really clear on performance with regard to finance, operations and education. We don’t just do education in MATS – of course we don’t. We’re a multi-million pound business! How did we actually know what was going on? Well, we didn’t. And that’s kind of the point. Classic left hand, right hand stuff: too many people.
If you look at old versions of our website, you will see that there’s all these people employed at the centre doing goodness knows what. And morally, I have an issue with that. So one of the first things we’ve done is try to drive ethical leadership culturally through the organisation. We have to be absolutely clear. What is that job that isn’t either a teacher, head teacher or member of associated support staff? What do they do? What is the point of me? What is the point of a job like this? And how do we continue to evidence the impact of these fairly highly-paid people?
“What do you do?” That was a question that couldn’t be answered effectively by quite a number of people in those roles. Then there was an equally large problem: no approach to people development. There was no strategic, deep understanding that the most important thing you ever do as a trust – as any large organisation – is look after your people. Develop them. Challenge them. Bring them on. Make them feel like they want to be part of the journey.
(Image 3: A slide taken from Debbie Clinton’s presentation showing key operations problems within the Academy Transformation Trust)
I agree. In terms of education, there were some pockets of great practice going on within many of the academies and actually within our central team. We’ve had a lot of different staff that have worked separately for our trust over the 5 years I’ve worked with ATT. We’ve had some great individuals within those groups, but it’s never been joined up. And what it has resulted in is these academies pretty much working in silos, occasionally collaborating with other academies because the principals have taken it upon themselves to do it. But it’s been very much them and us.
So that brings me on to where we are now. We are one organisation. We are one trust. I think what attracted me initially to work for ATT – to take on my first headship with it – was the fact that I was clearly going to have huge amounts of autonomy, which was very attractive at the time. I could bring in the people I wanted, which was great fun, and so on. And that worked well, even in my environment. I’m not just saying that because it’s me necessarily, because I had a number of other great things in place, but this did not work well in other academies where that wasn’t the case.
We had, as I’ve said, uncontrolled spending. We had crazy staffing structures in some places and things not driving on educationally as one would want. Another big issue was definitely our people development strategy. In terms of talent mapping, capacity mapping and skill mapping, it was only done well in some academies. In others, we’ve lost some fantastic people along the way and I see them doing great things now in other trusts and in other organisations. And really, you know, our kids are missing out on those people now because it wasn’t mapped out properly at the time.
Debbie
You know, Sir David Carter, as he left his role as National Schools Commissioner, talked about the spectrum of autonomous alignment and standardisation. What do you tightly control? What do you not really care about and what do you need to make sure you align? We did a lot of work on that, which is nowhere near finished, but we have begun a very important piece of work in our Trust about that.
One of the things that most fascinated me in my interview for ATT was the total absence of this. There were about 8 trustees involved in my appointment. During the interview they asked, “Have you got any questions?” And I said, “Talk to me about your school improvement strategy,” and they couldn’t tell me anything. It was disgraceful.
In fact, the trustees were quite clear that this was one of their main worries that they felt unable to articulate. That classic Ofsted question: “Talk to me about how you improve academies.” What do you do? What’s your model? How do you know it works?
So defining that was was really, very important indeed. When I arrived, they were spending £185,000 on consultants. So I asked to see the 16 contracts for these 16 consultants. Not a single KPI on any contract. One of them is charging around £800 a day (to fund his villa in Spain, clearly). I could not see any KPIs in any of those contracts, so they’ve all gone.
(Image 4: A slide taken from Debbie Clinton’s presentation showing key education problems within the Academy Transformation Trust)
Just to conclude, I mean, we will all be very aware of what’s happened with certain other high-profile MATs that no longer exist. And I think the bottom line was that ATT was in a position which was seen externally as relatively healthy. It was a MAT that had been allowed to grow – in a crazy way, really. If you look at the geography of a lot of our academies, we had at the time very rapidly declined, in a way that could have basically forced us to cease to exist.
Click here to read the next instalment of Debbie and Vince’s presentation, in which they talk about exactly how they approached turning around Academy Transformation Trust.
We’re delighted to announce that School Business Services (SBS) is now an accredited support partner for Arbor MIS. SBS is a leading specialist in school support services, offering a wide range of MIS services to suit schools’ finances, staff and vision. They work with over 1000 schools across England, with strong hubs in London, the
We’re delighted to announce that School Business Services (SBS) is now an accredited support partner for Arbor MIS.
Consisting of ex-deputy headteachers, teachers and educational specialists, the SBS MIS team builds trusting relationships with schools, providing consultancy and training.
In addition to MIS, School Business Services is an onsite, offsite and online support provider for Finance, HR and ICT. They develop the leading budget management software SBS Budgets, accessed anywhere via SBS Online.
We’ve already helped more than 800 schools and MATs make the switch to our smarter cloud-based MIS. With human support at every step!
We visited the SBS Milton Keynes office recently to complete their accreditation test.
The full day’s accreditation included:
Following a successful day, we’re thrilled to say we are now working together to give schools the option to switch to Arbor MIS whilst keeping their trusted support team at SBS. Working with Arbor and SBS together gives your school:
2. Clear MIS data you can use to focus where it matters most
3. An MIS Support Team who will help you save time on data management
4. Peace of mind for statutory returns
5. A team who will empower your staff to develop skills
To find out more about switching to Arbor with the SBS MIS team contact 0345 222 1551 – Opt 5 or email hello@schoolbusinessservices.co.uk.
In my last blog, I explained why SIMS Support Units are teaming up with Arbor right now – and why this is great news for schools. This week, we’re celebrating one of our new partners gaining their Arbor accreditation. Meet Orbis – a collaboration between Brighton & Hove City Council, and Surrey and East Sussex
In my last blog, I explained why SIMS Support Units are teaming up with Arbor right now – and why this is great news for schools. This week, we’re celebrating one of our new partners gaining their Arbor accreditation. Meet Orbis – a collaboration between Brighton & Hove City Council, and Surrey and East Sussex County Councils – who’ve just passed their test with flying colours!
(Image 1: logo of newly-accredited Arbor Partner, Orbis)
The Orbis Partnership started seven years ago as a way of taking the stress out of procurement and helping schools get the best value for money. In 2017, they teamed up formally sothey could share more services and bring together decades of expertise in finance, business operations, HR and IT.
Orbis are proud of their public sector background and they know how important it is that the technology in your school “just works”. Their passion and experience help them go the extra mile for their schools by:
(Image 2: The Orbis team explaining how they help schools and MATs)
Orbis chose to work with Arbor after noticing that more and more local schools were switching away from Capita SIMS each year and choosing cloud-based systems instead. SIMS – once the go-to name in schools for all things admin – has had some delays in bringing out a cloud alternative to their traditionally server-based product. Now, schools and MATs are switching to the cloud in greater numbers than ever before, and are looking for a cloud-based MIS like Arbor that takes the stress out of daily admin and lets them work from anywhere.
(Image 3: A graph showing the declining number of schools using SIMS and increasing number of schools using a cloud-based MIS)
This has transformed the way thousands of schools work, putting data at the fingertips of every teacher, administrator and senior leader to help them see the big picture and take action. Even so, schools are busy places and people still need human support! A new MIS can often do things they couldn’t have imagined with the old system, and they need training to empower them to use it.
Orbis realised that there was a demand for local, hands-on support and training from the hundreds of schools using Arbor MIS across the South East, so they joined Arbor’s partner program in February 2019. As well as championing the effective use of MIS in schools, they can also help with all aspects of IT within your school as part of their all-inclusive, fully-managed Premier Support Service. They can also advise you on Finance, HR and Payroll, Property and Catering – so you can get all your support from one team.
The Orbis Partnership is one of 24 brilliant Arbor support units around the country – click here for a full list. If you’re a current Arbor customer and you’d like to switch your support to a local partner, reach out to your Arbor account manager on 020 7043 0470 and they’ll be happy to advise.
If you’re new to Arbor and thinking of switching to our cloud-based MIS, book a demo by calling 020 8050 1028 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com. For more information on Orbis IT Services you can call them on 01323 463133 or email itd@orbis.services
I read the news today, oh boy. Unfortunately, I’m not going on to talk about the lucky man that made the grade in the famous song by The Beatles; instead I’m talking about the story that appeared on BBC News with the caption: “I had an interest in school – but zero help.” I felt
I read the news today, oh boy.
Unfortunately, I’m not going on to talk about the lucky man that made the grade in the famous song by The Beatles; instead I’m talking about the story that appeared on BBC News with the caption: “I had an interest in school – but zero help.”
I felt profoundly sad for the families and their unmet needs but as a former Headteacher, I also felt for the schools as they seemed to be taking the presenting issues extremely seriously but their “help” wasn’t helping.
Thinking back to situations I had managed in my schools, I remembered the round-robin reports that regularly hit my desk about the progress, behaviour and attendance of pupils causing concern. This was our way of capturing the presenting issues in order to formulate a plan.
The sort of report I’m talking about is the kind that is being generated right now by teachers and pastoral leads across the country (and across the world) to explore concerns, or support meaningful meetings with parents. Every school seems to have their own template and completes in a way that meets their specific circumstances. However good I thought our report templates were, there was always some information that we hadn’t captured to complete the picture of the child. It’s only since I’ve been working with Arbor MIS that I realised just how poorly set up my schools were to surface student-level information quickly due to the limitations of our previous MIS. To compound the problem, my teams could only access the information when on site, which put an added burden on working parents and carers.
Our weekly student focus meetings brought together progress, educational support, welfare and attendance leads to discuss current and emerging issues. A typical action arising from the meeting would be for a key worker (in this instance: me) to make contact with home to request a meeting.
For the purpose of this blog, I am going to walk through a typical “student of concern” scenario but in this instance, the fictional student is Kimberly Adams, a Year 10 student at Pinewood Secondary School. As Head, I’m collating information ahead of a meeting with her parents. The meeting is therefore at our request because, as I shall explain, her name had cropped up in a number of progress and well-being meetings recently and we want to engage with home at the earliest opportunity. I want to get a comprehensive picture of the student using Arbor MIS.
The following picture begins to emerge:
Kimberly appears to like school; her attendance is currently 96%+ and this is an improvement on last year. She has regular planned absences for medical appointments due to a long-standing medical condition: the result of a head injury that causes a lack of focus. She has the highest attendance in her Tutor Group.
(Image 1: Screenshot of Attendance in Arbor broken down into different groups)
Unfortunately, since the start of Year 10 she has begun to arrive at school late. There is no particular pattern to her lateness to school but she is frequently late to Pd3 which follows break. This is an area to investigate.
(Image 2: Screenshot of Attendance in Arbor broken down into time of day)
Her behaviour is generally good but September the 18th was an uncharacteristically bad day. Kimberly didn’t suggest a reason as to why she had such a bad day but perhaps her parents can offer some context that would explain it. This is an area to investigate.
(Image 3: Screenshot of Behaviour in Arbor broken down into time of day)
It seems that Kimberly does not adapt well to temporary teachers and, looking at her behaviour log in more depth, there seems to be a correlation between her incidents of misbehaviour and supply teachers. As a side issue, I can see that she had eight lessons where her regular teacher has been absent which is potentially having a de-stabilising effect. This is an area to investigate.
(Image 4: Screenshot of student cover statistics in Arbor)
Academically, she is performing fairly well. She is a low prior attainer but she has a flair for Maths and English. It would be useful to explore the issues around English and the relative underachievement in Computer Science and Textiles from her perspective.
(Image 5: Screenshot of assessment and progress statistics in Arbor)
Kimberly has not signed up for any trips or visits this academic year but she is a member of the Eco Club. Her form tutor, Ms Kelly runs the Eco Club and this seems to have sparked her interest somewhat. Ms Kelly fears she may be bullied by some of the other girls in the tutor group but Kimberly has always denied this. This is an area to investigate.
Neither parent has logged into the parent portal, so may be missing vital communications from school about events, achievement and progress. I should offer to reset their password or resend the joining instructions if required.
I am confident that I can approach the meeting with some good evidence to back up my concerns and steer the conversation to cover the areas for further investigation.
Meetings like this one will happen everyday in schools for a myriad of reasons. I’m fortunate that, because Arbor is designed to turn insight into action, I have all of my information on students at-risk together in one place – and not all over the place.
What we do and why… At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work with smarter, hassle-free tools teachers love to use. You’ve seen the headlines. Sadly, the mess and stress of data and admin is a major source of unhappiness in our schools. 60% of a teacher’s time is spent on
What we do and why…
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work with smarter, hassle-free tools teachers love to use.
You’ve seen the headlines. Sadly, the mess and stress of data and admin is a major source of unhappiness in our schools. 60% of a teacher’s time is spent on admin related work, 53% agree that it contributes to stress and it’s only getting worse every year.
So, at Arbor we put everything we have into building hassle-free school technology, like our MIS (Management Information System), that’s as powerful and intelligent as it is easy to use.
Ultimately, we’re here to help make our schools and trusts stress a little less, and focus on what matters most – improving the lives of teachers and outcomes of students everywhere!
So, who are we?
We’re a diverse team of ex-teachers, education enthusiasts and motivated people who are all working towards the same goal: to help schools stress less and focus on what matters! Our interview process includes specific questions to make sure candidates’ values are aligned with our own.
(Image 1: A diagram showing Arbor’s core company values)
Finding people who share the same passion for our social impact not only makes our company an amazing place to work, it gives our customers a consistent, 5* service that sets us apart from our competitors.
Why working at Arbor was the right move for me
I joined Arbor in July 2019, with little knowledge of the EdTech market, but with a passion for helping people and finding great talent, which aligned well with Arbor’s mission. It was refreshing to join a company that cares just as much about values and cultural fit as experience and a CV.
Arbor also aligns its values with the benefits offered to its employees, including a volunteering day with a cause/charity of your choice, flexible working, half day Fridays during the summer, personal and professional development training budgets – and much more!
Arbor’s values aren’t just something we promote on our website; people say them out loud in the office; people live them day in, day out – internally with teams and externally with our customers.
(Image 2: A photograph of the Arbor team)
Hear it from our schools…
“Working with Arbor is a pleasure in every way. It is an exceptional tool but the people make the real difference with their friendly but professional manner, clear knowledge of the system, and most of all a strong passion and desire for delivering the desired outcomes and improving features and functionality.” – Stephanie Bass, Business Manager at Bridge Schools Trust
“We genuinely love the Arbor system and the team behind it who seem to just want the whole system to succeed at the Lakes. There’s always a bit of heart in the mouth when you instigate such change in a school and I would just like to say a huge thank you to yourself and your team, who really have looked after us and who have wholeheartedly helped us confirm that the decision to change to Arbor was the right one.” – Andy Cunningham, Headteacher at The Lakes Secondary School
Hear it from our Arborians…
Emma Sharples, Head of Professional Services
“Employee number 35 and number 4 on the ground in Leeds. I started Arbor as an Engagement Manager, working on special projects and building our implementation models for future onboarding.
After approximately 1090 working days, onboarding over 600 schools, supporting nearly 40 MATs, I’ve had a fantastic opportunity to help shape the customer team! My own career development has gone from strength to strength, from engagement manager to programme manager, to building out the Secondary Support Team as we took on the world of Secondary, to now Head of Professional Services!”
Stephen Higgins, Lead Product Manager
“I left a 6 year career in Teaching to join Arbor. Initially I was worried if I could “make the jump” to a new career and a new city, with a new set of colleagues.
My first experience of the Arbor family was to join the company at their annual winter conference in Belgrade. After spending a few hours with the team, I realised that my fears were completely unfounded. Everyone was so friendly, smart and passionate about solving problems in education, and they instantly made me feel like one of the team.
Since that first day, I have learnt so much about myself, about business and about my new profession. It was hard work and challenging at times, but I’ve never looked back!”
This September, Ofsted’s new inspection framework came into effect, putting more of an emphasis on curriculum as opposed to just academic results with their new “quality of education” grade. A consistent theme in teachers’ feedback to inspections so far seems to be that Ofsted have become more rigorous; rather than settling for a surface level
This September, Ofsted’s new inspection framework came into effect, putting more of an emphasis on curriculum as opposed to just academic results with their new “quality of education” grade. A consistent theme in teachers’ feedback to inspections so far seems to be that Ofsted have become more rigorous; rather than settling for a surface level view, they now want to dig a little deeper into how schools and trust operate and why.
According to Tes, some leadership and teachers have described these new inspections as intense and stressful, while others say it provides a fairer, more balanced view of how you work. Either way, we can safely say that it definitely wouldn’t hurt to prepare to tackle some tough questions about your MAT.
To help you prepare, we’ve put together this useful list of questions that you might be asked during an Ofsted inspection this year. Our list is by no means exhaustive, but acts as more of a checklist for you and other MAT leaders to read ahead of any upcoming inspections.
Questions are based on inspections that other schools have experienced this year. Many of these questions can be credited to governingmatters.wordpress.com who posted this useful article to help governors prepare for Ofsted inspections.
1. MAT structure and values
Ofsted are very likely to ask you at least one question about your MAT’s values and the aims that you have for your pupils. Consider why your trust operates the way that it does and how you think this will help to shape your students’ education overall.
A. How is your MAT structured and why?
B. What are your priorities for your schools?
C. What are your ambitions for your children?
2. Governors
You’ll be expected to provide some information on your governors, including their training and the role they play. Think about how you can show that your governors are adequately trained and appropriately contributing to how your MAT is run.
A. How does the MAT board work with Local Governing Bodies?
B. What role do your governors play in school leadership? How do you recruit new governors?
C. What training do your governors receive?
3. Headteachers and SLT
Have a think about how often you hold your headteachers and SLT members to account for how their schools are performing. Be sure to have some proof that you can present to Ofsted ahead of your inspection! In Group MIS, it’s easy to check how your different schools are performing by looking at your data dashboards when you first log in to your portal.
A. How do you hold your headteachers and SLT to account?
B. How do you ensure that you are not just relying on information provided by the head?
C. Can you give an example of how you challenged the head and brought about a change?
Image 1: A screenshot of the main Dashboard when you log into Arbor Group MIS
4. Staff performance and wellbeing
Be ready to provide examples of how you handle both positive and negative staff performance, as well as how you make sure the staff across your MAT are well looked after and happy. In Arbor MIS, you can use our Staff Development function to track staff appraisals and training.
A. How do you ensure staff wellbeing? Can you give any examples?
B. What is the link between teacher appraisal and pay?
C. How is teacher underperformance dealt with in your trust?
5. Measuring progress and school improvement
Think about how you’ve analysed your KS1 & KS2 performance data so far and whether you’ve effectively pinpointed where your MAT is performing well and where it could be doing better – click here to find out how you can do this using our free Group Insight reports and dashboards.
A. What do your schools do best and what could they do better?
B. How do you contribute to and monitor your school improvement plan?
C. Please describe the MAT’s journey since the last inspection. Have you made an effort to fix issues that were picked up last time?
6. Curriculum planning and tracking
Ofsted is putting more emphasis on the curriculum than ever before with their new inspection framework. Use Arbor’s curriculum tracker to manage the way you deliver the curriculum across your MAT, and our analytics to inform your methodology. You can also read our helpful blog on curriculum planning and improving student outcomes.
A. How do you monitor your schools’ curriculum and how do you know it matches the national curriculum?
B. How do your students do in foundation subjects?
C. How do leaders discuss the sequencing of curriculum development? How do your teachers know what to teach?
7. Education equality
Consider the provisions you have in place for your disadvantaged pupils and how you make sure they have as many opportunities as their fellow students and that they are treated equally. Remember – you should be able to show how you measure the impact of these provisions! In our Group MIS, you can use our “By Demographic” function to keep track of disadvantaged students and work out where to intervene; you can also use our Interventions tracker to monitor any progress made.
A. How do you meet the equalities act? How do you know diversity is being taught in your schools?
B. What do you know about the performance of your SEN/EAL/disadvantaged pupils?
C. How do you use Pupil Premium and Sports Premium monies and what impact has this had? How are pupil premium children progressing and what do you have in place to ensure higher attaining Pupil Premium students are challenged?
Image 2: A screenshot of attendance by demographic in Arbor’s Group MIS
8. Data monitoring
It’s possible that Ofsted will also ask you about the way you monitor and measure the data you receive from schools across your MAT. You need to be prepared for questions about the accuracy of this data; do this by collecting tangible evidence ahead of time. In, you can use our helpful data dashboards to diagnose any potential errors before your inspection.
A. How do you know that the data you get from your schools is accurate?
B. How do you measure pupil attendance in your schools?
C. How do you monitor pupil behaviour in your schools?
9. Safety and GDPR
We’re pretty confident that you’ll be asked about the level of safety in schools across your MAT. Make sure you have evidence to show that you’re compliant with GDPR regulations and that you have all the necessary procedures in place to keep your students safe. Visit our website to see how you can keep your data safe with Arbor.
A. Are children safe in your schools?
B. Do you have safeguarding training? Are safeguarding audits carried out regularly
C. Are you aware of and happy with the lockdown procedure in your schools
10. Parental engagement
Finally, you may be asked about your schools’ relationship with parents and how this relationship is maintained. You might want to check out our blog on “5 ways to boost parental engagement at your school” to see how you can effectively keep in touch with your parents.
A. How do you communicate with parents?
B. Are parents supportive of the schools in your trust?
C. Can you tell me more about your parent questionnaires?
As we’ve mentioned in a previous blog, our new “Understanding Your School Report” will help you prepare for the new Ofsted inspection framework by allowing you to benchmark your schools’ performance data against the national average, top quintile, and schools with a similar demographic intake. Download our new report to help your schools prepare for the next inspection: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/register
Hope you find the list helpful!
Arbor MIS for MATs brings all your schools together so you can instantly see how everyone’s getting on, and jump in if you need to. To find out more about Group MIS, get in touch via the contact form on our website, email us at tellmemore@arbor-education.com or give us a call on 0208 050 1028.
We’re excited to let you know that all your KS1, KS2 and Phonics Analyse School Performance (ASP) data has been added to your Group Insight portal. We’ve crunched your schools’ 2019 data ahead of the DfE and used it to build free, interactive dashboards which you can use to explore aggregated statistics for all your
We’re excited to let you know that all your KS1, KS2 and Phonics Analyse School Performance (ASP) data has been added to your Group Insight portal. We’ve crunched your schools’ 2019 data ahead of the DfE and used it to build free, interactive dashboards which you can use to explore aggregated statistics for all your schools. Keep reading to find out more about Group Insight and how you can use it to plan your MAT’s improvement approach for next year.
What is Group Insight?
Group Insight is a free performance analysis tool for MATs to help you analyse your schools’ latest Analyse School Performance (ASP) data. We automatically analyse your MAT’s latest school performance data and present it back to you in easy-to-understand PDF reports and personalised dashboards, so you don’t have to spend hours aggregating and analysing the raw data yourself.
Fig 1.: A screenshot of a Group Insight dashboard displaying KS2 data across a MAT
How do you present my schools’ KS1 & KS2 data?
Your dashboards are great for helping you spot trends over the past three years, identifying which schools are driving over (or under) performance, and benchmarking your academies against national and top quintile averages. You can also use them to view each of your schools’ outcomes side by side, drill down into individual school outcomes and show impact over time when reporting to trustees.
Fig 2.: A screenshot of a Group Insight comparing a MATs school results by cluster
We’ve also updated our popular pre-paid PDF reports analysing your schools’ attainment and progress, highlighting areas to close the gap, and exploring patterns between your trust’s outcomes and the context of your unique demographic intake in our new Understanding Your School Report, which you can download via your portal.
Click here to log in & access your 2019 reports and dashboards: https://login.arbor.sc
Fig 3.: A screenshot of a Group Insight comparing a MATs results by demographic
“Clear, saves us time, available sooner than DfE MAT data, and is extremely well presented, making reporting to Trustees very straight forward”
– Paul James, Chief Executive Officer at River Learning Trust
How do I sign up?
Click here to sign up to your MAT’s free Arbor Insight portal: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/group-register
When will you add KS4 data to my portal?
We expect to receive your 2018/2019 KS4 data from the DfE very soon – so watch this space! If you’re already signed up, we’ll email you automatically to let you know when this happens.
Do you offer training on how my schools can use their Arbor Insight portal?
Yes! We run a free Arbor Insight Roadshow each Autumn Term offering free, in-person training to help your schools’ central teams to get the most out of Arbor Insight. Click here to sign up
Where can I hear more about Group Insight?
You can hear our CRO, Phillippa De’Ath, talk about how you can use your ASP data to drive school improvement across your MAT at the Schools & Academies Show in Birmingham. She’ll be speaking in the Business & Finance Theatre from 10:10-10:30 on 14th November 2019.
Can I use Group Insight alongside the DfE’s ASP service?
Yes! Arbor is an accredited supplier of ASP data, which means we receive secure, early access to all your school performance data from the DfE as soon as it’s released. So far over 10,000 schools have signed up to use us. Lots of schools and MATs use us instead of the DfE’s ASP service, but you can also use our reports and dashboards as a companion to the DfE’s analysis.
You haven’t answered my questions! Can I contact you for help?
Absolutely. You can reach the Arbor team at tellmemore@arbor-education.com or by calling us on 020 8050 1028.
This November, we’re also holding another of our popular MAT Conferences in Manchester. Over 80 MAT leaders from over 50 MATs have already signed up! Click here to book your free place before they sell out
This blog was written by Beth Mokrini, Partner Manager at Arbor Education. Click here to discover Beth’s Top 10 must-have cloud systems for your school. Two years ago, my job didn’t exist. That’s because two years ago, most schools used on-premise SIMS as their Management Information System, supported by a local IT support desk known
This blog was written by Beth Mokrini, Partner Manager at Arbor Education. Click here to discover Beth’s Top 10 must-have cloud systems for your school.
Two years ago, my job didn’t exist.
That’s because two years ago, most schools used on-premise SIMS as their Management Information System, supported by a local IT support desk known as a SIMS Support Unit (SSU). Meanwhile, the growing number of schools using Arbor MIS came to us directly for support and training. Although we sometimes collaborated to help a school switch, in general, there wasn’t much opportunity for SSUs to team up with Arbor.
Fast forward to September 2019, and Arbor is now closely partnered with 19 SSUs of various shapes and sizes, based everywhere from Oldham to Cornwall. I have the exciting full-time job of managing Arbor’s partner program, which means leading on the development of new partnerships, helping SSUs earn their Arbor accreditation, and spreading the word to schools!
Image 1: A collection of just some of Arbor’s partners
We’re not the only ones making moves in this direction – most cloud based MIS providers now offer a partner program, though the costs and benefits vary widely. Like us, they’re responding to demand from support units who’ve been working with SIMS for decades, but who are now keen to diversify. Everyone is adapting to the new reality of the school MIS market: SIMS has lost 7% market share since 2016, while alternative MIS vendors have picked up over 5000 schools and continue to grow.
Image 2: A graph showing how school cloud MIS usage is increasing over time
Schools now have a wider choice of MIS provider and (quite rightly) they want a wider choice of support options too. Many SSUs are taking the opportunity to form new partnerships, develop new skills and ride the wave of schools moving to the cloud (rather than being swept away!).
We asked our three biggest support partners what they thought was behind this significant shift, and they gave three key reasons:
1. “We’re listening to our schools.”
A quarter of all primary schools and 1 in 14 secondaries have now moved to a cloud-based MIS. The pace of switching is accelerating year on year, as more schools realise the benefits of a cloud-based MIS in terms of saving time, reducing costs and enabling more flexible working.
Just because schools want to switch MIS, doesn’t mean they want to switch their support too. Many SSUs have been working with their schools for 15+ years and they’ve built up a strong relationship, which neither party wants to lose. But the challenge that’s emerging for schools is that when their support provider only works with Capita SIMS, moving to the cloud means they’ve no choice but to leave them behind.
This may put some off switching MIS for a year or two – but eventually the benefits of the cloud become too hard to ignore. This is especially true for MATs, who are faced with the challenge of aggregating and analysing data from multiple schools on a regular basis. Too often with on-premise SIMS, this means physically driving from school to school to download reports, then manually combining them in excel. For academy trusts, moving to a cloud MIS puts data at their fingertips so they can concentrate on improving outcomes for students. In fact, over half of the largest MATs have already moved to a cloud based MIS, according to a recent blog on MIS market stats by the director of the analytics platform Assembly Education.
School leaders too, previously cautious about leaving SIMS, are now more likely than ever to know another school that’s already done it. As the school market dares to become excited about the alternatives to SIMS, SSUs are listening and welcoming partnerships with cloud-based MIS providers.
2. “We don’t know when ‘SIMS8’ will be ready.”
We posted a year ago about the delays to Capita’s new cloud based product ‘SIMS8’, and not much has changed since then. It’s still live in fewer than 50 schools, only suitable for primaries and behind in the development of complex areas like reporting and integrations.
Meanwhile, there’s no sign of schools & MATs waiting around for Capita to release their cloud-based offering. Around 1,200 schools are thought to have switched MIS in the last academic year, including many Local Authority maintained schools. Although academies have so far been switching from SIMS in greater numbers, maintained schools are increasingly challenging the assumption that they should all use Capita software – especially when doing so prevents them from taking advantage of user-friendly, cost effective systems.
Unfortunately, until SIMS can meet schools’ demand for a smarter, cloud-based MIS, neither can SIMS Support Units. That’s why, to fill the gap left by SIMS8, many SSUs have differentiated their provision and developed partnerships with existing cloud MIS providers instead. This in turn is stoking up a measure of healthy competition between the leading cloud-based MIS providers, all of whom want to be chosen as the SSU’s preferred alternative to SIMS.
3. “Arbor is the leading alternative to SIMS.”
Arbor is now the 4th biggest MIS provider in England by school numbers, having grown by over 100% this academic year. We cater to all phases – primaries, secondaries, special schools and MATs. Of all the schools who left SIMS in the last year, more switched to Arbor than to any other provider.
We’ve also invested in our partner program to make sure we’re not only the leading alternative for schools, but for SSUs too. Our Partner program is completely free – there’s no cost for training & support, no fee for our accreditation test and no annual charge to remain on the program. We believe schools should have the widest possible choice of support as well as MIS, so we’ve removed the barriers to becoming an Arbor partner.
We also offer a referral scheme, so instead of losing money when a school moves to the cloud, Arbor support partners receive a bonus! This has helped the SSUs we work with to see their partnership with Arbor as a growth opportunity, rather than simply a way of minimising disruption to their business. Schools can switch to the MIS of their choice without losing their trusted local support provider, and SSUs can continue to provide outstanding support, but now to a wider customer base.
It’s fair to say a lot has changed in the last two years at Arbor (and not just in my job). We look forward to seeing what the next two will bring!
If you’re a SIMS Support Unit and interested in becoming a partner, I’d love to have a chat – please email me to set up a phone call.
If you’re a school and would like to know more about our MIS or our support partners, contact us today.
For a list of our current support partners, click here.
As I’m sure you’ve read, the new Ofsted Inspection Framework has now come into effect. Central to the new framework is the idea that there isn’t a “correct” way for schools to do things – whereas the old framework encouraged inspectors to look at your school’s results and use data for accountability purposes, the new
As I’m sure you’ve read, the new Ofsted Inspection Framework has now come into effect. Central to the new framework is the idea that there isn’t a “correct” way for schools to do things – whereas the old framework encouraged inspectors to look at your school’s results and use data for accountability purposes, the new one focuses on the context of your school and the ways in which this has shaped your curriculum and the “quality of education” available (you can see a summary of the other changes in our blog here).
After reviewing the new framework with our partner LKMCo, we decided that we wanted to help schools make the most of this less prescriptive approach from Ofsted. So we’re excited to announce that we’ve upgraded and enhanced our old Ofsted Readiness Report, converting it into a report which is focused on helping schools to plan around and respond to their specific context, rather than on whether things are being done in a particular way. The old name didn’t make much sense any more, so we’ve renamed it the Understanding Your School Report.
The Understanding Your School Report combines your latest DfE performance data (ASP) with ONS area classifications, families of schools, and top quintile benchmarks to give you the most complete picture of your outcomes in the context of your school’s unique demographic intake. Our aim is to bring a range of data sources together to give you a balanced and nuanced picture of your school to help inform your school improvement approach. We’ve summarised some of the new report’s features below.
What can I do with the new Understanding Your School Report?
The main data source in the report is still Analyse School Performance (ASP). Whilst ASP is helpful for getting a basic overview of your performance, it’s often hard to use, so we wanted our new report to be a useful companion to the DfE’s service as well as a helpful tool in its own right:
1. Understand your school’s performance & outcomes in the context of its demographics
Exam results can be disproportionately affected by social and geographical context, but it’s time-consuming to bring these data sets together. Services like ASP don’t show any contextual data alongside your performance out-of-the-box.
To help you see how the area your school is in has impacted outcomes, the Understanding Your School Report features our new Area Type Comparison graph, which uniquely brings ONS area classification data together with your ASP attainment data for the first time. The ONS has classified every LA in the country into 8 “supergroups” which share characteristics, based on socio-economic and demographic data from the national census. Our graph explains which supergroup (or area type) your school is in, and shows how your performance compares to schools in areas with similar socio-economic characteristics, helping you to examine patterns between your student intake and attainment.
Image 1: A screenshot of the Area Type Comparison graph from Arbor’s Understanding Your School Report
2. Get meaningful benchmarks beyond just comparing to the national average
ASP only benchmarks your school against the national average. Whilst this is helpful, the national average isn’t always the most meaningful benchmark (for example, as a small rural primary school you might feel it’s not relevant to compare yourself to large primary schools based in a city because their intake will be so different). The Understanding Your School Report still shows how you’ve performed compared to the national average, but it also introduces 2 new benchmarks as well.
Our new schools “Like You” benchmark uses EEF “Families of Schools” methodology to compare your performance to similar schools based on four factors:
This benchmark helps you to compare your performance with other schools with similar pupil characteristics, in similar contexts.
The Understanding Your School also gives you a “Top Quintile” benchmark, which compares you to the top 20% of schools for each measure – this provides your school with a useful stretch target to work towards.
Image 2: A screenshot showing the different benchmarks available in The Understanding Your School Report
3. Understand how consistent your performance has been over time
It can be hard to visualise progress over time using the tables and bar charts provided in ASP. Our new Understanding Your School Report helps you see how your performance has changed over time by presenting Trend over Time line graphs, and showing 3 year rolling averages next to key headline figures. This gives you a broader picture of your performance, meaning you can quickly spot any inconsistencies and identify anomalies (for example, is this cohort’s performance consistent with your school, or is it atypical? If so, why?).
Image 3: A screenshot of the Trend over Time line graph in The Understanding Your School Report
4. Easily visualise gaps and work out where to target interventions
Whilst ASP breaks down your performance by pupil characteristics, it does this in tables – which means it can be time consuming to spot gaps, making it very hard to tell at a glance how well different groups are performing.
The Understanding Your School Report has a dedicated Closing the Gap section which helps you to benchmark different school groups such as SEN or Pupil Premium against each other. We express gaps as numbers of pupils rather than % to help make your SIP more meaningful.
Meanwhile, the new Curriculum Summary section for secondary schools helps leaders see how different student groups have chosen to take exams, so that they can identify whether there are issues with access to different areas of learning between groups of pupils.
5. View meaningful analysis of your data presented in easy-to-understand charts
With its clear, visual designs, simple bar charts and callouts in plain English, the Understanding Your School Report does all your performance analysis for you. Instantly see headline measures on the Key Findings page, as well as key areas to work on. This means you can get on with using your data to drive school improvement instead of wading through tables in ASP.
Image 4: A screenshot of the Key Findings page in The Understanding Your School Report
We hope that the Understanding Your School Report becomes an essential part of your school improvement cycle. If you’re interested in hearing more about the report, as well as about what our other Insight reports can do for you, just get in touch.
Sign up to Arbor Insight here to purchase your own Understanding Your School Report, and to view other popular reports that we offer. For more information about Arbor Insight, email insight@arbor-education.com or call 02070431830.
School Operations | Vulnerable Students
In May, the DfE published the findings from the much anticipated Timpson Review, which recommends that schools be supported to reduce the number of exclusions they make by focussing in on early intervention and quality Alternative Provision. In this blog, I will explore the implications of this on schools and discuss how Arbor MIS can
In May, the DfE published the findings from the much anticipated Timpson Review, which recommends that schools be supported to reduce the number of exclusions they make by focussing in on early intervention and quality Alternative Provision. In this blog, I will explore the implications of this on schools and discuss how Arbor MIS can help schools to use data to intervene proactively with students and better understand their holistic needs, before they reach the point of being an exclusion risk.
Are current intervention strategies timely enough?
Prior to working with Arbor, my 13 years as a teacher and senior leader were spent both in Mainstream Secondary and in Specialist Education for Behaviourally Challenging students, so I have seen both the before and after stories of mainstream exclusions.
When a child comes into a full time AP or SEMH school, it’s often the case that they have been excluded, not just once but many times, and are trapped in an ongoing, negative spiral of:
Image 1: A diagram showing a child’s negative behaviour cycle
Trying to re-instill a sense of self-worth and value for learning into individuals who seem almost broken by this experience is very difficult at the post-exclusion stage. We succeeded with many, but not with all.
For those with whom we didn’t, I often wonder… Could it have been a different story if during their more formative stages in education, greater focus had been placed on developing their necessary dispositions for learning, rather than hammering home a nearly entirely academic curriculum? For students who are more resilient and better at regulating their emotions , this is ok; but for those who aren’t, early subjection to repeat experiences of failure will trigger innate safety behaviours such as escape and avoidance, which in the classroom context will display as refusal to work and disruption to lessons.
This opens up a broader debate about the appropriateness of the curriculum we deliver and whether we are assessing the right things for these individuals – something I discussed in my previous blog which focussed on SEN Assessment. Whilst there will never be a silver bullet answer to the “what to do?” question for all children (this will differ depending on context), my overriding feeling regarding “when to do it?” is that, in nearly all cases, it could have been earlier in the story and not at the point where behaviour had already become unmanageable. But how do we know when is best to take a different approach? That’s where the effective use of data comes in!
Data driven intervention
During my time in schools, I have seen and implemented a fair share of behavioural initiatives and policies, some of which were successful and others less so, but in every instance their success was dependent on the quality of information that fed into them. Data-wise, the two most important questions to ask are:
Unfortunately, the answer to these questions isn’t always “yes”. In many schools, it’s hard to act on data in a timely way, as there’s usually a heavy reliance on the manual collation and analysis of it in order to find meaning. Therefore, intervention is often carried out at the point where behaviour is so severe or prevalent that you don’t even need data to tell you there’s something to do. So, you become a reactive culture.
Negative behaviour doesn’t occur in isolation; it’s often linked to other factors, such as home-life, literacy, attendance and pastoral issues. But due to the siloed nature of data in schools (as illustrated in the systems diagram below) it is also difficult to combine different measures into simple, quick analysis, or to easily know what’s been going on with a child.
Image 2: A diagram showing the siloed nature of data in schools
Arbor MIS makes it easy to input and analyse all your core data in one system. With all student data brought together on simple profile pages, it’s easy for staff to get the holistic overview of a student that’s needed in order to plan more specifically for their needs. This is something that’s crucial to Liam Dowling, and the staff of Hinderton School, an Outstanding Cheshire SEN school who specialise in supporting students with Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) and social communication difficulties from a young age.
Image 3: A diagram showing the way school data can be brought together
Hinderton’s short inspection letter from June 2017 praised the school on the interconnectedness of it’s systems, meaning that all stakeholders have easy access to the data they need:
“Your online systems, which work seamlessly together, make sure that senior leaders, staff and parents all have the information they need at their fingertips. As a result, you have streamlined and improved all aspects of information relating to pupils.”
Hinderton’s short inspection letter – OFSTED June 2017
Hinderton are one of nearly 800 schools who benefit from Arbor MIS’ ability to:
Give staff easy access to the full story of a child to enable better understanding of needs
Image 4: A demonstration of how Arbor MIS gives you the full story of a child
With appropriate permissions, all information ranging from communications with parents, attendance, behaviour and SEN history is visible in one place. Understanding what has gone on with a disaffected child is crucial to knowing how best to work with them and Arbor makes finding this information as easy as possible.
Automate behaviour action and analysis
Image 5: A demonstration of how you can automate behaviour action in Arbor MIS
Arbor’s automatic workflows within the behaviour module ensure that students who exhibit persistent low level behaviour across multiple lessons are always identified and action is taken without an administrative burden to staff. This helps schools to ensure that negative behaviour is appropriately challenged in all instances and isn’t allowed to snowball to the point of being unmanageable.
Link Interventions to Data
Image 6: A demonstration of how you can plan interventions with Arbor MIS
Arbor allows you to create interventions with Participant and Outcome criteria that pull data in from anywhere in the MIS. Therefore, students could be recommended for a Behaviour for Learning intervention following a slight change in behavioural patterns at an earlier point in time than when it becomes prevalent and significantly disruptive to others.
Customise Assessment frameworks to target specific needs
Image 7: An example of how to customise assessment frameworks in Arbor MIS
The Springwell Special Academy are an Outstanding SEMH school who make full use of Arbor’s flexible Assessment system to host specific frameworks that fit their students’ needs. This enables them to focus on social and emotional development, resilience and student wellbeing as well as tracking academic progress. The image above shows the input page of a framework they have developed called the SEMH tracker.
In conclusion, the Timpson review has brought about a greater emphasis on schools to develop strategies to help students whom they may otherwise exclude. The four tools above are just a few examples of how Arbor could help schools in collecting more specifically focussed data to use in a more timely and targeted way in order to help improve the holistic outcomes of these vulnerable students. We recognise that the challenge isn’t easy and the “what to do” expertise lies with the people who know the students best – a piece of software isn’t going to be the solution but could play a significant part in the data strategy that drives the change!
If you’d like to find out more about how our simple, smart cloud-based MIS could help you transform the way your school uses interventions, contact us. You can also book a demo by calling 0207 043 0470 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
Last year, over 1,000 schools moved their MIS to the cloud – the highest number of schools ever to have moved in the space of a year! That means 1 in 4 schools have now left SIMS in favour of easier-to-use cloud-based systems like Arbor. We’re really excited that more and more schools are realising
Last year, over 1,000 schools moved their MIS to the cloud – the highest number of schools ever to have moved in the space of a year! That means 1 in 4 schools have now left SIMS in favour of easier-to-use cloud-based systems like Arbor. We’re really excited that more and more schools are realising the benefits of the cloud; after all, we’ve been talking about it since we were first founded!
We’ve spoken to lots of Headteachers and SLT recently who want to move MIS, but who are nervous about the pain of switching out-weighing the gain of a new system. With that in mind, we’ve to put together a helpful guide on moving your MIS to the cloud (scroll to the bottom of this page to read), which we’ve written based on our experience of helping over 800 schools make the switch.
We’ve answered some of the most common questions we get asked, including how secure the cloud really is, how much it costs, and how cloud-based systems differ to SIMS. You’ll also find some first-hand switching stories from schools & MATs who use Arbor – we hope it helps make switching MIS seem a little less stressful than it might feel right now.
Moving their MIS to the cloud hasn’t just helped the 600 primary schools, 77 secondary schools and 101 special schools using Arbor save time and money – it’s also helped them transform the way they run their school. Arbor MIS acts as the central system at your school to help you get work done, replacing any clunky, third-party apps that don’t speak to each other. Teachers and SLT can now follow up with absent students, write report cards and prepare for census in just a few clicks – meaning they no longer have to switch between paper, spreadsheets and different systems to get the information they need about their students!
If you’re planning your own move to the cloud, have a read of our guide on Moving to the Cloud by clicking on the link below:
Why have 5,000+ schools moved to a cloud-based MIS? ~ powered by Arbor
Hope you find it helpful!
If you’d like to learn more about how Arbor could help you transform the way your school operates, get in touch at tellmemore@arbor-education, or give us a quick call on 020 8 050 1028
Being born in the early 90’s and receiving my first computer as a gift in December of 1999 turned out to be not only a brilliant idea (thanks mum & dad!), but for many reasons, also quite profound in the way that this beige PC tower ended up shaping not just my life, but also
Being born in the early 90’s and receiving my first computer as a gift in December of 1999 turned out to be not only a brilliant idea (thanks mum & dad!), but for many reasons, also quite profound in the way that this beige PC tower ended up shaping not just my life, but also the lives of an entire generation.
It’s almost impossible to imagine today’s world without the advent of the technology that has shaped our lives so dramatically. Even as a young boy, while I would spend countless hours playing around with this marvellous box of tricks (Windows 98 seems so archaic by today’s standards), I was amazed by what it could do and saw no limit to what was possible.
Suddenly, I could (willingly) do my homework on-screen and at the press of a button it would be spat out by the enormous printer to the left of the big-back monitor. I’m sure you can imagine my utter delight when I figured out how to access the internet through dial-up (and my hopeless despair when I’d spent 10 minutes trying to download an image, only for the phone to ring half way through and kill my connection).
Picture 1: A comparison of a computer from 1984 and a computer from 2019
Fast forward 20 years and I still find myself astounded with all the technological advancements of the modern world. My smartphone can do everything and more that my first computer could and all the time we’re finding new and clever ways to apply all of this technology to a variety of different situations, problems and sectors to make our lives easier.
However, this isn’t always the case. When I think about how we use technology to supplement educational outcomes and improve the effectiveness of our schools in general, I have mixed feelings. In some cases schools are embracing tech with great results (putting iPads in the classroom being an example) but in other areas, schools are being left behind.
The (not so) looming crisis
In 2019, schools are under scrutiny and pressure like never before. The education system is ever evolving and adapting to address its own challenges whilst trying to find new ways to teach the next generation so they’re set up for life in an ever more competitive and challenging world. Despite this, it’s failing to adequately address an ever progressing crisis: teachers leaving the profession at an unprecedented rate.
Among others, one of the most commonly cited reasons for the staffing crisis in the UK is the increasing demand and workload placed upon school staff as a whole, not just teachers. When I meet with school leaders in the North of England this is a question which is raised almost every single time – ‘how can I improve the efficiency and outcomes of my school whilst also reducing my staff’s workload?’ and my answer is always the same: try to see technology as an assistant and a driver for positive change and not a means to an end. It should help, not hinder you.
In most elements of our lives we embrace the latest and greatest in tech and no longer do we settle for the sub-standard; take mobile phones as an example. On average, most people change their smartphone every 2-3 years and sometimes even more frequently. If the device doesn’t do what we want or expect it to, or even if we just find it a bit difficult to use, what do we do? We replace it without hesitation and try another brand entirely.
I really like this attitude to tech; it serves to ensure that vendors are always striving to find new and innovative ways to make our lives easier, always one step ahead of us and improving on things that we never even thought were a problem, until we’re handed the solution. Of course, we know what happens when they don’t move with the times. More so, it stops vendors becoming complacent.
Having seen the internals of education and technology for myself, I firmly believe schools should think of their systems like most of us do a mobile phone; a really useful tool to help us out on a day to day basis, but something we can easily swap and move away from if it no longer serves its purpose. It’s for this reason that we encourage schools we meet with to do a systems audit, which helps determine if the technology they’re paying for has become outdated or no longer fits with the day-to-day running of the school.
Picture 2: An example of mobile phones from the 1980s and a mobile phone in 2019
In a school, the MIS is one of the key pieces of tech which has the capacity to vastly reduce staff workload, increase the efficiency of the school and improve pupil outcomes at large. Despite this, many schools across the country are still using clunky, out-of-date systems that are time consuming and difficult to use, yet some appear to accept this because they’re perhaps unaware just how much of a difference a modern MIS could make to their work, and their school as a whole.
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone who’s not happy with the technology that’s supposed to assist them and make their life easier, it would be to explore alternatives and try and find a system that fits the ethos of your school, and that enhances the livelihoods of its staff and the outcomes of its pupils.
Sometimes, we’re unaware that there are better ways to do things until we’re presented with a new idea. Try to look for a solution to your problems in a proactive manner – technology is there to help you and when it no longer does, it effectively becomes surplus to requirements.
If you’re unhappy with your MIS and school systems in general, it could be that they’re no longer fit for purpose and you should start exploring alternatives. It’s your duty to ensure your school has the best outcomes and your staff are as happy as they can be.
Remember, a change of attitude is all that’s necessary.
School payments happen every day: parents pay for school lunches, clubs and trips all the time. Studies have shown that the number of cashless transactions is constantly increasing, with more and more of these parents choosing to use online payments to purchase goods and services from schools. It’s not a secret that online payments are
School payments happen every day: parents pay for school lunches, clubs and trips all the time. Studies have shown that the number of cashless transactions is constantly increasing, with more and more of these parents choosing to use online payments to purchase goods and services from schools.
It’s not a secret that online payments are susceptible to fraud (we’ve all heard stories about stolen credit cards and phishing sites that steal your details), so making online payments as safe as possible is a challenge for organisations all around the globe. As they became more aware of these risks, governments and financial authorities decided to take action by making payments more secure and protecting consumers when they pay online. They introduced the Payment Services Directive (PSD) in 2007 to regulate online payments in the EU and EEA, and in 2015 the updated directive – second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) – was released. This introduced even more regulations, including Strong Customer Authentication.
It was initially put forward that on 14th September 2019, new requirements for authenticating online payments will be introduced in Europe as part of PSD2. When you make an online payment, SCA requires you to use at least two of the following 3 elements:
Update: UK Finance are now recommending an 18-month delay to the introduction of Secure Customer Authentication rules in the UK to give companies more time to prepare. While this might mean that SCA regulations are postponed, there is no guarantee, which is why we have made sure we are compliant. Arbor is set up for all eventualities so that your school won’t face any problems now, or in the future. Our updates to your system also means that school payments will be protected from fraudulent transactions, which is an added bonus!
From when SCA comes into action, banks will decline payments that require SCA and that don’t meet this authentication criteria (if you would like to read the original SCA requirements, they’re set out in this Regulatory Technical Standards document). These regulations will apply to British banks as well, as they are not dependant on any Brexit decisions.
Authentication is typically added in as an extra step after checkout, where the cardholder is prompted by their bank to provide additional information to complete a payment (this could be a code sent to their phone or fingerprint authentication through their mobile banking app).
Under this new regulation, specific types of low-risk payments may be exempt from Strong Customer Authentication. Payment providers will be able to request these exemptions when processing a payment. The cardholder’s bank will then receive the request, assess the risk level of the transaction, and ultimately decide whether to approve the exemption or whether authentication is still necessary. Usually, transactions lower that £30 will be considered as low-risk and, in most cases, will not require any authentication.
SCA regulations will introduce small changes to the way people make card payments to school:
Image 1: A screenshot showing you how to enter your card details into Arbor
Image e: A screenshot showing a successful payment in Arbor
At Arbor, we’ve introduced changes to the way we process card payments to become 100% compliant with the new regulations, which means your school won’t face any problems when Strong Customer Authentication comes into practice. You also won’t need to make any changes if you use the card payment functionality in Arbor – we’ve taken care of all that for you already!
If you’d like to find out more about how our simple, smart cloud-based MIS could help you transform the way your school handles payments, contact us. You can also book a demo by calling 0207 043 0470 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
Assessment | School Operations
A-Level and GCSE results days are amongst the busiest days in any school’s calendar. We’ve compiled this guide and checklist to help the day go as smoothly as possible. 1. Import results files Results files can either be downloaded from the awarding organisation’s online portal or automatically received using the A2C transport application. Once you
A-Level and GCSE results days are amongst the busiest days in any school’s calendar. We’ve compiled this guide and checklist to help the day go as smoothly as possible.
1. Import results files
Results files can either be downloaded from the awarding organisation’s online portal or automatically received using the A2C transport application. Once you have received your results files, it’s then a case of importing them into your MIS.
Arbor’s MIS makes this process very easy by automatically identifying any problems when you upload your results files. Don’t worry about importing QN (Qualification Number) files, creating grade sets, or entering discount codes; because Arbor MIS is in the cloud, this is all done for you.
Image 1: A screenshot showing how results files are imported onto Arbor MIS
2. Set embargo date/times
The JCQ stipulates that only the school’s Exams Officer, Senior Leadership and other selected members of staff can have access to results before the official publication date. To ensure that this happens, it is essential that an “embargo date” is set in your MIS. The embargo date ensures that results can only be viewed by other members of staff, students and parents the day after results are published.
Setting an embargo is straightforward in Arbor. When you upload results files, you’ll be asked to enter an embargo date. Arbor automatically assumes that the Examinations Officer and Head Teacher will have access to results files before the embargo date, but it’s really simple to add more staff members as “pre-embargo” viewers if you’d like.
Image 2: A screenshot showing how to set an embargo date in Arbor MIS
3. Manually enter the results for any non-EDI qualifications
In the case of qualifications that don’t support EDI results files, results need to be manually added into your MIS. Non-EDI results can be viewed and downloaded from the awarding organisation’s secure portal.
Arbor’s Exams module supports all Ofqual recognised qualifications. Non-EDI qualifications can be easily added to your centre’s qualification offering. Arbor manges all the information for non-EDI qualifications centrally, so there’s no need to manually add information such as award and/or learning unit names and combinations.
Image 3: A screenshot showing where to enter non-EDI qualifications in Arbor MIS
4. Export results to a data analysis application
There are a number of excellent and intuitive third party data analysis tools available to schools (some schools have their own Excel templates, or prefer to use an analysis tool such as SISRA, 4Matrix or ALPS Connect for this purpose). After all the candidates’ results have been loaded into your MIS, the next step is to export them for analysis. To get the most out of your exams day data analysis, you should have exported assessment data at selected periods (“data drops”) throughout the year; this will allow your school’s Data Manager and Heads of Department to analyse student’s progress throughout the year.
Importing data into a third party data analysis tool can either be done from within the application itself, or by creating a marksheet with the relevant student and exam result that can be re-imported into the application.
We know that creating marksheets to export exam data is incredibly time-consuming – that’s why Arbor’s Exams module has multiple, powerful out-of-the-box reporting tools that allow you to export candidates’ results in a few clicks. If you want more flexibility to create your own reports, you can also use Arbor’s Custom Report Writer which lets you quickly and easily compile custom marksheets that contain any data point from your MIS.
Image 4: A screenshot showing how export candidate results from Arbor MIS
5. Print candidate’s Statement of Results
After you have completed your results analysis, it’s advisable to print out paper copies of candidates’ Statement of Results. Remember, only the relevant members of staff should be able to see these results before the release date. This means that all printed content should only be handled by theses members of staff. When the Statement of Results have been printed, they must be stored in a safe and secure place until the following day.
Image 5: A screenshot of how candidates’ Statement of Results appear in Arbor
6. Electronically share results with parents and guardians
The nervous thrill of opening your exam result is something that none of us ever forget. Opening the envelope is usually followed by a phone call home to tell loved ones. Students will be making plans for college, university and the rest of their lives; teachers will be on hand to offer congratulations, advice and support.
It’s not always possible for parents, guardians and students to be in school on results day, and amidst all the excitement, it’s not uncommon for Statements of Results to get spoilt or lost! With this in mind, it’s wise to share students’ exam results with their parents and guardians electronically too. Your MIS provider should give you the option to do this.
If your school is using the Arbor App, parents will be able to see their child’s exam results by selecting ‘Examinations’ in the menu. Parents can view a list of their child’s exam results or download a printable PDF. If you don’t want to share students’ exam results with parents via the Arbor App, or you would like to wait until after results day, all of this can be managed in Arbor MIS.
Image 6: A screenshot of how examination results appear in the Arbor App
Using Arbor MIS? Need help on Results Day?
We have a comprehensive online help guide that addresses all the questions that you may have. Still stuck? Our customer team will be on hand to help you!
If you’d like to find out more about how our simple, smart cloud-based MIS could help you transform the way your secondary school works, contact us. You can also book a demo by calling 0207 043 0470 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
Thousands of schools have now joined the cashless and paperless revolution, from the cosiest rural primary to the biggest inner-city sixth form college. This has led to an explosion in the Edtech sector, with hundreds of useful apps and dashboards now available to manage your school or MAT more efficiently. This is great news for
Thousands of schools have now joined the cashless and paperless revolution, from the cosiest rural primary to the biggest inner-city sixth form college. This has led to an explosion in the Edtech sector, with hundreds of useful apps and dashboards now available to manage your school or MAT more efficiently. This is great news for schools, but the choice can be bewildering.
To combat the flow of paper slips, cash and cheques that once flooded the office, many schools have now armed themselves with an array of new technologies. This can lead to soaring IT budgets and “login fatigue” (a feeling of exhaustion caused by typing in multiple usernames and passwords to complete one simple task!).
That’s why we thought we’d help you narrow down the field, by compiling our top 10 cloud systems to help schools work more efficiently. These systems are all best-of-breed in their own right, and what’s more, they integrate smoothly with Arbor’s smart, simple, cloud based MIS!
| CPOMS
Banishing paper logbooks and filing cabinets from schools all over the country, CPOMS is an intuitive app for monitoring child protection, safeguarding and pastoral issues. It cuts down paperwork for staff, while ensuring incidents are properly reported, details are shared securely and students are kept safe.
Basic student and staff data already syncs from Arbor to CPOMS, allowing our customers to operate seamlessly between the two systems. We’re now working together on a deeper integration, which we hope will allow teachers to get a single clear picture of their student’s pastoral and education data.
| G Suite for Education
Google offers its much-loved set of apps (including Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Hangouts) to schools for free, including extra features to make for smooth collaboration between students and staff. You can link Arbor MIS to Google so that you only have to set up accounts for your staff and students once, and your timetables in Arbor will automatically show in your Google Calendar, keeping your MIS as the single source of truth.
| InVentry
InVentry’s popular Sign In tools help schools securely monitor staff, students and visitors, while speeding up the sign in process. They also provide a user-friendly Audit & Compliance app, to simplify the management of assets. InVentry has set up read/write integrations with Arbor and other leading MIS providers, so you can relax knowing your crucial attendance and security data is accurate to the minute.
| SISRA and 4Matrix |
Although SISRA have recently branched out into lesson observations and CPD with their new product, SISRA Observe, they’re probably best known for their outstanding secondary data analysis tool, SISRA Analytics. Highlights include bespoke grading so you can use your own scales and language, and out-of-the-box performance reports to save you time on exam results day.
Similarly, 4Matrix is well loved by secondary schools for its management of school performance data. The app produces quick, in-depth reports on exam results day, meaning you won’t need to sift through spreadsheets to show progress for different student groups. 4Matrix also supports the design and assessment of a curriculum “without levels” for KS3.
Both systems help you create neat, visual representations of your key performance data. You can easily sync achievement and contextual data from Arbor marksheets to either 4Matrix or SISRA, meaning there’s no need for dual entry, and your MIS remains the single source of truth.
| RS Assessments
RS Assessment’s standardised tests PIRA and PUMA are a key component of many primary school improvement strategies, helping Senior Leaders track in-year pupil progress and benchmark against age-related expectations. What’s more, you can use the tests in conjunction with MARK (My Assessment and Reporting Kit) online, to get time-saving analysis of test results.
Arbor has partnered with RS Assessments to feed test results from PIRA and PUMA into our smart, simple MIS, so there’s no need for dual data entry. For MAT Leaders, the same data will aggregate up to your MAT MIS to give you a single overview of your schools. Read more about this integration here!
| ParentPay
ParentPay is an easy-to-use online payments service used by over 9,000 schools in the UK. It allows cashless income collection and financial reporting for everything from clubs and trips, to dinners and uniforms. ParentPay comes with in-built email and SMS functionality too, so you can manage payments and communicate with parents in the same place. Arbor MIS includes a built-in payment and communications service, but we also integrate directly with ParentPay, giving schools the flexibility to choose the best solution for them.
| Assembly
Assembly offers school data integration and Multi Academy Trust analytics. You can use their innovative dashboards to connect your MIS to a wide range of third-party applications, and also to populate Assembly Analytics (Assembly’s MAT Analytics tool) with a live feed of you school’s data. Arbor is one of six leading MIS providers to integrate with Assembly, so it’s a great option for MATs who aren’t ready to move all their schools onto the same MIS.
For MATs looking to find economies of scale by centralising MIS across their schools, Arbor’s MIS for Groups and MATs allows you to transform the way you work, by reporting and taking action centrally.
| Wonde and Groupcall |
Wonde and Groupcall are two of the UK’s most popular “data providers” for Education, which means they can connect your MIS with hundreds more apps and make it easy to control data sharing. You can share data from your MIS with 3rd party apps through their platform, with user friendly dashboards to help you see what data is shared with whom. Arbor MIS (along with many other cloud based providers) integrates with both Wonde and Groupcall, meaning any of the apps on their platforms are open to Arbor schools.
So there you have it: our pick of the top 10 apps for schools and MATs looking to go cashless and paperless. Powerful on their own, they all integrate with Arbor’s cloud-based MIS to help you save even more time and get deeper insight into your data. We’re not stopping there though – our API team is constantly expanding the range of integrations available to our customers. We’re currently working on a deeper sync with the market-leading Cunninghams Catering app, so watch this space!
I used to marvel at the mystery and complexity that always seemed to surround the world of the Curriculum Deputy. When I eventually became one, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the enormous privilege but enormous responsibility I had to create the perfect curriculum model – taking into account the latest thinking on curriculum design and
I used to marvel at the mystery and complexity that always seemed to surround the world of the Curriculum Deputy. When I eventually became one, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the enormous privilege but enormous responsibility I had to create the perfect curriculum model – taking into account the latest thinking on curriculum design and implementation. As I became more experienced, I began to make increasingly bold moves to build the curriculum around the needs of learners and not just the constraints of the budget.
My first mentor was a retired (and fabulously wise) Curriculum Deputy who stressed that planning the curriculum was a whole-year job. When I became a Headteacher, I continued working and planning in this way and valued the support of some really creative thinkers on my leadership teams. It was a special day indeed when Ofsted visited one such school and judged leadership, management and the curriculum as outstanding.Sadly, that framework and financial climate are a thing of the past now!
In more recent times, the Leadership Team started to consider in depth the outcomes for pupils after each set of summer results and would use this to interrogate the merits of our curriculum plan. Once or twice we did withdraw a course in September if student numbers didn’t justify it, or a staffing crisis necessitated it, but generally, once a commitment had been made to students that a course would run, we honoured it for the full two years.
Whatever our staff/student profile looked like, our first priority was to ensure that students had access to a broad, balanced, relevant curriculum. Our most recent challenges included:
Working to a timetable of 30 periods a week meant an inevitable squeeze on option choices, reducing the number of subjects students could choose from four to three in one case, and removing PSHCE/RE as subjects and mapping the provision across the curriculum. None of these decisions were easy to make or sat particularly well with me, but as the saying goes; something’s got to give.
My mentor, Bob, helped me plan my staffing requirements and showed me how many staff periods I needed to cover my commitments. Not only did this give me the opportunity to examine my current staffing needs, I could also begin to plan ahead – particularly if it meant recruiting a double specialist like a French/Spanish teacher or an RM/Textiles teacher. This was hugely helpful in feeding into the budget planning cycle and supporting my requests for additional funding for staffing.
We rarely carried any slack in our curriculum model. This inevitably meant that SLT members would also have to pick up subjects outside of their discipline and teachers that didn’t have a full timetable of classes were used as additional support with key groups and interventions. In reality, our staffing model would have to change incrementally throughout the year if the staffing profile suddenly changed, or if it was clear from our in-year tracking that students were not making sufficient progress.
One strength of our curriculum was that we could plan our interventions so well that we could provide extra lessons and tailor the curriculum for individuals and groups. We would do this by taking them out of some lessons where they were performing well to give them additional support in subjects where they were performing less well. We were blessed with a dedicated team of teachers and TA’s, some of whom would run sessions before and after school, others during registration and others during gained time or non-contact time.
If, like we did, you believe the curriculum is the dominant driver for boosting student outcomes and life chances, you will face constant budgetary pressures with very few variables to play with. We explored:
As a direct consequence, we found ourselves increasingly offering shorter contracts, reducing the size of the SLT and going without certain associate staff roles like a PA – just to balance the books. After all, it’s about delivering the most effective curriculum possible with your current staff and budget!
We used an approach we called “active vacancy management” that ensured that each time a post became vacant we didn’t simply fill it. First of all, we decided if we needed to replace the post, assessed whether it would be a like-for-like replacement or in some reduced capacity and analysed current staff deployments in detail, before considering placing an advert.
Increasingly, we looked beyond our own staff and worked closely with neighbouring schools to share teachers and other support roles. This is not without its complications, but it makes the process of appointing one full-time English teacher that works on two sites marginally easier than appointing two.
I am heartened by news of courageous schools and Trusts that break the mould and shape their curricula around the needs of their students by considering the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to be happy, resilient and independent learners.
Maintaining the intent and moral purpose of the curriculum is challenging, but the rewards for young people make it worth every minute.
“When we’re talking about intent, we’re talking about how ambitious, coherently planned and sequenced, how broad and balanced and inclusive the curriculum is.”
Heather Fearn – Ofsted
Data entry is a daunting prospect for most teachers. With the amount of data they are expected to record, it can often take up a large portion of their daily workload, and workload is listed as one of the most common reasons for leaving the profession. The good news is it doesn’t have to be
Data entry is a daunting prospect for most teachers. With the amount of data they are expected to record, it can often take up a large portion of their daily workload, and workload is listed as one of the most common reasons for leaving the profession. The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way – keep reading to see how you can transform the way your school deals with data entry.
Making data work
In November 2018, the Teacher Workload Advisory Group released a report called “Making Data Work”. The report reveals that teachers consider unnecessary tasks around recording, monitoring and analysing data to be notably time-consuming, with data entry highlighted as the biggest problem. The Teacher Workload Advisory Group set out a number of suggestions for the DfE to consider. These included:
So what’s the best way to reduce data entry at your school? Try following these simple steps:
Part 1: Streamline your systems
Before you do anything else, you need to ask yourself if all the third-party systems you’re currently using still work for your school. Are they up to date? Do you need all of them? Do staff engage with them regularly?
Find out by running a systems audit. It’s easy to do – just follow the instructions in our blog on how to audit your school or MAT’s IT systems. By running a systems audit, you can reduce the number of places you have to enter data. Goodbye, multiple logins! Your staff will have fewer systems and apps to keep track of, which will considerably reduce their administrative workload.
Image 1: How we encourage schools to approach an IT systems audit
Part 2: Make sure any extra systems you’re using are integrated with your MIS
Over the years, your school has probably invested in lots of different systems that were useful at the time, but which don’t integrate with your current MIS. This can make everyday tasks like following up with detentions and creating meal plans much more complicated and time-consuming than they need to be, as you have to visit external apps in order to properly record all of the data. Using systems that integrate with your MIS can make admin a lot simpler. For example, Arbor’s integrations with apps like CPOMS and Inventry means that you only have to enter student data once and it will update automatically in these apps.
The “Making Data Work” report also advises that schools should “minimise or eliminate the number of pieces of information teachers are expected to compile.” Ensuring your systems integrate with your MIS will mean that you can access all your data in one place, which means you won’t have to spend time transferring it from one system to another.
Image 2: How parents can view all payments and invoices from Arbor’s Parent Portal
Part 3: Set up a system to suit your school
It’s important to think about how your MIS can best serve your school. For example, the report advises that schools should have simple systems that allow behaviour incidents to be logged during lesson time, rather than at break or lunch. In Arbor, you can set up incident workflows that track negative and positive behaviour (e.g. a Level 2 incident could automatically create a lunchtime detention). Automating workflows in this way means that teachers don’t have to add this information manually, which will save them a significant amount of time.
Your MIS can also help to reduce data with quick group selection. For example, in Arbor you can select absentees from your register and instantly send emails to their primary guardians with the help of our mail merge tool. You can even use a pre-made message template so you won’t have to type a single word!
Image 3: How you can follow up on students registered absent in Arbor
Not only will reducing data entry help to improve workloads, it will make your staff happier too. So – streamline your systems, make sure they integrate with your MIS, and set it all up to suit your school. If you’d like to hear more about how Arbor could help you reduce data entry at your school, why not drop us a message here?
At our most recent MAT conference, Paul West, Chief Executive Officer at Spencer Academies Trust, shared his experience of the trust’s recent merger with Trent Academies Group, and how other trusts considering a similar move can make sure they’re doing it right. Check out his presentation below to see how Spencer Academies Trust navigated this
At our most recent MAT conference, Paul West, Chief Executive Officer at Spencer Academies Trust, shared his experience of the trust’s recent merger with Trent Academies Group, and how other trusts considering a similar move can make sure they’re doing it right. Check out his presentation below to see how Spencer Academies Trust navigated this important process:
Fig. 1: Click on the the arrows to flip through Paul’s presentation
At our latest MAT conference in London, Paul James, Chief Executive of River Learning Trust, talked to us about the importance of “working together to achieve excellence in education”. His presentation, which you can view below, explores different approaches to leadership and emphasises the necessity of teamwork. Fig. 1: Click on the the arrows to
At our latest MAT conference in London, Paul James, Chief Executive of River Learning Trust, talked to us about the importance of “working together to achieve excellence in education”. His presentation, which you can view below, explores different approaches to leadership and emphasises the necessity of teamwork.
Fig. 1: Click on the the arrows to flick through Paul’s slides from the day
At our recent MAT conference in London, Will Smith, Chief Executive Officer at Greenshaw Learning Trust, spoke about the importance of defining your Trust and how building strong foundations and principals is key to running a successful organisation. We’ve transcribed the beginning of his presentation below. What do we mean by “Trust”? A couple of
At our recent MAT conference in London, Will Smith, Chief Executive Officer at Greenshaw Learning Trust, spoke about the importance of defining your Trust and how building strong foundations and principals is key to running a successful organisation. We’ve transcribed the beginning of his presentation below.
What do we mean by “Trust”? A couple of years ago, as I walked around schools and spoke to my relatively small central team, I would hear things like “the Trust are coming in; the Trust have asked for this information.” We seemed to exist in some ivory tower headed up by me in some sort of draconian dark suit wielding some sceptre of power that was “the Trust”. We needed to bust that myth.
We moved away from the notion of “the Trust is coming in”. I went round and made it our number 1 performance managing objective to get it clear to local governing bodies and head teachers that “The Trust” is everyone. We challenge people when they refer to the Trust central team as “The Trust”. They are included in that Trust.
This has created an understanding of who we are as an organisation and has allowed me to develop true school-to-school collaboration, because we are all in one Trust and that’s been a massive thing for us. That’s why I focus very much on defining that Trust.
Click on the slides below to learn about Greenshaw Learning Trust’s strategy in more detail:
At our latest MAT Conference in London, Martin Holyoak, Education Product Specialist at PS Financials, spoke about the benefits of standardising systems across your MAT as you scale. Read what he had to say below. Let’s talk about using technology to strengthen your position when centralising. When we read into the whole centralising process, there’s a
At our latest MAT Conference in London, Martin Holyoak, Education Product Specialist at PS Financials, spoke about the benefits of standardising systems across your MAT as you scale. Read what he had to say below.
Let’s talk about using technology to strengthen your position when centralising. When we read into the whole centralising process, there’s a lot to consider. One of the first considerations should be the technology we use. What you should try to do is to use 1 product across all the schools in your Trust. When some schools first join the Trust, they try to take their systems with them. They can use anything up to 15 different systems – just for the basics. It’s actually more cost-effective when you start breaking contracts and just using one system.
Fig. 1: Click on the the arrows to flick through Martin’s slides from the day
Looking at accounting, HR, procurement, communications – whatever it may be; if you have multiple sets of software that don’t work with each other, it’s not helpful. If you just use these spreadsheets and systems, making an error could mean that hundreds of messages could be lost. You’re not going to see the full picture with these spreadsheets – and it’s a lot of work as well! So, if you can have 1 of everything, that will strengthen your Trust’s position and help you with scaling up as new schools join.
Where do you sit?
This brings me to your centralisation journey, wherever you are on it:
1. Autonomy: we work autonomously at first, holding only ourselves accountable and hiring who we want
2. Standardisation: when I look at the information in my Trust, I see differences without seeing lots of processes – standardisation is the next step
3. Centralisation: once everyone is doing step 2, it’s easier to put everything into a central site
But with centralisation, there are quite a lot of issues. I have seen schools in Trusts for years that are still autonomous; they all do their own payrolls, hire who they want, run their own bank accounts. I’ve seen a lot of centralising as well, but you do have 2 separate directions to choose from. Ours is more controlled. By controlled, I mean we have a core team of specialists. Every MAT central team should have a core that covers finance, Hr, IT – to name just a few. They work together, not across business units, but across all schools. This way, you are getting efficiency and uniformity, which will help you to scale up when new schools join the Trust.
What are the positives of going central?
It’s very, very efficient. Let’s look at an individual business unit like the finance function, for example. When running a 10-school trust, that’s 10 banknotes, 10 payment runs – it all takes time. Or we could just have 1 of everything. That seems a lot easier, doesn’t it? Improving financial reporting also really needs core specialists. We get what we can out of the system and all the schools in the Trust get included.
And that’s just in finance. Let’s look at HR: people are always the most expensive part of your budget and that will never change. It’s also the place with the least visibility in all the schools I’ve been to. We’ve introduced our core specialists to HR to control and harmonise processes across our schools. We can onboard people quickly and capture their data.
If we’re going to scale up, it comes down to 3 things and the main thing is people. Getting the right technology is also really important, but it’s about process as well. You can have the most sophisticated software in the land – but if you use it incorrectly, what’s the point?
How does GAG Pooling fit in?
I will bring up GAG pooling, although I have no opinion on the matter. With many Trusts, even centralised Trusts, their schools manage their own premises, IT, administration and much more. The Trust then covers a small margin that handles things like legal, overheads and whatever else. The idea of GAG pooling is that the opposite would happen – the Trust would manage the majority of these school operations. All the ethical stuff, contracts and the like would be taken care of by a core team of specialists. This leaves the school to come back to their main focus: education. That’s something you can do with the right technology.
Is it right for your audience?
One of the concerns you have with centralising is your audience. We all crave reports. I know you’ve got governor reports, trustees, SLT and everything else. There’s lots of reports to produce. With the right technology in the hands of the right people, you can turn great looking things into something tangible. Fantastic work, but is it right for your audience? Again, the right people in the right positions in the central team working together can produce information that is going to make a difference moving forward.
What’s the best way for your school to engage with parents? Far too often we’ve seen schools struggle with a mixture of asking parents to check letters, forms, payment systems, booking systems, and report cards. This causes too much manual work for schools, and makes it hard for parents to keep on top of everything.
That’s why today we’re thrilled to launch the new Arbor App for iOS & Android. Say goodbye to paper slips and emails – our new App lets parents register their child for a club or trip, book parents evening slots, and manage payments all from their phone. Parents can also use the App to check in on their child’s attendance, behaviour and progress.
What’s more, the App will let you communicate with parents for free using our new In-App Messaging feature.
Image 1: Arbor have launched a simple, smart app for parents and guardians
How will parents benefit?
How will your school benefit?
How to get set up
The Arbor App is for parents at schools who already use the Arbor MIS. To get your school set up, contact your Account Manager or email myteam@arbor-education.com.
Not using Arbor yet? If you’re interested in finding out more about how Arbor MIS and the new Arbor App could transform the way your school works, get in touch! You can request a free demo and a chat with your local Partnership Manager anytime through the contact form on our website, by emailing tellmemore@arbor-education.com or calling 0208 050 1028.
Today I will share with you the principles that keep REAch2 together. We call them our touchstones. These are the things that are common and that are important for us as an organisation. We call them touchstones because a touchstone 500 years ago was a measure of quality. It’s a standard by which we are judged.
Today I will share with you the principles that keep REAch2 together. We call them our touchstones. These are the things that are common and that are important for us as an organisation. We call them touchstones because a touchstone 500 years ago was a measure of quality. It’s a standard by which we are judged. Hence, their importance can be felt across our organisation.
They’re also a barometer of how we’re doing. As a director of HR, I can assure you: when we have challenging conversations, this is what we come back to. As I’ve said before, REAch2 isn’t a Starbucks where every coffee shop is the same. We’re the equivalent of a bespoke coffee shop, where quality is absolutely paramount. No teacher is the same; no two schools are the same, but we share these guiding principles.
So what does this mean in practice?
Let me give you some good examples:
We make time to meet. If you take everything else away, apart from aligning with your culture and your purpose, this is paramount. It’s the easiest thing to disappear out of your calendars. We enjoy working together. We are vibrant when we work together.
We don’t have head office, so we’re all in lots of different locations. We’ve gotten really good at Zoom or Skype calls and work hard at making it feel like we’re all in one room. Making time together is really important. That’s the senior leadership team, head teachers and teachers.
You’ll see on the website that we talk about the REAch2 family. That may sound corny to some, but we mean it. Being a family means that we actually hold each other to account. We have a chart that reminds us of who’s responsible for what: how central team is going to work with schools, what support they’re going to get. We challenge each other when things aren’t going so well.
One of the things we remind our headteachers and SLT about is “raise extra purpose”. We have to ensure that everyone understands why we do what we do. If you go onto our website, then you’ll see our 5 year strategy document, which outlines that REAch2 stands for ‘reaching educational attainment’. Under that, we’ve got 3 headings:
Image 1: REAch2 uses touchstones to stay focused on their guiding principles when on-boarding new schools to the MAT
Another key element: people. When I first joined REAch 2, I was clearly the executive. My focus would be leadership, leadership, leadership coupled with location, location, location. You can imagine that, having 60 schools, we’re not looking for the same head teacher for every single one. Our smallest school in East Anglia has 75 pupils, while our largest in London has over 1000. We’ve appointed every single one of our head teachers apart from 3. It’s not a ruthless statistic: it’s the results of painstaking clarity in what we’re about and what works.
When you think about it, it’s not difficult. Know what you’re looking for when you interview. Our first questions are about the ‘REAch2 fit’, not about experience. Our on-boarding plan for every single person on the central team is 6 months. It’s very specific, it’s very clear and the line manager takes ownership of it. We have an induction event, which is not just for head teachers, but for any of their SLT whom they wish to bring along. We have 3 regional teaching conferences a year, and we have one larger headteacher conference where everybody comes together.
It’s important to get people together to reinforce messages. When it comes to leadership and culture:
Practice is important. If our touchstones are non-negotiable and we’re clear about our mission, then actually it takes practice. Communicating something via a poster or on a website and doing it once won’t accomplish anything. It’s about reinforcing it on a daily basis. Over the last 6 months we’ve been looking at our own growth to make sure we maintain our purpose and principles when we add more schools. We’re not standing still.
One of the reasons why REAch2 is really keen to be at Arbor’s conference today is because our sector is still relatively new. This is a good reason to support each other. Don’t forget that whilst we’re all working on our own individual culture, people outside our sector will be looking at us. They will say: ‘what’s it like working there?’ So, your culture (our culture) is important. It will define us as a good place to work: a sector for a career and a sector which means business.
Today I’m going to talk about how to scale culture across your MAT whilst giving schools individual identity. I’m Sue Northend, Head of HR at REAch2, and I wanted to start by telling you a little bit about the trust and the journey we’ve been on so far. REAch2 is the largest primary academy trust
Today I’m going to talk about how to scale culture across your MAT whilst giving schools individual identity. I’m Sue Northend, Head of HR at REAch2, and I wanted to start by telling you a little bit about the trust and the journey we’ve been on so far.
REAch2 is the largest primary academy trust in England, and we have 60 schools scattered across 200 miles of geography. Our schools tend to fall into one of two specific categories; they’re either rural and coastal, which has its own set of challenges, or they’re in central towns and cities. Part of REAch2’s DNA is taking on schools that are in particular situations where there is a lot of social deprivation.
82% of our academies were sponsored when they came to us with severe issues of performance. We’ve got 20,000 children and 4,000 staff, and of the 60 schools we’ve got today, 17% of them were in special measures when they came to the trust. I’m really delighted to be able to say that 6 years later, 82% of our schools are now rated “Good” or above. There’s no doubt that it’s a journey, and part of the culture that we embed in our schools is to make sure that they know that we’re not looking for results over a 12-month period, because we want those results to be sustainable.
My background is in finance, so coming into education was a learning curve for me! Despite this, I think I bought some fresh thinking to REAch2 when I arrived. Really, any organization in the commercial sector that is growing in the way REAch2 has done (which is about 50% in three years!) would think it was utter madness. But what we’ve learnt along the way is that we don’t get it right all the time, and I think we as a central team have had to accept that it is a learning journey. What I want to share with you today is a bit about where we are, what our culture looks like, and how we reinforce it.
First of all, let’s take a look at what it takes to create and organise a culture.
One of our first steps when taking on a new school is to do what we call “facilitating a path”. When a MAT is small, alignment is easy – after a few conversations by the water cooler, a decision is made, steps are agreed, and we’re on the same page. As the MAT grows, that gets more difficult. It becomes all the more important to be clear and consistent, and to communicate what it is we do & what we’re about on a daily basis. So when a school joins the trust, we clear the path for the REAch2 culture, and some of this is really practical, as you might expect. We look at things like structure, accountability, and whether the school has the right talent (although we don’t sack the headteacher!). We have conversations with all the teachers about what REAch2 is about, and our CEO, Deputy CEO, COO & Leadership team make time to go out and spend time in the school so that the teachers can ask us questions and can see that we really care about the path that we’re clearing.
There are a lot of CEOs, COOs and CFOs here today, and make no mistake – culture is your responsibility. It has to start at the top. When we clear the path, we focus on supporting the school leadership by balancing what’s core and consistent across all our schools, with what’s individual to that specific school. I think that’s one of the attractions of REAch2 to all the primary schools that join us – we don’t insist that all schools have the same vision. We don’t impose a curriculum or a uniform – headteachers are headteachers because they enjoy the leadership, the ownership and the success that they bring to their own schools. We understand that.
So we’re very careful about what is core and what’s not. We’re not the Starbucks of the education world, and not every latte, frappuccino or mocha is the same. We see the trust and central team as being the enabler and the empowerer, facilitating and supporting change or improvement.
In order that we can understand what needs to change, we hold inductions. And during that induction, we introduce our Headteachers to “Oh, the places you will go”, by Dr Seuss (one of my favourite philosophers!). It’s a simple book, but it’s got some fantastic philosophy in there. When you first join the trust, it feels like this line in the book:
“You’ll be on your way up. You’ll be seeing great sights. You’ll join the high flyers who soar at great heights.”
However, we’re really clear about this to the Headteachers in our senior leadership team – for all of us there will be times when, as Dr Seuss says:
“When you’re alone, there’s a good chance you’ll meet some things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some down the road between hither and yon, that will scare you so much you won’t want to go on.”
Image 1: REAch2 use The Places You’ll Go by Dr Seuss to onboard new schools joining the MAT
For me, part of the culture of REAch2 is making sure that all of our schools know that we are there when things are going well and when the chips are down. And, let’s be realistic – that can be a daily occurrence.
Before I talk more specifically about REAch2’s culture, I’m going to talk a little bit about what the word culture actually means. We tend to our schools in the same way that a farmer might tend to a field, or a parent might tend to a child. We’re there through the good weather and the bad weather, thick and thin, and no matter what the time is; I’ve been supporting teachers with cases over the weekend and during the evening. It’s important that they know we are there. Every school is individual – not only because of the location – but because no two pupils are the same. So why would our schools be the same? The DNA may be alike, but they’re more like siblings, not clones. Most importantly, the culture spans across all aspects of the organisation, from our trustees to our governors, our headteachers to our pupils, and we share our vision with parents. We tend to our staff through CPD, and coaching is available to all leaders, without restriction. For pupils, our Eleven Before Eleven programme means that children from disadvantaged backgrounds get to cook a meal together, sleep out under the stars, or travel on the train – things they’ve never had the chance to do before.
These are the kind of things that excite us. These are the kind of things that mean the curriculum is not core – it’s differentiated for school to school. So before I talk specifically about REAch2, I’m going to ask you a really easy question. Grab a pen and paper off the table, and I want you to score yourself in answer to these two questions (top marks is 10, and 1 is really low):
You should have found those questions easy to answer. Now I’m going to move onto a harder question.
My guess is probably not (unless you’ve just done a session on this exact topic). But this is the work that you need to do, because those words will affect the way you’re behaving. No matter if your senior leadership team is 3 of you, 10 or 15 of you – if your behaviour is reinforcing different cultures, different words and a different purpose, you can imagine how your sphere of influence will dissipate as the organisation grows.
On Thursday 2nd May, we bought together 68 MATs for our third sold out MAT Conference in London. Matthew Haynes, SHMI and the designer of MAT summary evaluations, was among our speakers, and took to the stage to talk us through what Ofsted hope to achieve through the new approach to inspecting multi-academy trusts. You can
On Thursday 2nd May, we bought together 68 MATs for our third sold out MAT Conference in London. Matthew Haynes, SHMI and the designer of MAT summary evaluations, was among our speakers, and took to the stage to talk us through what Ofsted hope to achieve through the new approach to inspecting multi-academy trusts. You can flick through his informative slides below:
We’ll be posting the rest of the presentations from our MAT conference in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on the blog for more updates!
We recently talked about the importance of an aligned staff development framework in your school or Trust, and our first point was to make sure your objectives are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. SMART objectives are a common project management tool, and can be set for an individual staff member, for a
We recently talked about the importance of an aligned staff development framework in your school or Trust, and our first point was to make sure your objectives are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. SMART objectives are a common project management tool, and can be set for an individual staff member, for a department, a school, or even as a vision for an entire Trust. So, what are the benefits of SMART objectives for staff management, and how do you make sure you’re getting them?
(You can also click here to read & download a handy PDF checklist for SMART objectives)
Specificity is important because it means your staff will always have a clear sense of direction. Wanting to improve attendance may be your overarching goal, but your staff will be listless and their attempts to do so may rub up against one another if they each have that as their own personal objective. A more specific school objective would be “improve on last year’s attendance across the board in every year group”. Then, your Heads of Year would have even more specific attendance objectives such as “meet with the parents of every persistent absentee in Year 5, to create personal attendance strategies“.
In this way, your staff all know how they’re contributing to your targets. This will give their daily tasks a sense of genuine purpose, and help them prioritise their time. To check if your staff objectives are specific enough, ask yourself; is this objective focused on this one person’s role in the school? Am I confident this objective won’t be misconstrued?
Measurability is important to consider for practical reasons. You need to know if your efforts are effective so that you can build on them next term or next year, and you can’t know that unless you’re somehow measuring them. When you set a staff member’s objective, consider how it will be reviewed in three months time. Try not to set objectives that will require a significant admin burden to measure – it’s best to use metrics which are already recorded by the tools at your disposal. For instance, the Head of Year target above, to meet with the parents of every persistent absentee in Year 5, would be very difficult if you didn’t already have a way of reporting on persistent absentees by year group and easily making their meeting records.
Remember that ‘measurable’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘measured by hard data’. A classroom teacher, for instance, might have a target of achieving positive feedback in every lesson observation that year. If you decide how you’re going to measure your targets up front, you remove any disputes and headaches from the performance review process, and ensure that staff members always know how well they’re doing.
It’s important to make sure your objectives are challenging, yet realistic. Give your staff members something aim for, but make sure the target is within range. Getting to a 97% attendance average this term is a very specific and measurable goal for your school, but could end up being pretty demoralising if your current attendance is 85%. If a goal is overwhelmingly optimistic, it’s harder to work out where to start, and stressful to invest energy into any one approach.
Individual staff abilities should also be considered – do they have enough training in their role to complete this objective? Will they need any help? Do they feel confident that they can succeed, and if not then how can you as a manager instill that confidence in them?
Making sure your objectives are relevant has obvious surface level benefits – there’s no point telling your staff to do something that has nothing to do with the school or its students. Relevance has a more refined meaning though; individual staff objectives should be relevant to their team’s current objective, which should be relevant to the school’s current overarching objectives, and so on. At the top level, creating a very clear improvement plan will help all of your school or Trust’s line managers to set relevant individual goals for their staff.
If staff goals are all very relevant, the right person will always be completing the right task. Relevant objectives also help staff improve their skills in their chosen career. To test whether an objective is relevant enough, ask yourself if it’s contributing both to the goals of the school and the purpose of that individual’s job role.
Every objective should be time bound, both to make sure there’s a defined end or review date, and to make sure your staff member is performing tasks at a relevant time in relation to their context. In a school or Trust context, this generally means binding objectives to the academic year. You should be able to decide whether an objective is a short term goal which should be finished by the end of term, such as to support students in achieving their mock exam target marks, or whether an objective is a longer term project that could take all academic year with termly check ins, such as to improve homework submission rates across a department.
The benefit of this is that your staff member will have the time they need to achieve their objective and will be achieving them in time to contribute to your broader goals for the school. To check if an objective is timely, ask yourself; is this the right time of year to attempt this objective? Have I provided enough time to succeed? Will it be complete in time to fit in with our overall improvement plan?
However you track your staff performance, whether through Arbor MIS or any other system, SMART is a useful framework to keep in mind. The best performance objectives will instill a sense of purpose, make task prioritisation easy, and give your staff a clear direction for the year ahead. Download a PDF checklist of this advice here, or read more advice on improving school and Trust operations here.
A number of factors are making schools and MATs look again at the data they gather and use around pupil attainment and progress. These include, but are not limited to: Reducing teacher workload The proposed new, less data reliant, Ofsted Framework The challenge of standardising teacher assessments Balancing the autonomy that schools require to meet
A number of factors are making schools and MATs look again at the data they gather and use around pupil attainment and progress. These include, but are not limited to:
The traditional model in schools has, for some time, been a combination of formative assessment and summative teacher assessment.
Tracking formative assessment takes many forms, from simple notes against lesson plans to more formal ‘rubrics’ where banks of statements are ‘ticked off’. Whatever level of recording is used by schools, this is the main vehicle for improvement in student achievement as it’s ongoing and informs future provision.
Since the removal of ‘levels’, there’s been a huge amount of time spent by schools coming up with alternative summative assessment models. A lot of these ended up looking very much like the levels they were supposed to replace!
Whatever the summative model, the greatest challenges of a teacher-determined summative judgement have remained the same; ensuring consistency and validity of these judgements, and managing the workload caused by creating, moderating and collating judgements (let alone analysing the outcomes!)
There is also clear pressure from Ofsted to stop using flight paths to judge whether pupils’ progress is as desired. Only this weekend, Sean Harford (HMI and Ofsted’s National Director for Education) made it clear that this approach to target setting is, in his opinion, potentially demotivating. Flight paths are intrinsically linked to the use of summative teacher assessment scales – each implies the other is a valid approach.
In summary; schools and MATs face a real challenge. It’s essential for leaders to know the success, or otherwise, of their provision. This is particularly difficult for MATs as they scale and begin to cover a wider geographical area (and manage ever higher pupil and school numbers). Without attainment data then desktop surveys of the success, or otherwise, of schools and teachers is not possible.
What is needed is a method of providing the data required whilst reducing teacher workload, ensuring consistency of judgement and, depending on your approach, moving away from flight-paths.
This is where commercial standardised testing comes in. It solves many of the problems associated with summative teacher judgement:
The final piece of the jigsaw in getting standardised testing to work in your school or MAT is making sure you have analytics that are informative and easily aggregated.
Some MIS systems should be able to do this for you. For example, Arbor’s integration with RS Assessments’ PiRA and PUMA testing aggregates all of your test outcome data into the school and MAT MIS, with no extra data downloads and uploads, for easy and insightful analytics. Teachers can use the strand level analysis provided by RS Assessments to more accurately plan future curriculum content to meet the needs of the pupils. Senior leaders at schools and MATs can also use Arbor MIS to take action on their results – for example, by setting up intervention groups, or by building custom reports combining data from their PiRA and PUMA test results and Arbor MIS. If you don’t have access to this kind of analysis, many standardised test providers will offer their own dashboards or reporting services.
Fig 1.: Using Arbor’s integration with PiRA & PUMA tests in Arbor MIS
By adopting standardised assessments in place of teacher determined summative judgements, the time saved can be put back into planning and delivering great learning experiences for pupils whilst ensuring school and MAT leaders can still evaluate the outcomes achieved.
Get in touch to book a free demo to find out how Arbor MIS and RS Assessments from Hodder Education could transform your school or MAT, call us on 0208 050 1028 or email us at tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
For current customers: contact your Arbor Customer Success Manager or Account Manager to get this integration set up!
Over the past few months we’ve been giving our Assignments a fresh lick of paint, so that what used to be a minor feature on the lesson dashboard is now a full blown module schools can use as an electronic homework solution. Teachers have always been able to set students work directly from the lesson
Over the past few months we’ve been giving our Assignments a fresh lick of paint, so that what used to be a minor feature on the lesson dashboard is now a full blown module schools can use as an electronic homework solution. Teachers have always been able to set students work directly from the lesson dashboard, which will appear in their Student Portal so they can submit their work online, but we’ve made some big improvements to what you can then do with the data this generates. School leaders can now analyse how much work is being set in each subject, which teachers are setting the most work, and more!
We asked Carly McCulloch, Arbor Product Manager, to go over some of these features for you in a bit more detail:
We’ve made some improvements to the workflows for creating assignments, and tracking the submissions of assignments within Arbor for you and your teaching staff. These new additions to the assignment module have been developed based on feedback from school senior leadership, who wanted a way to see the submission statistics for assignments in their school, and check the quantity and quality of homework set by teaching staff. We take suggestions from schools very seriously, so please keep them coming!
Improvements to homework tracking include:
Fig. 1 – The Overview by Courses page showing automatically calculated stats for the number of assignments set and their submission rates
We’ve also not forgotten about our company mission to save teachers time. A lot of the new features should help teachers set and mark Assignments more easily, incentivising use of the system and streamlining workflows in your school:
Fig. 2 – A Student Marks Chart automatically generated for a marked assignment in Arbor MIS – the colour splits the marks down the median, the blue line shows the mean, and hovering over each bar shows further student level information
Fig. 3 – A teacher marking a grade-based English assignment, submitted by students online
We hope this module can help you to track assignment submissions, make them easier for students and teachers to manage, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of assignments in your school.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS system could transform the way your school or MAT works, save your staff time and improve student outcomes, get in touch via the contact form on our website
The educational landscape is constantly changing, not least the way in which student and school performance is measured. While working in my previous role as a secondary school data manager we still had Levels, GCSEs graded A* to G and RAISEonline. Now we have Progress 8 and Attainment 8 as the headline measures used to
The educational landscape is constantly changing, not least the way in which student and school performance is measured.
While working in my previous role as a secondary school data manager we still had Levels, GCSEs graded A* to G and RAISEonline. Now we have Progress 8 and Attainment 8 as the headline measures used to measure school performance, along with the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) average point score, and the proportion of pupils attaining English and Maths at a grade 5 or above.
Fig 1.: Your free Arbor Insight dashboards analyse trends over the past three years and benchmark you against local, national and “Schools like you” measures
Arbor Insight is all you need to analyse past performance and view trends, but how can you estimate your accountability measures for your current Year 11 cohort?
First, some quick definitions:
Attainment 8 for each student is simply the sum of values of the highest GCSEs within four “buckets”: Maths, English, EBAcc and Open (other subjects). Maths is double-weighted. The highest of English Language and English Literature is placed in the English bucket and is also double-weighted, provided that the student takes both. Some non-GCSE qualifications can count towards the ‘Open’ slots.
Progress 8 for each student is one tenth of the difference between the student’s predicted Attainment 8, and the expected Attainment 8 score, based on their KS2 Prior Attainment. Both measures are calculated after the Key Stage 4 results are released each year, because they’re based on the actual average results achieved by students.
The first and easiest way to analyse your Key Stage 4 performance is to check the features available in your MIS or assessments system. Your MIS may provide estimates for Progress 8 and Attainment 8. Arbor does this within the Progress 8 Analysis dashboard. This automatically uses the complex DfE methodology and will give you a useful overview of your estimated measures. The estimates for each student can be downloaded or sent to a live feed:
Fig. 2.: Arbor uses DfE methodology to calculate estimates for Progress 8 & Attainment 8
What can you do if your MIS doesn’t provide this analysis?
You can calculate your Progress 8 measures within a spreadsheet. You’ll need to start by calculating the KS2 prior attainment for each student. For details of how the DfE calculate the KS2 Prior Attainment you should refer to the Secondary accountability measures document published by the Department for Education. It’s currently the rounded average of the fine scores for Reading and Maths. Below is an example of how the fine scores can be calculated within a spreadsheet – feel free to copy my work!
You can use lookups on the test marks to find the fine score for each student. Then average the two marks and round to one decimal place:
You then need to download the grades for English, Maths, Ebacc and Open from your MIS. To calculate the Attainment 8 convert these grades to values and sum, doubling the value for Maths and English (providing students are taking both English Literature and English Language).
The Secondary accountability measures document provides Attainment 8 and “bucket” averages from the previous year. These can be copied into your spreadsheet.
Use this data to calculate the expected Attainment 8 score and marks for each student. The KS2 Prior Attainment for the student is used to lookup the average marks for Attainment 8 and for the English, Maths, EBacc and Open subjects. The average marks for Maths and English need to be divided by 2 to give the expected marks for these subjects; the EBacc and Open marks need to be divided by 3.
The Progress 8 for each student can be found by subtracting the expected Attainment 8 score from the predicted Attainment 8 score for each student and dividing by 10:
To calculate the overall school Progress 8, find the average of all the students’ Progress 8:
Finally, you can refer to columns from the different sheets and use conditional formatting to analyse your data further:
I hope these tips have been useful for new data managers, as well as those who still aren’t quite comfortable with the new system. If you’d like to find out how you can perform your Progress 8 or Attainment 8 analysis in Arbor instead, do get in touch here!
We’ve just updated our KS1 and KS2 free dashboards and premium Insight reports with the latest ASP disadvantaged data! This means that our Ofsted Readiness, Attainment & Progress and Closing the Gap reports all now include validated & disadvantaged KS2 data and disadvantaged data & phonics KS1 results. With the release of this new disadvantaged
We’ve just updated our KS1 and KS2 free dashboards and premium Insight reports with the latest ASP disadvantaged data!
This means that our Ofsted Readiness, Attainment & Progress and Closing the Gap reports all now include validated & disadvantaged KS2 data and disadvantaged data & phonics KS1 results.
With the release of this new disadvantaged data, the Department for Education has published new analysis about the disadvantage gap in UK schools. Looking at provisional phonics data from 2018, 70% of pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) met the expected standard in phonics in year 1, compared to 84% of all other pupils. The gap between pupils eligible for FSM and all other pupils is 14 percentage points, and remains the same compared to 2017.
The gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged KS2 pupils (measured using the disadvantage gap index) has decreased in each of the last seven years, narrowing by 3% in the latest year and 13.2% since 2011.
If you’d like to know how your disadvantaged pupils have performed relative to national averages and other pupils within your school, you can find all the information you need in your Insight reports, which are available to view in your Arbor Insight portal. If you’ve already got an account, you can click here to log in, or click here to create an account for your school or MAT.
A closer look at what’s new in our Insight reports:
Since we imported this new data, we’ve made a few changes to your Arbor Insight reports. We’ve outlined the most important changes below.
1. Ofsted Readiness report
In the KS1 section of this report, we’ve added disadvantage cohort benchmarks to the Working at Expected Standard measures for Reading, Writing and Maths. For KS2, this added benchmark can be found in Averaged Scaled Score and Overall Progress Score for Reading, Writing and Maths.
Fig. 1: The bar graphs above show your school’s average as a benchmark against each demographic group, helping you to quickly see which cohorts are under-performing or exceeding the school average
Fig. 2: A screenshot of our Ofsted Readiness report
You may have also noticed changes in the condensed Closing the Gap section in our Ofsted Readiness report for both KS1 and KS2 data (see above image). For KS1, Working at the Expected Standard for Reading, Writing and Maths now has added disadvantaged measures. For KS2, this measure has been added under Averaged Scale Score in Reading and Maths. The text callout for these measures contain useful calculations which explain your data in plain english & calculate the percentage by which the gap for each measure has widened or narrowed in your school.
2. Attainment & Progress report:
The KS1 & KS2 Attainment and Progress reports also now contain disadvantaged benchmarks and cohort data for 2017/18, allowing you to benchmark this cohort against all other demographic groupings in your school. For KS1, this chart can be found in measures, Achieving Expected Standard: Y1 Phonics, Achieving Expected Standard and Working at Greater Depth within the Expected Standard for Reading, Writing and Maths. For KS2, this graph appears in Overall Progress Score for Reading, Writing and Maths.
Fig. 3: A screenshot of our Attainment & Progress report
3. Closing the Gap report: Focus on Disadvantage
This particular report is part of a series of 5 reports which help to identify the gaps between student groups, showing which groups are under or over performing relative to the school, group and national averages.
At the beginning of this report there is a star chart which shows the gaps between disadvantaged and EAL pupils compared to the rest of the school. For KS1, the measures shown in this graph are attendance and attainment, and for KS2 they are attendance, attainment and progress measures. This star chart is colour coded to help you identify any areas that need your attention (or indeed any areas that should be shouted about because there is no gap!); for example, a green star indicates there is no gap between the group and the school average, whilst an orange star indicates the group has performed below the school and national averages. A yellow star indicates the group has performed between them.
Fig. 4: A screenshot of the star chart at the beginning of the Closing the Gap report
Your reports clearly display the cohort size for each measure, so you know how much statistical significance each outcome has. This can help you know which areas you should be prioritising.
Finally, KS4 validated and disadvantaged data will be released in the next few weeks. Once it’s released, Arbor Insight portals & reports will be automatically updated.
As one of only a few accredited suppliers, we receive all of our data for Arbor Insight reports and dashboards directly from the DfE. Over 10,000 schools are now using Arbor Insight to benchmark their performance, so if you’re thinking of signing up, you’ll be in good company!
We’re excited to announce that on 2nd May 2019, Arbor & PS Financials are bringing together MAT CEOs and senior leaders from across the country for the third installment of our MAT conference series! The conference will build on the success of our MAT conferences in London and Manchester last year, attended by over 200
We’re excited to announce that on 2nd May 2019, Arbor & PS Financials are bringing together MAT CEOs and senior leaders from across the country for the third installment of our MAT conference series! The conference will build on the success of our MAT conferences in London and Manchester last year, attended by over 200 Executive Leaders representing 150 MATs nationally.
Image 1: Kings Place, Kings Cross, where this year’s conference will take place
Entitled Scaling sustainably: How, when and if to centralise, the conference will cover various different strategies for achieving sustainable growth. Delegates will hear from established MAT CEOs & Senior Leaders about how they’ve scaled their strategy, operations, central team process, systems, reporting, governance & culture. You can read about some of of our speakers below:
Cathie Paine, Deputy CEO, REAch2: Appointed in 1998 to her first headship in a large and socially deprived school in “special measures”, Cathie was at the time the youngest headteacher in England and led the school to become “Good” in just four terms. Cathie’s headship career went on to span 15 years across three key stages and schools in a variety of challenging circumstances across the 3-11 age range. As Deputy CEO of REAch2, the largest primary MAT in the country, her vision is the belief that school leadership at its heart is about transforming lives. Cathie will share her advice on how to scale culture across a MAT whilst giving schools individual identity.
Will Smith, CEO, Greenshaw Learning Trust: Will is judged by Ofsted to be an outstanding and inspirational school leader. He has worked as a senior school leader for over 15 years and was a national leader in education as leader of the PiXL network, supporting half of the secondary schools in England and Wales. Will was headteacher at Greenshaw High School for five years where he oversaw improvement in outcomes at GCSE and A level. His talk will draw on his experience of scaling from 1-13 schools in 3 years, and will include practical and implementable tips for MATS at a similar stage of growth.
Paul West, CEO, Spencer Academies Trust: Paul West is a teacher, school leader and National Leader of Education with twenty-five years of experience in schools, and a ten-year record of outstanding leadership in first tier education trusts and corporates. Paul has worked across maintained and independent schools and has led at both primary and secondary level, and his leadership has been judged as outstanding in successive Ofsted inspections. He has practical experience of developing rapid school improvement strategy, opening start-up Academies, establishing Free Schools, Additional Provision Schools, and managing significant change, and will draw on this experience to talk about what to do right and what to avoid when merging MATs.
Paul James, CEO, River Learning Trust: Paul James is a qualified teacher with over 20 years of experience in schools, including in senior leadership roles in a range of secondary education settings, and as a primary school governor and IEB member. Until recently he was a Headteacher of a comprehensive school of over 1800 students, which is a National Teaching School. He is currently a National Leader of Education alongside being Chief Executive of the River Learning Trust. Paul will discuss how to define non-negotiables across your trust whilst building in agency for your headteachers.
In addition to the speakers and talks listed above, there will also be an open, round-table discussion between MAT COOs about how they’re scaling different sized MATs, including any challenges they’ve come up against in the process and anything that’s worked particularly well. You’ll leave with lots of ideas and tips to take back to your MAT to help you as you scale.
Similarly to our previous conferences, we’ve scheduled various breaks throughout the day, during which we encourage delegates to network, exchange stories about scaling, and share good practice with one another. There will also be breakfast pastries on arrival, free lunch served, and tea & coffee throughout the day. Hope to see you there!
Click here to sign up for your free ticket to Arbor’s MAT Conference: https://scaling-your-MAT-sustainably-2019.eventbrite.com
To get an idea of the sorts of topics we’ll be covering on the day, why not have a look back at the presentations from previous MAT conferences that we posted on our blog? Click here to read them
More and more software on the market offers ways of moving beyond the classic time saving tools of mail merges and reporting templates, into the realm of fully automated workflows. As with all new technologies, this offers opportunities to improve the way we work, as well as potential pitfalls, depending on how you use them.
An automated workflow is essentially one in which a single input from a user can trigger several resulting actions. This reduces the amount of data that needs to be entered and screens that need to be clicked through to achieve a desired result.
Every step in the process achieving the outputs above is one that would have to be performed manually by a staff member if they did not have automated workflows, and which can be performed in moments by automated computer software with access to accurate school records.
Some common examples of automated workflows in school software include:
The most obvious concern when setting up these workflows is human error. If a serious behaviour incident were to be incorrectly logged against the wrong student, that could result in a confused or upset parent on the phone to the school office that afternoon (not to mention the unearned earful the unsuspecting student could be in for when they got home). If you’re interested in automated workflows but your staff are not yet very technologically literate, it might be better to set up semi-automated systems with stopgaps for admins to approve comms before they’re sent out, before trialling full automation.
The root of this concern is the level of training required for all the individuals using the system. If inappropriately knowledgeable about the level of information that a parent portal shares, for example, a staff member may end up disseminating more of their personal opinions to parents than they would like. Similarly, if a workflow is inexpertly set up, the administrator may cause far too much or too little information to be transferred, to the extent that notifications become either irritating or simply not useful. This is why it’s absolutely vital to have excellent support and training resources from your software provider when setting up automated workflows, and why you should choose software which clearly outlines to administrators which workflows they have set up and how they can be edited. If there’s no way to work out what your outputs will be, don’t use that automated process – regroup, reconfigure, and retrain.
Even if you only implement semi-automation, and only for your most repetitive admin tasks, this can pay big dividends for staff time. This should give them more time to spend working with students. The best version of an automated workflow is one which removes the burden of data collection and processing from your staff, and lets you prioritise actually dealing with what the data tells you.
Automation also lends a degree of consistency to your policies, as the same results will always be generated from the same input, and staff don’t have to remember exact data processes perfectly every time themselves. While human error can lead to incorrect outputs, there’s far more chance for human error to creep in throughout systems which are entirely manual and paper based. We’ve seen firsthand how setting up consistent and reliable automated communications can have a big impact on parental engagement and school processes, particularly within behaviour workflows where consistency of both rules and rewards is really vital.
Castle Hill had a couple of issues with parent comms before they moved to Arbor MIS, because almost everything was based on paper. When children showed good or bad behaviour, teachers would write a note in the student’s planner, which the child would then take home for parents to check. However, children couldn’t always be relied upon to take their planners home with them – especially if they’d been given a negative behaviour note from their teacher! Now they’ve switched to Arbor, the staff at Castle Hill log behaviour points in the system, which automatically sends an email to the relevant guardians. Parents can also log into their Parent Portal for a live update on how their children are doing. Children are now better behaved because they know that their parents know what they’ve been up to, and the school has less paperwork to get through.
Overall, like any tool in education, the effectiveness of automation depends entirely on how you can use it. If you are going to set up automation, it needs to be in such a way that it demonstrably responds to your specific challenges, and can provide the maximum possible impact to the time constraints currently affecting your staff and the outcomes of your students.
If you’re a current Arbor MIS or Group MIS customer interested in setting up more of your automated features, get in touch with your Account Manager or email myteam@arbor-education.com. If you don’t use Arbor yet and would like to find out more about how we can automate repetitive tasks to save teacher time, get in touch on 0207 043 0470, hello@arbor-education.com, or via our contact form.
More and more schools and MATs are choosing to move MIS, with 1,000+ schools and MATs predicted to switch this year, and we’ve definitely noticed interest in our own products and services increasing. We now work with over 600 schools spread across hundreds of MATs and Local Authorities, driven by a desire to transform the
More and more schools and MATs are choosing to move MIS, with 1,000+ schools and MATs predicted to switch this year, and we’ve definitely noticed interest in our own products and services increasing. We now work with over 600 schools spread across hundreds of MATs and Local Authorities, driven by a desire to transform the way they work, save teachers time, and improve outcomes. However, while it seems ever clearer why you might want to move to simpler, smarter, cloud based systems, we still often hear from schools wondering exactly how they buy something as complex as a Management Information System.
This is always the first step! Email tellmemore@arbor-education.com or call us on 0208 050 1028 and we’ll connect you with your local Arbor Partnership Manager. Your Partnership Manager will come and visit you to learn more about your requirements and give you a demo of our MIS. They’ll also answer any of your questions while you decide when you’ll switch, including a written proposal so you can feel confident in your decision and share it among other stakeholders.
When you’ve had time to evaluate your options and decide which package suits you best, they’ll send your contract and introduce you to your dedicated Customer Success Manager, who will personally walk you through your kick-off plan and data migration. This is definitely the simplest way to get started on Arbor MIS, and is perfect for customers from individual schools to smaller and medium sized trusts.
You can also buy Arbor through several trusted frameworks, giving you the peace of mind that due diligence checks have already been made on our product and company. Arbor is a member of the government’s G-Cloud 10 framework for approved cloud suppliers, and the ThinkIT framework.
To use a public framework, check their website carefully as the rules for each are different. Generally you’ll be able to send us your requirements and have a demo, before signing using the framework’s contract template.
For example, for G-Cloud 10, a standard process would be:
Both of these frameworks are suitable for customers of all sizes, and allow you to buy direct without running your own process, though they do provide you with a little less flexibility than coming to us directly (see above), or going to tender (see below).
If you’re a medium/large MAT or a larger school with more complex needs, you might want to take the time to write a tender outlining your requirements. We can still give you a demo whilst you work out your requirements, and once you go to tender we’ll respond to all your questions and outline the contract we think will be right for your school or Trust.
When writing your requirements, it can help to think about what you need your system to do, rather than just listing specific technical features you like the look of, as different MIS providers may have different solutions to the same problem. So long as you follow this rule of thumb, functions over features, tendering doesn’t have to be intimidating – you know what your school or Trust needs, and it’s up to suppliers to prove how they can provide that for you. You can find lots of great procurement advice online from the Crown Commercial Service, including a list of MIS functions you might want to ask about in your tender. Click here to see their list of suggested areas to consider.
If you think your MIS lifetime contract value will go over £181,302 you’ll need to run a formal public tender, which comes with its own set of rules and guidelines – tender expert John Leonard has written a blog that thoroughly outlines this process. Otherwise, just make sure your questions are clear, that you’ve outlined how you’ll be scoring products and pricing, and that you’ve given a reasonable amount of time for suppliers to respond to you. Don’t forget to give yourself enough time to properly evaluate the systems, as well – it’s better to tender sooner rather than later.
All this is especially important to consider at this point in the financial year, as some of your contracts may be coming up for extension. The DfE has confirmed in recent advice that moving to a cloud based product should be considered enough of a contract change to run a new procurement exercise, even if the new product is with the same provider. If you’d like to see what else is out there and look into Arbor MIS or Group MIS for your school or Trust, you can fill out our contact form, email tellmemore@arbor-education.com, or call us on 0208 050 1028 to get in touch!
School Improvement
Every teacher knows that good behaviour in the classroom is fundamental to learning. This isn’t just anecdotal; we’ve had the data to back this up since 2009, when the University of Nottingham surveyed hundreds of head teachers in school improvement groups whose schools had sustained improvement over three years. One of the most highly rated
Every teacher knows that good behaviour in the classroom is fundamental to learning. This isn’t just anecdotal; we’ve had the data to back this up since 2009, when the University of Nottingham surveyed hundreds of head teachers in school improvement groups whose schools had sustained improvement over three years. One of the most highly rated factors in their improved outcomes was an ‘improved behaviour climate’, an effect felt through all phases but most strongly in Primary schools (see below). Critically, the lower a school’s performance was at the start of the improvement process, the higher the impact they were likely to report behaviour climate having.
Fig. 1 – The number of schools in each improvement group and the impact Head Teachers stated behaviour climate had on that improvement
The obvious question then, is what does an ‘improved behaviour climate’ mean? And how can you create one in your school? In the home, the generally accepted theory for how adult attitudes can affect children’s behaviour are Baumrind’s ‘four styles of parenting’:
An authoritative style can also be adopted in the school. Creating an authoritative behaviour climate requires both structure and responsiveness.
For structure, behaviour policies must be clear and understood by all staff and students for them to be effective. When a student misbehaves, they should know in advance exactly what the consequences will be, and they should see these consequences being consistently applied. If discipline is capricious and random, or depends on which teachers are around and what their personal policies are, both staff and students can never feel certain that they are doing the right thing at any given moment.
For responsiveness, there should still be some room in your policy for mitigating case by case circumstances, and considered communication between students and staff. Listening to students to find out their side of the story, or letting them know when their voices will be heard regarding the matter, can be a key part of developing their understanding of what went wrong. If students feel unfairly treated, ignored, and confused about why a rule even exists, they are unlikely to follow the rule again next time – they’ll just try slightly harder not to get caught.
One of the most important factors in authoritative parenting, or authoritative school operations, is having a consistently applied policy. There are plenty of ways to encourage consistency in your school. Posters of your behaviour policy in classrooms, introductory assemblies for new students and parents, and one on one explanations of rules when students have questions are all great ways to get your policy across. We also suggest using an electronic system to log your behaviour incidents, which will allow you to analyse behaviour across the school over time and improve your policies to target any problem areas.
Trying to remember by heart a complete, in depth set of behaviour policies can increase both staff workloads and inconsistency, achieving the opposite of your aim. If you have a clear, user-friendly behaviour system, ideally one that can automate repetitive admin work for you, you can make sure everyone who needs to be is kept in the loop. Using modern technology, it is possible to create a central repository for all your policies and information, so disciplinary action can only be applied with the proper incident or reasoning behind it.
Fig 3 – The automatic behaviour workflows in our MIS can be customised to trigger any communication or escalation based on your policy – e.g. issuing an after school detention that will appear in the relevant staff and student calendars, and emailing primary guardians, if a serious incident is recorded.
With ‘behaviour and attitudes’ staying a key part of the proposed new Ofsted framework, it could be time to review your behaviour systems and processes to create an ‘authoritative’ structured & responsive style. Overall, the exact policies that will be best for your school depend heavily on your specific situation and challenges, but making sure those policies are highly consistent and make sense to students and staff alike is one of the key ways to improve behaviour climates, and ultimately student outcomes.
Click here to read more of our blogs about preparing for the judgements in the new Ofsted framework
During the winter, we had some lovely crisp mornings and could enjoy the heating coming on in the classrooms. We’re also inevitably faced with colds, flu, sickness bugs and travel delays! For the person responsible for arranging cover, this can be an incredibly stressful time of year (trust me, as cover co-ordinator and examinations manager
During the winter, we had some lovely crisp mornings and could enjoy the heating coming on in the classrooms. We’re also inevitably faced with colds, flu, sickness bugs and travel delays!
For the person responsible for arranging cover, this can be an incredibly stressful time of year (trust me, as cover co-ordinator and examinations manager for 18 months in a 15 year teaching career, I’ve been there!). For me, arranging cover was never just about getting a body into the room for supervision – I always wanted to allocate the most appropriate person for that particular lesson. In a secondary school, I needed to know the teachers that normally taught each subject, in order to avoid things like a French teacher covering a Maths lesson whilst a Maths teacher covered a Language lesson. I wanted the best people in front of the kids to reduce the impact on learning and minimise the workload stress on the staff. As the timetabler, this knowledge was ingrained in my mind, but for anyone stepping in to make cover arrangements in my absence, the task became almost impossible.
To mitigate against situations like this, in Arbor, we show not just available staff, but who is also a teacher of the same subject to actively support you in minimising the impact staff absence has on learning.
Image 1: Arranging cover in Arbor
Not only can you see which teacher is available that teaches the same subject, you can also request their agreement if you want to (this is always a useful feature when senior staff may have meetings booked!). You can, of course, still bulk select all of the lessons from a staff member to allocate as in house cover supervisor or supply in one go – meaning no more clicking into each lesson instance to add the same arrangements.
The first task of the day for any timetabler is to take a deep breath and open the schools’ emails whilst listening to the answer machine messages for staff absence. Within Arbor, you can mark multiple staff as absent either one at a time or all in one go, and you can also differentiate between a full day of sickness absence, or a 1 hour off-site meeting.
Image 2: Entering the details of a staff absence
Arbor’s ability to add attachments to staff absences (e.g. medical documents or a screenshot of a sick note) without separately logging into the HR module would have saved some of my finance colleagues from premature greyness!
Whilst teachers love the sight of a supply teacher (as they are then less likely to be needed for cover), this was one of my biggest nightmares. I could happily allocate them to the classes and print off cover slips, but then came the dreaded registers (I’ve sat at my desk for hours clicking into each individual class in order to print a register!). There was also the issue of wanting two copies: one to return to the office and one for the supply teacher to keep in class for reference. This either required a trip to the photocopier, or the time-consuming task of having to press print twice because no matter what settings I’d select, the MIS just would not let me have two copies.
In between this joyous process of printing and copying, another person would inevitably call in sick or have an emergency to tend to. I would then have to go back to my computer and close the screen I was using in order to start the process again for the newly absent person. Because Arbor is a cloud-based system, it can be open in more than one window (just like when you’re browsing the internet looking for information and open another ‘tab’ to look for something else), which saves you from repeating the same process time and time again.
In Arbor, it takes just a few seconds to download all of the registers you’ve selected, and then all you need to do is to hit the print button, choosing as many copies as you require. For a wet Wednesday during flu season and a full moon (we’ve all had those days!), I’d have saved hours if I’d been using Arbor instead of the other MIS I was using.
Image 3: An overview of staff absence, which lessons are being covered that day and by which teacher
With all the information you need in one place, Arbor gives you an overview of what’s going on in school that day, helping you to stay on top of what who’s covering what lesson and when. The green ‘cover slips’ button in the screenshot above allows you to print you a concise summary of cover staff for the staffroom notice board, as well as personalised slips for each teacher (with page breaks, so you haven’t got to get to the guillotine or scissors!).
So, if you were rushing around arranging cover for hours on end this winter, maybe it’s time to investigate a smarter, time-saving option. Get in touch with us via the contact form on our website to find out more about how Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS could transform the way you operate your school!
Why run a systems audit in the first place? Over the years, many schools accumulate a variety of IT systems or software. These systems were initially installed to help make things run more smoothly across the school but, over time, they’ve inevitably become outdated and no longer fit with the day-to-day running of the school.
Over the years, many schools accumulate a variety of IT systems or software. These systems were initially installed to help make things run more smoothly across the school but, over time, they’ve inevitably become outdated and no longer fit with the day-to-day running of the school. In many cases, school leaders can forget to question whether a piece of software is continuing to help improve the school, or whether it’s there simply because it worked in the past.
When a school or trust tells us about all the third party products they use, we always like to ask why they chose that particular system:
For example, a school may have been using a behaviour tracking software outside of their MIS for many years and are happy with how it charts points over time, but they don’t use any of the other features that the software offers. In cases like this, and with many other systems that are an added cost, it’s worth questioning if there are alternative ways of working within one system to consolidate both time and funds.
We encourage schools to create a side-by-side price comparison of the cost of each third party product to prompt an internal conversation about the practicalities and usefulness of each system, and whether it can be replaced by a new system altogether. This practice promotes the importance of an audit in deciding if there are added benefits to keeping a specific system, or if it’s time to part ways.
This is how we would recommend running an IT systems audit:
1. Ask members of staff from all areas of the school when running your audit – don’t assume that one person will know everything that everyone is using!
2. Start by listing out all the systems people use for the core functions in your school, like attendance, assessment, behaviour and communications, and how much you pay for them annually
3. Move on to listing the rest of your systems and costs – if you don’t have to pay for something annually and you already have it, you can mark the cost as £0
4. Make sure to list separate software products from the same company as being separate – one might be more useful than the other
5. Then go back down your list and note each software’s functionality – not just what you’re currently using it for, but what it could do if you used every module and feature in it
6. You’ll probably have come across several overlaps by now. This is the tricky part: for everything that overlaps, consider which really has the greater value, and which you can think about cutting down
This value judgement can’t entirely be based on price, although that is important – you also have to question why you had several systems in the first place. Is one of them more user friendly? Is it quick to train new staff on? Does it save your teachers a lot of time? Will you really get the best deal just by picking between these two programs, or if you’re switching anyway should you choose an entirely new system altogether?
It’s quite possible that with a change in mindset, cutting down your third party systems may open more doors than it closes, and create opportunities to improve how you work.
We understand that this takes time, but we’ve also seen first hand how many schools love the fact that Arbor can bring all of their data and systems into one central system, meaning that the number of logins (and passwords!) for staff can be cut down. This results in increased productivity as it ultimately saves staff hours of time manually transferring data between systems – because everything you need is all in one place!
If you’re not yet an Arbor MIS customer, you can request a free demo and a chat with your local Partnership Manager anytime through the contact form on our website, or by emailing tellmemore@arbor-education.com or calling 0208 050 1028.
As I’m sure you’ve heard, School Pupil Tracker Online (SPTO) will be closing down at the end of this year. If you currently use SPTO, you’ll be looking for something to replace it with the same (if not better!) level of functionality and analysis, so this is a great opportunity to look at how you’re
As I’m sure you’ve heard, School Pupil Tracker Online (SPTO) will be closing down at the end of this year. If you currently use SPTO, you’ll be looking for something to replace it with the same (if not better!) level of functionality and analysis, so this is a great opportunity to look at how you’re using your current MIS system as a whole. To help you, we’ve written this a short blog explaining how schools & MATs use the integrated assessments module of Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS to track, analyse and report on pupil progress.
Let’s start with the basics. Like SPTO, Arbor’s assessments module covers the following:
1. Formative Tracking: In Arbor, teachers can enter marks against curriculum statements and view formative analysis. This helps inform lesson planning and differentiate learning based on students’ understanding of the curriculum. You can either use preset or imported curriculum frameworks, or create your own custom curriculum framework in the system:
Image 1: A teacher marking a formative reading assessment
2. Summative Tracking: You can also access marksheets, enter marks for summative & ad hoc assessments, and view and export analysis for summative, ad hoc and 3rd party standardised assessments (such as PiRA and PUMA tests from RS Assessments by Hodder Education)
Image 2: Grade distribution dashboard analysing a summative assessment
Arbor also has some more in-depth, out-of-the-box analysis tools to help you dig deeper into your assessment data:
3a. Attainment over Time allows you to see how many students are achieving each grade during different assessment periods. The date chosen provides a breakdown of the available grades at that given point in time:
Image 3: Measuring Attainment Over Time
You can also choose to group students by demographic, in order to compare grades. For example, you can compare girls to boys and identify that girls currently require more support in this subject:
Image 4: Comparing students by demographic
3b. Below, At or Above: The Below, At or Above page allows schools to see the percentage of children who are below/at/above their targets for each assessment period:
Image 5: Tracking pupil progress using Below, At or Above, and clicking on a record to retrieve a slideover of students
3c. Analysis at MAT level: Some assessments, like PiRA & PUMA, even push up to Arbor’s Group MIS for dashboard analysis across schools:
Image 6: A screenshot of aggregated data in Arbor’s Group MIS
Image 7: A plain-text callout explaining your data
4. Most importantly though, the biggest benefit of using assessments in Arbor MIS is that it’s a fully-integrated module that syncs up with all the other data in your MIS system. This means:
Interested in finding out more about how Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS could transform the way your school works? Get in touch with us via the contact form on our website or give us a call on 0208 050 1028
At BETT this year, former school leaders Tim Ward & Stephen Higgins took to the stage at the Solutions Den to demonstrate how using Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-base MIS could transform the way your school operates by putting essential data at the fingertips of your senior leaders, teachers & office staff, and by automating and
At BETT this year, former school leaders Tim Ward & Stephen Higgins took to the stage at the Solutions Den to demonstrate how using Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-base MIS could transform the way your school operates by putting essential data at the fingertips of your senior leaders, teachers & office staff, and by automating and simplifying administrative tasks to reduce staff workload. For those of you who missed it, we’ve posted the presentation that they gave below!
A little bit about Arbor
We help schools transform the way they work to save teachers time and improve student outcomes
We’re an education company whose core aim is to improve student outcomes – I imagine that’s the same as your aim! At Arbor, we help you learn from your data, turning it into something that informs you and saving you and all the staff at your school hours of time per week. If we can help you do those two things, we’ll empower you to improve outcomes for your children.
We’re also funded by social investors, which allows us to act differently to other companies in several ways:
To give you some context, we’re going to tell you a story of how Arbor’s MIS can transform the way that 3 people in a school work:
The date: January 2019
The location: Sunnyville Through School
The characters:
Let’s start with Miss Quill. Miss Quill wants to find out what story the following data is telling her about her pupils at Sunnyville:
How can she do this? Using her Arbor dashboard, she can quickly review all of these areas in detail to uncover trends and take action (and she doesn’t need to ask anyone to create reports for her!). Watch the video below to see how:
Similarly, Mr Gray, who is Head of Maths, wants to know how can Arbor can help him to create a plan for his students. The questions he wants to answer are as follows:
In this video, watch how Mr Gray is able to quickly select underperforming students and add them to an intervention. He is then able to easily monitor the intervention in order to see which students have met the desired outcomes and which haven’t:
Finally, we have Anthony, who is a Year 11 student. Anthony’s parents have come into school, and want to speak to the pastoral lead about his progress so far this year. In order to have a meeting with Anthony’s parents, his teachers need to know the following:
Watch the following video to see how Anthony’s teachers can access all the information they need about him from his student profile, including drilling down into his behaviour to spot trends & comparing his attendance to all students in the school, all students in Year 11 and all students in his form:
To conclude, how have we helped this school find a happy ending?
To find out more about how Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS could reduce workload, save time and improve outcomes at your school, get in touch with us via the contact form of the website, or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com to book a free, personalised demo!
It may seem like a challenging task, but aligning your multi-academy trust’s staff development processes and policies should be high on your agenda – especially with the DfE’s new teacher retention strategy shining a light on how schools and trusts support their staff. We’re all aware of how effective performance management and staff development can
It may seem like a challenging task, but aligning your multi-academy trust’s staff development processes and policies should be high on your agenda – especially with the DfE’s new teacher retention strategy shining a light on how schools and trusts support their staff. We’re all aware of how effective performance management and staff development can be in not only recognising but encouraging high performance among staff, but also in improving quality of education in the schools across your MAT.
So why does having an aligned policy with set processes in place across your trust matter? You’ll probably be asked why you want to change things which are already working for your individual schools’ current performance/development plans. However, having alignment and a centralised policy is important for a number of reasons:
A trust that puts staff development at the heart of what it does should see improvements in teaching and learning as well. In order to do this, you’ll need a reliable system to carry out staff development activities and appraisals, which can help to easily highlight development needs and track performance & growth across staff (and see the impact this is having on student outcomes).
So, what are the first steps to aligning your trusts processes?
1) Make sure all staff have SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant & timely) objectives that are clear and are explicit in what needs to be done to achieve them. Understanding across the trust how objectives should be created, and ensuring that they are SMART, means each staff member’s individual targets will be consistent with the trust’s wider improvement plans or overall trust/school objectives.
Fig. 1 – Setting a staff member’s development objectives in Arbor MIS
2) Set up a regular cycle across the trust that completes the appraisal policy. You should make sure that it is clear:
This helps to set the basic foundations of a good appraisal policy and ensures that all staff across the trust always know what they are going to be measured on, and how long they have to achieve their goals.
Fig. 2 – A staff member’s Appraisal page in Arbor MIS
3) Finally, it’s important when aligning your trust’s development processes that you share best practice throughout each school. If staff at one school seem happier with their professional development, find out why and see if you can use that expertise to help you improve the process across all your schools. Running an effective development structure should be an iterative process, and it’s a great chance to learn what works best for your trust and your schools.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor’s simple, smart cloud-based MIS could transform the way you run your MAT, get in touch via the contact form on our website, email us at tellmemore@arbor-education or give us a call on 0208 050 1028.
With the new Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy now published, we’ve boiled down its many new ideas and policies into 3 of the core goals the DfE want to accomplish. Improve early career support Attracting people to the profession in the first place is a big part of increasing teacher numbers, and to this end
With the new Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy now published, we’ve boiled down its many new ideas and policies into 3 of the core goals the DfE want to accomplish.
Attracting people to the profession in the first place is a big part of increasing teacher numbers, and to this end a ‘one stop system’ for teacher training is being piloted to make the process simpler. For increased recruitment to benefit student outcomes on a long term basis, these new teachers also need better career support to make sure they have time to develop, instead of becoming overwhelmed and dropping out of the sector.
The ‘Early Career Framework’, a two year training package for new teachers, will support this aim, as will additional bursaries and financial incentives for performance. The Early Career Framework has £130 million already earmarked for its funding, in addition to £42 million from the Teacher Development Premium. The biggest change schools should initially experience is that new teachers in this framework will have a reduced teaching timetable. The idea is that their extra time will be spent in their ECF teacher training, meaning their career has a more gradual buildup of workload in line with the buildup of their expertise.
This aim could fundamentally change how a lot of teachers progress in their career and how a lot of schools think about staffing. A ‘job-share’ service is set to be launched to both help schools share staff with specific skills between them, and to help people remain in their professions while working part-time. To make sure this new level of flexibility doesn’t just move workloads from teachers to school administrators, free timetabling tools will be released by the DfE to help schools manage the new process.
It’s likely that this will benefit a lot of smaller schools who no longer have the budget for a dedicated staff member in every area, as well as MATs who are already starting to centralise job roles so specialist staff can work across several schools. Specialist NQTs will encourage teachers to focus in on their areas of interest and provide new avenues of career progression beyond the traditional steps up into school management.
Flexible working should also benefit the teachers themselves. The concept includes not only part time schedules, but also ideas like working from home when not needed in the school, that a lot of employees now expect in other sectors. Using cloud-based software could become key to offering these options, as it allows your staff to work securely from anywhere.
This is an issue very near and dear to our hearts, as saving teachers time has been a core tenet of Arbor’s social mission since the beginning. As our culture has become more data-driven, the time teachers spend on non-teaching tasks has increased. We’ve known this since 2010 – the results of the DfE’s last teacher workload survey are below.
Source: Teacher Workload Diary Survey 2010 (DfE)
That’s why Arbor focuses a lot of our product development on simplifying and automating administrative tasks for teachers, so they have more time to spend interacting with students to improve their outcomes. A key concept in the reduction of teacher workload includes making sure they have only one point of data entry (i.e. if you have more than one application doing essentially the same job twice, or you don’t have any integration between your MIS and your other providers, you may need to rethink your systems).
The strategy will apparently involve “working with Ofsted to ensure staff workload is considered as part of a school’s inspection judgement”, so this aim will be key for schools to consider alongside the new Ofsted framework, to make sure their improvement plan doesn’t rely on unrealistic expectations for teachers.
There are plenty of other specific plans and policies, from simplifying school accountability to developing housing near schools, that you can read about in the full strategy here. Overall, the strategy aims to make the day to day lives of teachers, as well as their overarching career progression, more manageable and more fulfilling – so talented teachers stay in the profession longer and perform better while they’re there.
You can find out more about how Arbor MIS saves teachers time to help them improve student outcomes by getting in touch here.
With BETT just around the corner, we caught up with Julie Smith, PA to the Headteacher at Parkroyal Community School, who’ll be joining us at our School Leaders Lounge at Tapa Tapa restaurant at this year’s show. We asked her some questions about how life at Parkroyal has improved since they adopted Arbor in 2015.
What was your first impression of Arbor & what did you like the most about it when you switched?
The first word that comes to mind 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.
Can you think of a particular part of Arbor that saves you time on a day to day basis?
Attendance, definitely! Being able to identify who’s absent and chasing them up in a few clicks saves us hours. Having spoken to other schools that don’t use Arbor, I know that it takes one lady nearly all morning to do attendance, whilst it takes our admin team about half an hour.
We also use Arbor for our First Aid. We log all incidents in Arbor which is a real timesaver because we don’t have so many paper copies of forms floating about that we have to then manually enter into the system. Our midday assistants know how to use Arbor and they’re able to log any incidents that happen at breaktime in Arbor independently, and we can then use this data to identify trends to see if the same pupils are involved in incidents at a particular time of day & then tackle the issue.
Our catering team also use Arbor. This is fantastic because we never need to tell them how many pupils are in that day as they can see it for themselves in the system. As a result, they know exactly how much to cook & this means that we almost never have any food wastage!
Can you think of an instance where Arbor has helped you spot a trend you would otherwise have missed?
On the attendance side of things, it’s really important for us to be able to spot trends in absences and we can do that really easily with tools like Arbor’s sibling correlation function. Being able to look back at past attendance and compare it against other pupils so that we can see if certain students have been absent at similar times is a real help. We can also use Arbor to spot if there’s a pattern of a child being absent on particular days of the week. It’s very easy to create detailed reports about this, and that makes my life a lot easier!
I’ve also set up custom reports for student attendance to be sent out to class teachers on a weekly basis. This is obviously automated, so I don’t have to prepare them or send them out myself – Arbor does it for me. As a result, our classroom teachers are more in the loop with what’s going on in their classes and don’t have to keep asking us for reports all the time.
How would you describe your favourite feature of Arbor to someone who’s never used it before?
I like the fact that it’s very visual. The colour coding side of things is brilliant – it helps you spot areas of concern instantly, especially with assessments & behaviour. I like the fact that you can dig deeper into analysing your data without too much effort – it’s there at your fingertips.
As a company, Arbor understands what data is the most important and you break it down into the right areas & present it well. You have an understanding of what actually happens in a school, partly because many of the people that work for Arbor have worked in schools in the past.
You understand the fact that teachers often need data quite quickly & don’t have the time to spend hours looking for it. I can find the majority of what I need just by clicking a few buttons i.e. breakdown of demographics, that sort of thing.
We’ve been using Arbor for 5 years but when we were with our previous MIS provider reporting was very time consuming. We had to make a report, create a report, run a report, and if you wanted to change something, you had to do it all over again! The fact that the teachers can now do their own reports has been brilliant – they used to come and ask us for all sorts of reports, but now they can do all of that themselves because they know exactly what to do.
Do your classroom teachers find Arbor easy to use?
They do, and they have a good grasp of the system. We had a couple of NQTs join us last year and one this year, so I sat down with them for 10 minutes and they knew what they were doing after that. You need a bit more training if you want to be able to have a deeper understanding, or set up something new, but for day to day stuff and getting information our classroom teachers generally find it very intuitive. The last NQT I sat down with said to me “I’ve played around on it, it’s just really easy to use”. She’d worked it out herself. I’m the Arbor champion at Parkroyal who’s responsible for training our staff on the system, so this is a great bonus for me!
Besides of course coming to see us at our School Leaders Lounge, do you have any tips for people visiting BETT this year?
There’s a load of people trying to sell lots of different products! I personally think it’s good to look round and see what there is, but before you launch into buying a particular product or a system that you think you might need for your school, I’d recommend talking to Arbor first because the system can probably do it. Or if it can’t do it, it probably integrates with a product that can.
If you’d like to speak to Julie in person or have any questions you’d like to ask her, you can meet her at our School Leaders Lounge at BETT this year. Why not come and join us for lunch and a glass of wine on us? Click here to see our full programme of events & book your free ticket: https://arbor-BETT-2019.eventbrite.com/
At our Manchester MAT conference on 5th December 2018, Frank Norris, Director of the Trust at Co-Op Academies Trust, spoke about the highs and the lows of trust’s journey so far, focusing on how they’ve created a shared culture and endeavoured to make sure schools are fully onboard with that culture. He began by drawing
At our Manchester MAT conference on 5th December 2018, Frank Norris, Director of the Trust at Co-Op Academies Trust, spoke about the highs and the lows of trust’s journey so far, focusing on how they’ve created a shared culture and endeavoured to make sure schools are fully onboard with that culture. He began by drawing a series of thought-provoking comparisons between the structures of the big banks that went down in the 2008 financial crisis, and the structures of multi-academy trusts today. We’ve transcribed the first half of his presentation below.
Image 1: Frank Norris addresses the delegates at our 2018 Manchester MAT Conference
The Co-Op Academies Trust have a row of desks on the eighth floor of this building. There are no private offices. The CEO of the company was here this morning at the coffee shop, queuing up with everyone else. We had a chat, and he wanted to know what I was doing this morning, so I told him I was going down to speak at Arbor’s MAT conference. It’s a very open environment.
As a trust, we have become immersed in the Co-Op, and what I want to do today is tell you a little bit about the journey that we’ve been on in order to get where we are now. I won’t pretend there haven’t been pitfalls – it’s not been easy, and there have been some really bad things that have happened within Co-Op that have had an impact on us – but there have been some great moments, too. This idea of a journey is something I want to focus on.
We are the largest business-sponsored academy trust in the country, and we have 18 schools at the moment. The Co-Op have invested £3.6 million into our trust at a time when they’ve taken £100 million pounds out of the business, so they’ve made a big commitment. The CEO of Co-Op, Steve Murrells, was on BBC Radio 5 yesterday morning, explaining why they made the decision to sponsor us (you can listen here). We’re hoping that this will be a model that other ethically-minded businesses (of which there are some!) may want to follow.
James has invited me today to share a little bit about our culture here at the Co-Op, but I want to start by talking about the financial crisis of 2008. When the crisis came about, I was fascinated in finding out why banks like Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, RBS, Britannia Building Society & the Co-Op bank all fell over during the financial crash, and the reasons why no-one’s been sent to jail for this.
And so I’d like us to watch the trailer for the film “The Inside Job”. Now, none of you are going to be earning the sorts of salaries that you’re going to see in the clip below, and I’m not suggesting that any of you are, but there is a reason for watching it, which I’ll explain in a second:
I would urge you to watch this film in full, because it highlights the reasons why things went wrong. I came across a bit of research by someone called Marianne Jennings, who is professor at Arizona State University, who also looked at the reasons why those major companies went down (bear in mind the Co-Op Bank was one that nearly went down!). Her research showed that actually, you only needed a combination of the following factors for your business to go down, and I think we can relate this to the MAT world, too:
1. Pressure to maintain numbers:
There is always a pressure to maintain numbers. In MAT terms, that could be GCSE results, KS2 results, or how many schools you’re going to get to by the end of the year.
2. Fear & silence
Some boards are completely scared of the trust’s CEO. I can safely say that if this is the case, no effective decisions are ever going to be made.
3. Young ‘uns, and a bigger-than-life CEO
Young people in the business world often think they have the silver bullet. I’ve seen young CEOs with a larger-than-life character that could railroad the entire business forward, but this then sets up a problem for the board who are unable to confront that person. It’s dangerous territory.
4. A weak board
If your board isn’t pushing back on you as a CEO at least 3 times in a meeting, they’re not doing their job. So think about the last trust board meeting you had. How many times was your CEO challenged about an issue? We’ve got a trust board meeting tomorrow, and trust me, it’s a tough day!
5. Conflicts (of interest)
We don’t buy any products or services from the Co-Op, and there are no third-party transactions between us and the Co-Op. It would be easy and we’d probably be able to save quite a lot of money, but we don’t do that because we can see the difficulties that would emerge over time. It’s a cultural thing.
6. Innovation “like no other”
Lots of people think that they have the answer, because they’ve innovated somewhere else and it worked. 9 times out of 10, they’re wrong.
7. Goodness in some areas atoning for evil in others
People have been willing to overlook bad behaviour in lieu of other good qualities. This can’t be allowed to happen.
To sum up, you only need 2 or 3 of the issues above on your board, according to Jennings, and you are looking at a big problem. Those are the reasons why the banks went down. The chairman of the Co-Op Bank was a methodist minister, who knew nothing about finance, but nobody on the board said anything. They were scared, and they were under pressure to get the numbers.
The moral of the story here is that if you don’t get the culture of your board right, your trust won’t survive. In the Co-Op Trusts’ case, the strength of our Trust is down to the quality of the people that we have on our board.
For more tips on creating your experience and skills criteria for MAT board members, you can read Sarah Pittam’s speech from our last MAT conference. To find out more about the demographics and performance of your Trust, log into your free ASP Group Insight dashboard here
In light of the new Ofsted framework placing weight on personal development through extra-curricular activities, we spoke to Alistair Endersby, a former national debating coach who’s twice brought teams to the World Schools Debating Championships and currently organises the Sixth Form enrichment programme at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. 1. Make it clear activities are
In light of the new Ofsted framework placing weight on personal development through extra-curricular activities, we spoke to Alistair Endersby, a former national debating coach who’s twice brought teams to the World Schools Debating Championships and currently organises the Sixth Form enrichment programme at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury.
Whilst some endeavours such as the school play or a Duke of Edinburgh award will require students to be committed from start to finish, most clubs benefit from an open door policy. If you set up a regular, publicised schedule, then students can drop in whenever they’re free. A successful club such as the politics and debating societies Alistair runs should, in his words, “be open to all comers each time, even if some keen students also take part in extra coaching to prepare them for competitions. The club’s committee are the fixed point of organisation, but the membership should be fluid.”
“If you can also open up your activity to a wider range of year groups then you should.” This allows younger students to develop a sense of responsibility organically by seeing the example of older students, rather than developing didactically under a set of stringent membership rules. “It’s good for the younger kids to see the older years engaging with interesting and serious things outside of the classroom, and you can form vertical links throughout your school by getting the older students in the club to coach the younger students. […] It has to be voluntary, too, to change the way it’s seen and add value to the experience.”
This open, inter-year culture is particularly helpful in secondary schools, allowing younger students to think about where they want to be in their activity and their learning by the time they reach their peers’ age; do they need to start taking music theory to progress in their orchestra? Should they do a sports leadership award if they want to be captain of the football team? Should they arrange work experience in their chosen area?
“It almost allows ‘gifted and talented’ to be self-selecting rather than a set program – what you’re rewarding is interest.”
“An atmosphere of mentorship has practical benefits as well, of course, in that it can free up staff time.” Once you’ve established a committee and a regular activity schedule across a range of disciplines, staff focus should be placed on developing their student committees and leading their activity to self-sustainability.
The everyday logistics of a club can be taken on by trustworthy student committee members, not only developing their general organisational skills but also their professionalism and confidence when speaking to adults. This can mean everything from asking the head of PE whether they can use the gym for practice to asking universities and speakers to visit the school. “Students asking can be more persuasive than teachers asking – especially if the university thinks of you as a target school”.
In the case of Bishop Wordsworth’s; “At the end of assembly when the head asks for notices, there’s no distinction made between student and staff announcements. The committee members have to put their hand up, stand up, and talk, or their club won’t get publicised. Trusting students to make announcements is potentially quite daunting, but very valuable”. It’s all about building up value, until your students are invested enough in the activity to reduce the burden on their teachers.
“Gaining confidence in their abilities is beneficial academically and beyond the curriculum, in terms of their wider confidence and what they can bring to university and the world. Teamwork, leadership, logistics, organisation, persuading people to help you, and negotiating with adults will all leave them more prepared for the future. It’s the kind of thing employers say schools don’t do.”
Having enabled the students themselves to coordinate internal activities, staff will have more time to organise higher level plans for their clubs and societies, that give your students goals to work towards.
“Although inter-school competition sounds like a luxury, it makes the activity bigger and higher status than just your school, and invests time in a few students who are then likely to take on roles running the activity within the school, and passing it on to others.”
“At Bishops the Year 12s who are now entering national contests run the internal Year 10 debating contest, which will make them better equipped to run the whole society once they hit Year 13, because they’ve improved by judging other people’s work. In turn, the Year 10s run a smaller scale public speaking contest for Year 8s.”
Competitions shouldn’t only be thought of as something for the students to put in their CV or Personal Statement, but as something that will actively challenge students, improving confidence, teamwork, and outcomes. If you usually only run casual internal competitions, these can justify the cost of entering regional or national contests by acting as a basis for who is entered. In turn, the prize of being taken to a more prestigious event can increase the popularity of internal activities to both enter and spectate.
“For instance, just a debate workshop would have a pretty low turnout, but showcasing your contest entrants and trialling them openly appeals to the spectating students’ competitive spirits, and trains the viewers at the same time by letting them watch the best the school has to offer”.
If your committee has been able to take on internal responsibilities, the inter-school competition can then be the focus of staff time put into the club. “You can give your contest entrants a bit of elite experience, stretch them beyond the training they would just have within the school, and add status to the activity to in turn inspire younger students”.
The last thing we asked Alistair was what he would say to a teacher or school leader who doesn’t believe they have the time to fully develop their extra-curricular program.
“One of my core beliefs and values in teaching lies in what you do outside the classroom. It’s worth the school committing to and investing in, for both their students and their teachers. It’s possible to build in a way that it becomes self-sustaining. That’s not necessarily a job to give a brand new teacher, but if one in their second or third year, gaining in professional confidence, can be given the time to properly set up over the course of a year, then the students that get involved in that activity will feel invested in by their school.”
If you want to read more about the new Ofsted judgements and ideas for how you can prepare for them, click here.
At our MAT CEO conference on 5th December, Luke Sparkes, Executive Principal of Dixons Academies Trust, gave a thought-provoking presentation that challenged traditional thinking about the structure of MATs. He spoke about how DAT has looked to looked to entertainment giants Spotify and Netflix to develop a model that moves away from a “no-interference” approach to
At our MAT CEO conference on 5th December, Luke Sparkes, Executive Principal of Dixons Academies Trust, gave a thought-provoking presentation that challenged traditional thinking about the structure of MATs. He spoke about how DAT has looked to looked to entertainment giants Spotify and Netflix to develop a model that moves away from a “no-interference” approach to its high-performing schools. We’ve transcribed his presentation below!
I’ve been asked to share our thinking on the concept of ‘aligned autonomy’ – the optimal balance between consistency and self-determination that can empower agility.
I must start by stressing that aligned autonomy is a process, not a destination, and, as a Trust, we are very much at the start of the process. This is only the second time we have talked about our ideas externally; we aren’t sure how they will be received, but we hope to disrupt thinking.
Core principles
At Dixons we have 6 core principles:
The most important is that we are values-driven. Every decision we make, every conversation we have, every lesson we plan is absolutely rooted in our values.
In the last 12 months, we have started to organise our Trust around the concept of aligned autonomy.
A different MAT model
As a growing Trust, we are constantly grappling with our organisational development. The received wisdom from other Trusts includes:
At Dixons, our model had developed differently. In particular, as Principals, we’d grown used to having a lot of autonomy. As a Trust, we talked about the concept of earned autonomy – if a school is performing strongly it should have freedom and the Trust shouldn’t interfere.
However, we started to realise that we were storing up problems for the future, because the Trust had almost become a holding body for a series of largely autonomous units.
Of course, the strengths and identity of academies should be respected, but the whole point of a Trust is to enable schools to ever more deeply engage with, learn from and support each other. We knew we’d reached a point in our growth that we had to think and act differently. We needed to develop a different Trust model.
I think Dixons has always had a reputation for being fairly cutting-edge (in some circles) and has learnt quite a bit from industry over the years (not least from Dixons electricals in the early years). When shaping our new model, we looked at how leading organisations across the world (in a range of industries) are managing their growth. A series of slides from a Netflix presentation – which has described as Silicon Valley’s most important document – really resonated with us:
According to Netflix:
Process brings seductively strong near-term outcomes – a highly successful company or Trust:
But then the market shifts, due to technology or competitors; or, in a MAT’s case, due to curriculum or accountability changes. The organisation is unable to adapt quickly and can grind into irrelevance.
And so it seems like there are 3 bad options:
But, there is a fourth option.
We believe that the agile organisation is dawning as the new dominant organisation paradigm. Organisations will no longer be ‘machines’ with top-down hierarchy, but ‘organisms’ with agile leadership.
Dixons Structure
Freedom from hierarchy doesn’t exist anywhere in nature (not least in schools), but no one would argue that all hierarchies are good. With that in mind, we’re trying to design our flatter, less hierarchical organisation as a distributed, interdependent, continually evolving system.
Leadership shows direction and enables action, but “boxes and lines” are less important. An agile organisational culture puts people at the centre, which engages and empowers everyone in the organisation. They can then create value quickly, collaboratively and effectively. Leadership in agile organisations serves the people in the organisation, empowering and developing them. They create space for teams to discover new opportunities and effectively respond to change.
Agile way of working
Agile is not a methodology; it’s a way of behaving, it’s a culture, a mindset. Autonomy of agile teams is a must but it’s not sufficient, as teams also need alignment. This grid is a useful way to explain the relationship between autonomy and alignment:
At one end of the spectrum you have low autonomy and low alignment. This results in a micromanaging organisation and an indifferent culture – there is no higher level purpose, and schools are told to “shut up and follow orders”.
On the other hand, there’s low autonomy and high alignment. This creates an authoritative organisation and a conformist culture, where employees are told which problems need to be solved, but also how to solve them. Arguably, a number of Trusts are taking this approach, but, as those companies are finding, we believe this approach will stifle innovation and drive talent out.
High autonomy and low alignment can result in an entrepreneurial organisation, but leads to a chaotic culture.
The Dixons Story
As a Trust, we were heading towards chaos. We were starting to see divisions – rather than working for Dixons, staff increasingly talked about working for City, Kings, Trinity or Marchbank. We were autonomous, but starting to sub-optimise, with each school only working for its own success and keeping things to themselves. As a relatively small Trust with some exceptional Principals (who were quick to respond to curriculum changes), we were securing great educational outcomes, but there was confusion, we had limited turnaround support and our central systems were inefficient (some still are).
We realised that to scale agile, we must continue to enable autonomy for our teams, but ensure alignment with the organisation.
Why Aligned (at Dixons)
Why Autonomy (at Dixons)
Aligned autonomy will deliver a more agile and less hierarchical organisation:
Strong backbone vertebrae
A core element of an agile organisation is a fixed and stable backbone that evolves slowly. In order to minimise workload and maximise impact, elements of the backbone must be as efficient and spare as possible. This also allows room for further elaboration and development in response to a leader’s own drivers and context.
Again, I must stress that aligned autonomy is a process, not a destination. A component of the backbone one year may be dropped in another because it outlives its usefulness, or because it is a time for further innovation and testing.
For each element, we have started to create clarity by stating which aspects are aligned across the organisation and which aspects teams have autonomy over:
And so, this fourth option, this new MAT model, is focused on avoiding chaos as you grow with ever more high performaning people – not with rules.
The key to this is to increase talent density faster than complexity grows. And with the right people, instead of a culture of process adherence, you can cultivate a culture of creativity and self-discipline, freedom and responsibility. Leadership is about context, not control. Agility means building a structure that allows people to react in real time. In our current age of urgency, we have to take the principles behind agile and use them a little differently. Let’s call them the three “insteads”:
Scaling agile at Dixons
The following models help to show how we have started to scale agile at Dixons:
Each academy (or what agile organisations in industry would describe as a tribe) is made up of squads or departments that are built around end-to-end accountability and share the same long term mission. The Principal is the Academy Lead and is responsible for setting the context and providing the right environment. The Principal is supported by an EP who acts as an Agile Coach. Together they provide leadership that shows direction and enables action. Senior and middle leadership groups (described as chapters in industry) promote collaboration and cross pollination of ideas across departments. They are also responsible for developing people.
Finally, we have started to develop cross-cutting teams that act like guilds. These are groups of people from across the organisation who want to share knowledge and practices, innovate and develop new ideas (in all areas – curriculum, support, and operations). Each cross-cutting team has a coordinator and teams can form, dissolve and reform as resources shift and priorities change. They can also be used to secure alignment. A people-first organisation relies on true work of small, cross cutting teams:
Scaling agile in this way through squads, chapters and guilds will help us to create a talent-driven organisation. At Dixons, we believe talent is king. Talent, even more than strategy, is what creates value. Hierarchy can isolate and bury talent. Flattening the organisation and pushing power down will stimulate personal growth and create speed. Leading a talent-first organisation requires agility. It requires enough ego to be comfortable with making the hardest decisions and enough humility to defer to the brilliance of other people.
It means living with the idea that the talent will determine the direction and strategy of the organisation.
These are the 3 critical moves to unleash talent:
1. Most vital people must be in roles where they can create significant value
2. They must be free from bureaucratic structure
3. They must be afforded the training and opportunities to expand their skills
Conclusion
We believe that the agile organisation is dawning as the new dominant organisational paradigm. Agile groups can thrive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing environment. They are both stable and dynamic. They focus on customers (or in our case, students), fluidly adapt to environmental changes, and are open, inclusive, and less hierarchical; they evolve continually and embrace uncertainty. An agile organisational culture puts people at the centre. And all of this is only possible through high autonomy – that is a must – but also high alignment. We must continue to enable autonomy for our teams, but ensure alignment with the organisation.
On 5th December, we held our second MAT CEO conference in Manchester at the Co-Op Academies Trust HQ, organised in partnership with PS Financials. With over 70 MAT leaders in attendance, our speakers delivered a series of thought-provoking talks throughout the day, drawing on their experience of growing their respective trusts sustainably. Image 1: James
On 5th December, we held our second MAT CEO conference in Manchester at the Co-Op Academies Trust HQ, organised in partnership with PS Financials. With over 70 MAT leaders in attendance, our speakers delivered a series of thought-provoking talks throughout the day, drawing on their experience of growing their respective trusts sustainably.
Image 1: James Weatherill giving the opening address at the conference
Arbor’s CEO and a trustee of the Langley Park Trust, James Weatherill, was first on the agenda and began by talking about the importance of MATs in today’s education system & their potential to transform it. He went on to discuss 4 different strategies for centralisation, concluding that the general trend is definitely towards more MAT alignment & standardisation. Click here to see his slides.
Frank Norris, Director of the Co-Op Academies Trust was next with a speech about the Co-Op’s values and the importance of embedding a shared culture into everything you do as a trust. He spoke about the challenges of making sure that every joining school is fully onboard with your values and principles. Frank was joined on stage by Jo Farnworth, Co-Op Co-ordinator at Co-Op Academy Failsworth, who gave some great examples of some of the ways that the Co-Op’s collaborative culture manifests itself in everyday school life. You can read their joint presentation here.
Image 2: Frank Norris discussing the Co-Op’s culture & values
Next on stage was Ofsted’s Regional Director for the North West, Andrew Cook, who delivered one of the first public addresses about the new inspection framework. He highlighted its stronger focus on the importance of curriculum, and Ofsted’s desire to reduce the burden on teacher workloads that inspections have caused in the past. He also explained plans to change the way Ofsted inspects MATs, and described how focused reviews of MATs will now become ‘summary evaluations’. Click here to read the slides from his presentation.
Will Jordan, Education Sector Manager at PS Financials, spoke about how to achieve greater efficiency and control within your MAT back office team, the benefits of financial alignment (see his slides here). He was followed by Chris Kirk, whose presentation entitled “The MAT growth journey: steps and mis-steps”, took the audience through the typical growth phases of a MAT and the potential crises that accompany them. Chris ended by discussing the most common barriers that prevent MATs from making change, including funding, capacity, and resistance from the people within in your trust. You can see his slides here.
The final presentation of the day was delivered by Luke Sparkes, Executive Principal at Dixons Academies Trust. Luke shared DAT’s thinking on the concept of “aligned autonomy”, and how they looked to entertainment giants Spotify and Netflix to develop a model that moves away from a “no-interference” approach to its high-performing schools. Echoing Frank Norris’ earlier talk about culture, Luke stressed the importance of rooting everything you do as a trust in your values. Click here to read his thought-provoking presentation in full.
The last item on the agenda was a frank roundtable discussion between Karen Burns (Victorious Academies Trust), Alex Thomas (Herts for Learning) and Phil Crompton (Trent Academies Group), 3 MAT CEOs of different sized trusts, who gave honest, relatable answers to Chris Kirk’s questions about the barriers they’ve faced as they’ve grown. The discussion created some great debate from members of the audience, so we’ll definitely be repeating this format at our next MAT conference!
Image 3: Chris Kirk chairs our MAT CEO roundtable discussion between Alex Thomas, Karen Burns and Phil Crompton
We’ll be posting transcriptions of our all our speakers’ presentations in full on the blog over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for updates. Stay tuned for more announcements about our upcoming MAT CEO conferences in the new year – if you’re interested in hosting or speaking at the next one, get in touch at hello@arbor-education.com.
This Autumn term, we organised 54 Insight Training sessions that were attended by teachers and members of Senior Leadership Teams from schools across the country. As well as looking at how Arbor’s Insight reports can help you to benchmark your schools results and streamline your operations, the sessions also demonstrated how you can use your
This Autumn term, we organised 54 Insight Training sessions that were attended by teachers and members of Senior Leadership Teams from schools across the country. As well as looking at how Arbor’s Insight reports can help you to benchmark your schools results and streamline your operations, the sessions also demonstrated how you can use your performance data and Arbor Insight portal to support and inform your annual school improvement cycle.
Each year, before you make any decisions based purely on your headline measures, you should be asking more questions about your data. This is to make sure that your decisions are not based on any bias or previous assumptions that you might not have even realised were affecting your improvement strategies. Your Arbor Insight reports help you do this by telling you:
Until you’ve answered those two why questions, you can’t figure out how to improve. We have two approaches to share to help with this.
The first is the Socratic approach. This approach requires you to think about your data from various angles to uncover any hidden assumptions you might have before taking action. You should ask:
Questions that clarify
“Do boys underperform in reading in all year groups?”
Questions that probe assumptions
“Do our pupils really enter school with low attainment?”
Questions that probe reasons and evidence
“Is there a reason to doubt the evidence?”
Questions about viewpoints and perspectives
“Should we look for another reason for this?”
Questions that probe implications and consequences
“How does this affect SEN pupils?”
Questions about questions
“Why do you think I asked this question?”
Categorising them like this encourages you to ask a wider range of questions and uncover the specific problem.
The second approach is asking“why” 5 times:
As those of you who teach or have younger children will know, one of their favourite, and sometimes most frustrating, games to play is the constant asking of “why?”. In fact, this single, repetitive question is a really useful way to dig deeper into the context behind your results and again, challenge your assumptions.
As a rule of thumb, 5 “why”s will usually get you to a root cause:
“Only 70% percent of children are working at the expected standard in writing”
WHY?
“Too many girls don’t make the expected standard”
“Progress for girls is slow across KS2”
“They start off poorly, with slower progress in lower KS2 than upper KS2”
“Expectations are too low in lower KS2”
“Poor teacher knowledge of what could be achieved”
In this case, “poor teacher knowledge of what could be achieved” is the root cause. You’ll know when you get to the root cause because it’s usually something specific and tangible. Unlike vague statements like “progress is slow” or “expectations are low”, it’s something you can actually address.
To log in and see your free ASP dashboard and reports for Phonics, KS1, KS2, and KS4, click here. Our Insight training sessions are over for the year, but if you’d like to host one for your area or find out how else Arbor can help your school or MAT, you can get in touch here.
Last week, we brought together over 70 MAT leaders at Arbor’s second MAT CEO conference in Manchester to discuss strategies for scaling your trust sustainably. Andrew Cook, Ofsted’s Regional Director for the North West, delivered one of the first public announcements about Ofsted’s new inspection framework, and talked in detail about its stronger focus on
Last week, we brought together over 70 MAT leaders at Arbor’s second MAT CEO conference in Manchester to discuss strategies for scaling your trust sustainably.
Andrew Cook, Ofsted’s Regional Director for the North West, delivered one of the first public announcements about Ofsted’s new inspection framework, and talked in detail about its stronger focus on the importance of curriculum. He also explained how Ofsted plans to change the way it inspects MATs, and described how focused reviews of MATs will now become ‘summary evaluations’. You can flick through the slides below to read his full presentation, or click here to view in it a separate window.
We’ll be posting all the presentations from the conference on our blog over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more updates!
— I recently spoke at our Manchester MAT Conference on how culture beats strategy when MATs start thinking about centralising data, operations and people. At Arbor we talk about 4 (broad) types of MAT cultures, and how the degree of MAT alignment vs school autonomy dictates how you approach scaling systems, processes and people. What
I recently spoke at our Manchester MAT Conference on how culture beats strategy when MATs start thinking about centralising data, operations and people.
At Arbor we talk about 4 (broad) types of MAT cultures, and how the degree of MAT alignment vs school autonomy dictates how you approach scaling systems, processes and people. What we see more and more from the 57 MATs who we provide MIS systems to, and the 100s more we are speaking to is that centralisation of school back office functions such as data, HR, finance and operations is the general direction of travel for all MATs. The debate is centred around the degree, style and pace at which this happens.
We’ve gathered feedback about the 4 different ways MATs go about scaling decision making, curriculum & assessment, systems & processes and their central team in the presentation below. See what you think and whether you fit into 1 or more of the categories I describe.
This is the final blog in our series offering a new vision for MATs. With a clear vision, based on 6 powerful principles and the development of 6 core competencies, and MAT-wide systems and cultures already put in place, the main focus should be on the systematic development of collaboration. Management style: collaboration Overview MATs
This is the final blog in our series offering a new vision for MATs. With a clear vision, based on 6 powerful principles and the development of 6 core competencies, and MAT-wide systems and cultures already put in place, the main focus should be on the systematic development of collaboration.
Overview
MATs which have achieved the integration above quickly realise that “you can’t mandate greatness”. Alignment and standardisation risk killing innovation and engagement. Arbor Education refers to this next phase as an ‘Assistant MAT’, Dixons Academies uses the term ‘Agile’ with ‘High autonomy, high alignment’
MATs at this stage are also well placed to collaborate beyond the MAT itself, contributing to a self-improving Academy system which is led from the middle.
If the work of Stage 2 has already been done, then the underpinning capabilities of Support, Learn, Assess and Communicate are also in place, and will be refined and improved through collaboration.
The emphasis now is on building systems, processes and policies to support purposeful collaboration. This supports the growth of teams which are focused on improvement, allowing experiments to be tried out, collaboration to grow. Management must support individuals and teams to be highly aligned to the vision, and then encourage groups which will self-identify and form to tackle a problem.
David Ross Education Trust operate a ‘Team around the school’ where supporting functions meet with the Principal to fix issues and plan for the future.
The Inspiration Trust employ Subject Specialist Leaders’ whose role is to develop Subject Communities, which variously focus on Assessment, Materials and Curriculum resources.
Dixons adopt the ‘Agile’ approach used by Spotify, of ‘Squads’ (a group of people who have decided to work together on a common challenge, e.g. learning and teaching of a particular subject and phase),‘Tribes’ (a group of ‘squads’ working on adjacent challenges who can benefit from sharing), Chapters (functional experts who bring different competencies to the squad), Product Leads (the owner of the particular challenge), and ‘Agile Coaches’ (senior leadership whose role is not to direct, but to coach the teams to help them achieve). In this model, Squads will form and finish based on the need to tackle a particular challenge. By this stage I assume a strong IT platform is in place to act as infrastructure for effective collaboration. In particular a strong IT platform will allow sufficient bandwidth and flexibility for anytime/ anywhere collaboration to be supported.
Benefits
The benefits of moving from Growth Stage 1 to 2 are well-documented and relate to traditional measures such as:
1. Economy – getting more for your money by planning ahead
2. Efficiency – the avoidance of wasted time and cash, the ability to buy at scale, reduced complexity; and
3. Effectiveness – improved systems and structures which allow people to do their job better, and retain staff as a result of less stress.
The important benefit of growth stage 3 is to foster…
Engagement. Empowered teams, aligned by systems, processes and vision, but free to develop their own groups and solutions, have the potential to be at the heart of taking the Academy system forwards.
It is tempting to jump from Stage 1 of MAT growth to Stage 3, missing out the detailed and difficult work of Stage 2. I believe this would be a mistake, as without a strong underpinning, it is difficult for a large group of Academies to collaborate effectively. I encourage you to stick with it as the benefits of getting this right are significant:
We’ve written before about the fact that more schools than ever are choosing to switch to a cloud-based MIS – in fact, we predict that over 1,000 schools will move in 2019 alone! It’s not just potential cost savings which are compelling schools to move (primary schools save £3,000 on average by switching, and secondary
We’ve written before about the fact that more schools than ever are choosing to switch to a cloud-based MIS – in fact, we predict that over 1,000 schools will move in 2019 alone!
It’s not just potential cost savings which are compelling schools to move (primary schools save £3,000 on average by switching, and secondary schools could save around £6,000) – increasingly schools are realising that moving to the cloud offers a real opportunity to transform the way they work. We explore the 4 key ways your MIS could do this below.
1. Your school can go paperless
Put an end to paper registers, incident forms, and classroom context sheets! A cloud-based MIS will let you record all this information quickly & easily via a browser so you never have to worry about printing or losing a sheet of paper again. Not only is this better for data protection, compliance & safeguarding (contrary to popular belief, the cloud is a lot more secure than using a server-based system or arch lever files), it also means you’ll eliminate unnecessary data duplication (never again will you have to transfer information from paper to screen!).
2. Let your MIS do non-teaching tasks for you
The second benefit to putting key information about attendance and behaviour in a cloud-based MIS is that you can start to set up smart workflows which mean your MIS ends up doing a lot of admin for you. For example, you could tell your MIS that everytime a “Level 3” incident is recorded, the Head of Year should be automatically informed by email and the student should automatically be registered for the next detention. This helps to cut out a lot of manual chasing & scheduling – and also helps your school to maintain a consistent behaviour policy.
3. Stop your staff being tied to their desks
When you use a server-based system, staff can only access your school MIS from specific stations (normally the desktop in their classroom). This limits the usefulness of the information inside it, since it can’t be viewed, discussed or put to use outside of that one room. With a cloud MIS, your staff automatically have the flexibility to work on the move around school and bring up important information quickly & easily in key meetings.
4. Reduce your “data workload”
Far too often, schools end up using a patchwork of different systems for different school areas (such as attendance, behaviour, parent communication, interventions, and so on). This normally means that in order to look at patterns between different areas, add demographic data into assessment results, or follow up with parents about absence, staff have to manually download and compare different spreadsheets, find contact details in one place to use in another, and juggle multiple logins. All of this means leads to lots of manual work to make data any use. By contrast, most cloud-based MIS systems replace your patchwork of systems with just one – making your data instantly accessible, comparable and useful.
With so many schools moving to the cloud, we’ve found the question has become when and not if the decision is right for your school. We’d be more than happy to discuss how you currently use your MIS and explain how our simple, smart cloud-based system could help you transform the way you work. Just get in touch here, call 0208 050 1028 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
This blog, the fourth in our series offering a new vision for MATs, describes the second growth phase of MATs. At this pivotal stage, a large number of changes are often needed to capabilities and systems across the MAT in order to create an “integrated MAT”. Management style: Growth through Direction Overview As the MAT
This blog, the fourth in our series offering a new vision for MATs, describes the second growth phase of MATs. At this pivotal stage, a large number of changes are often needed to capabilities and systems across the MAT in order to create an “integrated MAT”.
As the MAT grows larger, there is a need for more integration between Academies, to improve educational impact, and start to achieve efficiencies. Common systems, processes and policies need to be put in place. This is a big strain on the central team, requiring discussion, collaboration and expertise.
In a MAT which has grown primarily through Convertor Academies, supporting services will typically be standardised more readily than education activities. In a Sponsored MAT, the opposite may be true, with a strong set of educational practices and non-negotiables in place before supporting systems are centralised. Most MATs will create commonality around formative and/ or summative assessment, but with a variety of models to achieve this. Some will run central/ regional School Improvement teams, with intervention where required. Others will set up Subject Leadership roles, or working groups/ communities for other types of improvement.
Most MATs of above 4 Academies will create a central team with professional leadership of Finance, HR, and Operations (typically covering ICT, Estates and Governance). These leaders are responsible for working with Principals to put in place the central systems, policies and processes below. In many MATs, these leaders have dotted rather than direct line management responsibility for Academy teams who are implementing the policies (e.g. the local finance staff, caretakers, ICT Technicians). Some MATs are comfortable to stay in this arrangement. Others find that the cost of running a central team as well as Academy teams is unsustainable, and that the Academy teams start to become confused about whether to take ultimate direction from their Principal, or Head Office, and move to end-to-end functional management of support staff. This allows much more scope to redesign roles, processes and systems. These organisational arrangements need to be supported with strong systems, which could incude: Cashless catering, Asset management, IT system User Authentication, Biometrics, Digital signage, Parent Payments, Building Management System, Applicant tracking system, Management Information System.
Standardised and centralised processes should be put in place for Finance, ICT, Estates (Health and Safety, Premises Management), Workforce policies (including Abuse, Fraud, Pay& Reward, Capability, Disciplinary, Equality, Flexi time, expenses, hospitality, performance management, redundancy, Code of Conduct, Teacher Training, Recruitment and Induction), and governance (MAT and Academy standard Governance policies, Schemes of Delegation).
There should also be centralisation of Procurement & Contract Management of ICT infrastructure, software, broadband/ telephony, insurance energy, break fix, construction, Agency supply, catering, photocopying, legal services, audit, hard and soft Facilities Management. This will include consideration of Cloud-based systems, supporting Academies to have the right devices to achieve the educational vision, and delivery affordably, whether through a shared service within the MAT, or an outsourced contract.
Shared systems to support learning will be a priority for many MATs at this stage, although some will chose to leave some of the below to Academy level decision making.
Shared learning systems include: Admissions; Attendance management and reporting; Behaviour management and reporting; SEN planning; Learning management system/ VLE; Interventions tracking; Library/ resource management; Classroom management; Timetable generation; Seat planning.
A number of shared process should also be considered, including: development of curriculum resources/ Lesson planning and preparation/ SoW; Research to understand practices and theories within and outside the MAT; behaviour management and reporting.
Some MATs will provide support for the improvement of physical learning spaces to support educational philosophy (e.g. lighting, audio, availability of charging for ICT, wireless networks), although others will find this difficult to impossible depending on available funds and existing estates conditions.
Shared policies at this point should typically include Admissions, Attendance , Student Behaviour/ Pastoral support, Inclusion/ Special Educational Needs. There will be legitimate exceptions due to context.
A Mat of this size should consider shared systems for Formative/ summative Assessment, Progress tracking, Data analysis, Examinations Results Analysis. There may also be shared systems for marking, and an alignment of Primary Assessment models/ Exam Boards. Alongside this, MATs should convene teacher led groups to investgate shared policies for marking (or not marking!).
MAT-wide systems can be put in place for communicating with parents and students, Parents evening booking, Homework setting, Reporting to parents and Visitor management. There could also be alignment or centralisation of some communication processes, allowing for efficiencies and improvements to quality. Home school agreement policies can also be aligned.
Shared development systems can include staff CPD/ lesson observation, and staff performance management. By aligning on a system, more time and energy can be spent on the more value-adding activity of refining which types of approach to development and support hae the most positive impact.
A number of systems can support, or get in the way of, collaboration for a MAT of this size. MATs should consider standardising Office productivity applications, Email, storage, and Collaboration tools (student-student/ student-adult/ Adult-adult)
In terms of processes, at this point a MAT will need to have formal roles or groups to support collaboration and alignment. These roles may be distributed amongst Academy Principals, middles leaders, teacher or other staff, or held centrally/ regionally.
Click here to read the final instalment of Chris’ blog series on how to create an agile MAT
Arbor Updates | Assessment
We’re delighted to announce our new partnership with assessment experts RS Assessment from Hodder Education on a new integration between Arbor’s MIS for schools & MATs and RS Assessment’s standardised tests for primary schools. RS Assessment’s standardised tests PIRA and PUMA are a key component of many primary school improvement strategies, helping Senior Leaders track
We’re delighted to announce our new partnership with assessment experts RS Assessment from Hodder Education on a new integration between Arbor’s MIS for schools & MATs and RS Assessment’s standardised tests for primary schools.
RS Assessment’s standardised tests PIRA and PUMA are a key component of many primary school improvement strategies, helping Senior Leaders track pupils’ in-year progress and benchmark against age related expectations. They’ve become even more crucial for MATs recently, as central teams at growing MATs need the ability to monitor and support school improvement across multiple schools and get an overview of whole Trust performance. RS Assessment’s MARK (My Assessment and Reporting Kit) online service is pivotal to providing time-saving analysis of test results.
Arbor’s cloud-based MIS helps to transform the way schools & MATs work by putting essential data at the fingertips of senior leaders, teachers & office staff, and by automating and simplifying administrative tasks to reduce staff workload. At a MAT level, Arbor MIS centralises not just data reporting, but operations and communications too – helping MATs to manage & support their schools all from just one system.
Our partnership with RS Assessment brings the power of Arbor’s simple, smart cloud-based MIS and the results of PIRA and PUMA tests together for schools and MATs for the first time. Later this year, schools and MATs using Arbor and tracking PIRA and PUMA test results in MARK will be able to:
We’ve worked on this partnership with RS Assessment in collaboration with REAch2 Multi-Academy Trust to ensure it works just as seamlessly for MAT leaders as it does for individual primary schools. To learn more about how we can support your school or MAT, contact us on 0208 050 1028 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
You can also learn more about our integration with Hodder at our specialist User Group at BETT this year! It’s a great opportunity to learn how the integration works, meet other schools & MATs using both products, and catch up with our teams. Click here to sign up for your free place.
As I’m sure you’ve seen, Ofsted recently announced plans to change the way it inspects schools, colleges, further education institutions and early years settings from September 2019. To help you understand how the new framework will impact the way you operate your school, we’ve rounded up the most important changes you need to know about.
“Quality of education” to replace current judgements
Firstly, Ofsted will introduce a new judgement for ‘quality of education’, which will replace the current ‘outcomes for pupils’ and ‘teaching, learning and assessment’ judgements with a single, broader judgement.
This new judgement will mean that Ofsted can recognise primary schools that, for example, prioritise phonics and the transition into early reading, and which encourage older pupils to read widely and deeply. It will also make it easier for secondary schools to offer children a broad range of subjects and encourage the take up of core EBacc subjects at GCSE, like humanities subjects and languages, alongside the arts and creative subjects. This is a move away from Ofsted’s previous focus on exam results.
Image 1: Arbor’s Assignments module
In many cases, your MIS system can help provide evidence to inspectors that you’ve incorporated these new guidelines into the way you run your school. Arbor’s Assignments module allows school leadership to check in on the quality of homework set by teachers and returned by students, and teachers can upload lesson resources to assignments and lesson dashboards, which can be reviewed by leadership or inspectors.
Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, also announced the 3 other inspection judgements that Ofsted will consult on. These are:
These changes recognise the difference between behaviour & discipline in schools, pupils’ wider personal development, and their opportunities to grow as “active, healthy and engaged citizens.” ‘Extra-curricular activities’ should be incorporated into the curriculum, and schools will be required to prove that they offer a range of these activities.
Image 2: Arbor’s Clubs & Trips module
Ofsted inspectors will want to know that each student has the opportunity to engage in extracurricular activities (especially Pupil Premium students). In Arbor, the Clubs & Trips modules can be used to report on which students are accessing extra-curricular activities, and, perhaps more importantly, allows teachers to identify students that have never taken part in an extracurricular activity and invite them or their parents to sign up, so that you can proudly say: “all our students have taken part in extracurricular activities this year.”
Schools need to be clear answering the following 3 key questions:
What can schools do?
The new framework places less emphasis on schools’ headline data, with inspectors focusing instead on how schools are achieving their results, and if they’re offering their students a curriculum that is broad, rich and deep. The changes will look in more detail at the substance of education, and actively discourage unnecessary data collection (a key contributor to increased workload in many schools). Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, Amanda Spielman, said that the changes would move inspection more towards being “a conversation about what actually happens in schools”.
If you’re interested in hearing about how Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS can help transform the way your school or Trust operates, you can get in touch via the contact form on our website, or give us a call any time on 0208 050 1028
In the previous 2 blogs in this series I described the need for MATs to sharpen their strategies, and set out 6 principles and core capabilities that should underpin this. In the next 3 blogs I describe how these can be developed during each of the main growth phases of MATs, stating with “putting the
In the previous 2 blogs in this series I described the need for MATs to sharpen their strategies, and set out 6 principles and core capabilities that should underpin this. In the next 3 blogs I describe how these can be developed during each of the main growth phases of MATs, stating with “putting the basic in place”.
The initial focus is on agreeing a common vision and values, alongside basic common systems and processes. These typically focus on school improvement for a Sponsor MAT, or on Supporting Functions (also called ‘Operations’ or ‘Back Office’), for a Convertor MAT.
Support
Common systems and policies for Finance (core finance and budgeting), HR (services and Payroll), safeguarding and child protection is a priority. Many will also put in place a common MIS system. As well as the system, most MATs will want to align finance processes quickly, e.g. a common Chart of Accounts and budgeting cycle. Aligned support policies will often include GDPR, FOI, Data Protection, Equal Opportunities and Recruitment.
Learn
In a Convertor MAT, learning and teaching is largely decided at a school level. In a Sponsored MAT, there may be a strong SIP function, or Executive Headship. In curriculum-driven MATs, e.g. those focused on a knowledge curriculum, this will be a much earlier priority. This means processes for collaborative alignment will be required at an earlier stage as well.
Assess
Assessment may be undertaken differently in each school, but there are likely to be a termly or more frequent sharing of data. Discussions commence about where and how to align elements of data. As above, if there is an early focus on a core curriculum then assessment will also be standardised at an earlier point.
Communicate
Communications from the Central MAT team are typically few; individual schools continue as the main point of contact with parents/ students.
Develop
Some light touch shared development may take place, especially for middle and senior leaders. There may also be a shared approach to ITT and induction, especially if there is a Teaching School Alliance within the MAT.
Collaborate
Collaboration is vital, but at this stage may be informal, light on systems, and through personal interactions connections between Principals and senior support staff leaders/ managers. More formal systems will be needed if MATs need to make ealier progress on the capabilities below.
Click here to read the next blog in Chris’ series about the benefits of creating an integrated MAT
In the first blog in this series I shared research which indicates MATs need to be clearer about their vision, even though different MATs will rightly have different visions. I would suggest that the following principles are likely to underpin the vision for many MATs as they grow and mature: Six powerful principles to include
In the first blog in this series I shared research which indicates MATs need to be clearer about their vision, even though different MATs will rightly have different visions. I would suggest that the following principles are likely to underpin the vision for many MATs as they grow and mature: Six powerful principles to include in any MAT strategy:
1. An inquisitive approach to curriculum and pedagogy, framed from the top and led from the middle
2. Consistent and regular performance data which is;
a) standardised (between Academies), b) balanced (measuring what we value, rather than valuing only what we can easily measure), c) integrated (the data is generated through activity which would be useful to the teacher, not just to create reports), d) layered (different people can use it for different purposes without recreating burdensome collection), e) benchmarked (we know how it compares to others) f) formative and summative and well understood by all
3. High quality governance which is clear about authority and delegation
4. Leadership and management which is focused on outcomes, which inspires, and which aims for “subsidiarity”, with decisions being made where they are most effective
5. A culture of personal development and learning for staff as much as students
6. A clear growth strategy which balances economy with capacity, geographic focus, due diligence and a clear ‘deal’ for new joining schools.
These principles are a good start but a MAT needs a clear view about the capabilities which will deliver them.
Six core capabilities for MATs*
*Capability: a combination of people, systems and processes
The importance of systems to enable collaboration is often overlooked
It is traditional to think of MAT capabilities in terms of the first five of the list above. However, I believe that there is a significant additional capability which can be built systematically: purposeful collaboration can bridge the gap between chaotic innovation, and stifling standardisation.
Technology can help scale collaboration between stakeholders
Paul Shoesmith, ICT lead for CJK Associates says that “technologies can help to support collaboration between students, and between teachers and students. Setting up, configuring and managing such systems can be challenging at an individual school level, but by sharing best practice across schools the investment in time which is often required to get those systems working effectively the benefits can be realised more quickly and at a lower cost, in time as well as financially.”
The way each MAT approaches the six principles and core capabilities will reflect size, context, and level of maturity. In the next three blogs I will set out a possible pathway, considering the management style, organisation, systems, processes and policies that are likely to be put in place over time.
Click here to read the next instalment of Chris’ blog on managing MAT growth
A vision for Multi Academy Trusts: a 5-part blog series written for Arbor by Chris Kirk, Ex-Partner for Education at PWC and formerly GEMS/DfE. The launch of the Confederation of School Trusts on Thursday 11 October 2018 is a huge step forwards for those of us who believe it is essential that we create a school
A vision for Multi Academy Trusts: a 5-part blog series written for Arbor by Chris Kirk, Ex-Partner for Education at PWC and formerly GEMS/DfE.
The launch of the Confederation of School Trusts on Thursday 11 October 2018 is a huge step forwards for those of us who believe it is essential that we create a school system which is led from the middle. For this to be a reality, we need to increase the pace of development of MATs as highly effective networks of schools, collaborating not only within, but between Trusts.
This five part blog sets out a framework for sharpening MAT strategy with powerful principles and core capabilities, followed by three stages of growth:
Strategy varies between MATs, which is a good thing
When asked about the focus of their strategy, MATs give a wide range of responses. Most MATs seek to preserve school identity whilst improving back office efficiency – often by centralising systems and staff – with a collaborative approach to standardisation. But there are much wider ranges of views when it comes to scaling tried and tested school improvement models, creating consistent pedagogy, boosting local governance, or MAT-wide enrichment programmes.
However, sometimes strategy varies within a MAT, which points to lack of clarity
This variation in MAT strategy is in my view a good thing, as there is certainly not one right way to work: context is very important, and very different between MATs. What is more surprising is that our research indicates that there is just as much variation of view of strategy within many MATs. This is less welcome. The most effective leaders have the ability to develop a vision which is strongly influenced by their followers’ needs, creating a climate of collective aspirations. Within a MAT, this must surely mean a clear vision focused on the difference made for students, schools, communities and the system, supported by a realistic and shared strategy which is honest about capacity and has high expectations for all.
It follows then that a significant task for MAT leaders is to build a common vision and view of strategy within their MAT. In the second blog in this series I will set out 6 principles and 6 core competencies that I believe should underpin every MAT vision.
Click here to read part 2 of Chris’ blog series about the 6 principles that MATs should always include in their strategy
This blog is a transcript of a talk from our 2018 MAT Conference given by Sarah Pittam, Director at SLG Consulting. Sarah explains how different governance structures and processes can scale effectively as your MAT grows. We’ve transcribed her presentation below. We’ve talked about a number of stages of the MAT growth scale today.
This blog is a transcript of a talk from our 2018 MAT Conference given by Sarah Pittam, Director at SLG Consulting. Sarah explains how different governance structures and processes can scale effectively as your MAT grows. We’ve transcribed her presentation below.
We’ve talked about a number of stages of the MAT growth scale today. I’m going to focus on the governance aspect of that growth scale.
1. The type of governance required depends on the size of your trust
In the early phases, you’re likely to have a board that is dominated by legacy membership. You will have inherited the boards of your founding schools, and there will be many people who will assume that they should automatically graduate to the MAT board. This is a problem, as these people simply may not have the skills that your Trust board requires.
As you grow, you must create financial stability, steady state governance, and effectively evolve the quality of your governance. Quality of governance is about three main things:
Once you reach regional trust size/stage, you need to ensure that your governance model works at scale. You need to have future-proofed it with the right people, the right processes, the right subcommittees, the right board-paper format, with a collection of people on your board who have the right skills, who are strategic thinkers, who work well together, and who all sit as front-benchers.
2. It’s a totally different ball game from LA maintained governance
This is quite difficult sometimes to make others realise, but it is something that you have to communicate to your members. There will always be an initial perception gap between you and your legacy members. After all, they’ve been on the board for 5 years and from their point of view, everything is going well. You need to try and explain to them that they were at the wheel of a ford fiesta, and now you’re driving a Ferrari. It’s a difficult question, but you need to find a way to have that conversation.
The lack of independence that comes when people graduate from a governing body/LGB straight to the Trust’s board is a problem. People often think that they are representing the interests of their school, but that’s just incorrect. The same applies to parents – I’d really advise against having parents on the Trust’s board. It is rare, and it’s rare for a good reason.
There will always be a culture challenge. People will say, ‘we’ve always done it like this, why do we have to do something else? The Local Authority used to do it all for us!’. What they don’t realise is that the LA-maintained context is so different from the MAT context because the reporting compliance requirements are so much greater.
3. Recruiting the Chair & your board
Recruiting the Chair is really difficult in any size MAT, whether it’s a 2, 5, 10, 20, or a 50 school MAT. Don’t underestimate this! It’s particularly hard if you’ve got turnaround challenges, because much more time is required, and very difficult if you’re in a high growth phase. The Chair really is in the hot seat. He or she is not paid, and they might be spending a day a week or even more on this. It is difficult to find a top quality Chair, but hang in there; don’t just hope for the best. You should be very picky!
So what should you look for in a Chair? You need someone with a social mission. The vast majority of governors & trustees do and it’s an absolute prerequisite. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition however; they must also bring something to the party. It should be an identifiable, generic and transferable skill set – e.g. if you’re looking for a growth manager, you must look for someone who has experience in managing growth in an organisation moving from £10 to £20 million turnover (if those are the sort of numbers you’re talking about).
You should populate your board with people who understand the form and the function of governance. Ask the basic question: what are the objectives of this board? Fewer than 50% of people know what the answer to that question is. Try to find people who have had internal governance experience previously, as they’re more likely to understand the form, function and objectives of governance. It is not just something to put on your CV. It’s to support and challenge, to hold to account, to form strategy, and to act as a custodian of public funds and public policy. These are responsibilities that need to be taken seriously
A board structure that scales is the easy part…it’s working out the right scheme of delegation for your trust that is much more difficult. Read what Sarah had to say in the second half of her presentation here!
Hugh Greenway, CEO of the Elliot Foundation, recently spoke at our MAT conference Scaling Sustainably: Centralisation vs. School Autonomy. This blog is the second part of a two-part blog series on his presentation – in part 1, Hugh spoke about the challenge of scaling a MAT without adequate funding. Here, he goes on to say
Hugh Greenway, CEO of the Elliot Foundation, recently spoke at our MAT conference Scaling Sustainably: Centralisation vs. School Autonomy. This blog is the second part of a two-part blog series on his presentation – in part 1, Hugh spoke about the challenge of scaling a MAT without adequate funding. Here, he goes on to say that creating trust among the people in your MAT is crucial to running a successful operation. We’ve transcribed part two of his presentation below.
Creating something from nothing
In order to successfully create a school-led system, we must ask ourselves two questions:
Question 1: Am I doing everything I can to improve outcomes for as many children as possible with the resources available to me today?
Question 2: Are the outcomes good enough?
The difficulty with Q1 is that it can make it difficult to get out of bed some mornings. Therefore, you have to find different ways and different people to help you ask the question in different ways. This is my latest version:
The questions that need to be asked are as follows: Are all children safe? Where do they learn? What do they learn? How do they learn? Who do they learn from? Can we pay for it? Does it work? Is it compliant?
Each of these questions relates back to a relevant operational part of the MAT, about which we can ask various questions to see if we are creating the best learning environment for our children using what we have available to us.
Think about your finances, for example. If you think that you’ve saved money on photocopiers and/or stationery, you probably haven’t. You just think you have. I can tell you that by implementing print management and switching off colour printing, you can save up to 50% on your print costs now. Schools don’t actually need to print in colour. But here’s the thing: your photocopy costs will be less than 1% of total costs, so even saving you 50% will only deliver a 0.33 of 1% point saving – which might not be worth the uproar you will face from teachers!
The benefits of good governance
The real savings come from building trust with your people. At the beginning of the previous blog, I said that there were no volume discounts on teachers. Well, you can save money on them by treating them better.
This in turn leads to systems which transcend individual schools. If you think about your trust as a tent that needs to be kept upright against any inclement weather, then you need guy ropes. Each guy rope represents a golden thread that runs through the organisation.
In order to be sure that things are as good as they can be you need to check the tension on the guy rope. The inputs and the outputs.
How do we know that all children are safe or that the provision of education is improving? What evidence do we have? And what do we then do with that evidence? Which employee is responsible? Which trustee and which committee has oversight and what does good look like?
For example:
Obviously there needs to be a limit to the number of guy ropes, because otherwise you’d spend all your time running round and never get to sleep in your tent.
For those who find that analogy a bit fluffy, here is a slightly harder nosed way of looking at the current way I look at our system:
In brief, the Trust board is accountable to the DfE, which in turn is accountable to the children and the community. Within the the MAT, the staff are accountable to the principal, who reports to regional directors, who report to the CEO. There is then a web of support and representation that links the finance committee, LGBs, the audit committee and the standards committee, as well as NUC unions, an ops group and the principals’ council. A feedback loop runs through the MAT, connecting children to staff, staff to principals and principals to the CEO & trust board.
No roadblocks or concentrations of power.
But, at the end of the day it comes down to trust, and that is where we turn our greatest weakness into our greatest strength. Because if we can deploy our values in such a way that they generate value, then we all have a chance.
At our MAT conference, Scaling Sustainably: Centralisation vs. School Autonomy, Hugh Greenway, CEO of the Elliot Foundation spoke about the challenge of keeping the “big picture” in view when managing operations across a trust, arguing that this is the biggest challenge to scaling a MAT. We’ve transcribed part 1 of his presentation below. Introduction: The
At our MAT conference, Scaling Sustainably: Centralisation vs. School Autonomy, Hugh Greenway, CEO of the Elliot Foundation spoke about the challenge of keeping the “big picture” in view when managing operations across a trust, arguing that this is the biggest challenge to scaling a MAT. We’ve transcribed part 1 of his presentation below.
Introduction: The job of a MAT CEO
I was at a DfE meeting recently where the job of being a MAT CEO was explained as being, “to find what works and make it scalable”. But education has always been and always will be mostly unscalable. You don’t get volume discounts on teachers (which are between 65-85% of your costs). The 1,000th teacher costs the same as the first one. What economies of scale you can achieve on your other costs are generally lost to the costs of running the system.
I set up the Elliot Foundation with my friend Caroline Whalley. She was the visionary, I was builder. But what did we set out to do?
The idea behind the Elliot Foundation was to build a safe place for primary schools and to try to protect them from the unintended consequences of academy reforms. We could see that the fragmentation of the system was likely to lead to hundreds, if not thousands of orphaned primary schools, with no one able or prepared to help them.
We set out to build this with three core ideas:
So – how’s it going?
The Elliot Foundation currently has 27 schools – that’s around 10,000 children (growing to 30,000). Two thirds of these schools are sponsored and 4 out of 8 converters were RI jumpers.
We’ve had 19 inspections so far, with 7 schools being awarded Oustanding, 10 awarded Good, and 2 Requiring Improvement. Out of the 6 Outstanding sponsored primaries in the West Midlands, 3 of those belong to the Elliot Foundation. But Age Related Expectations are not good enough. They’re probably at about 55% (validated). There are Pupil Premium and EAL gaps in East Anglia.
You can see from the numbers below that our schools are in the most deprived quartile:
Whilst you were reading the statistics, did you notice anything odd about the diagram above? Anything… gorilla-shaped? This idea is based on a famous 1990s psychology experiment that you can find on YouTube (but I’m afraid I’m now about to ruin for you). The difficulty is that nearly all MAT CEOs are former Headteachers, and they view the world through the lens of their experience. They see children, teachers and schools.
But they don’t see the gorilla. Do you see it now?
Unlike the academics at the DfE, I believe that our job as MAT CEOs is to create and maintain systems that keep schools, safe, solvent, structurally sound, legally compliant and educationally improving.
How do you scale without the money to scale?
Back in 2001 our system costs were handsomely funded – LAs used to retain around 16%. When the academy project was expanded by the coalition government in 2010, this had fallen to 12%, and academies had to make do with 8%. When the LACSEG was replaced by the ESG, it had fallen to £160 per pupil (around 3.5%). Today, each of us is personally accountable and potentially criminally liable for maintaining these systems. Yet we are given…nothing. Not even the most frugal of SME would run its head office on less than 5% of total. And in the UK, charities average closer to around 10%.
And yet, we have accepted this bargain by taking our system costs out of individual schools’ funding – and more often than not, by not taking enough, because we don’t want to. In doing so, we have tacitly accepted that our schools were over-funded. So, next time you sign your VfM declaration, you can point out that you have achieved VfM, even if you have only maintained standards (because you are doing so for much less than we used to get paid!).
The real pinch is that we cannot opt out of the law of the land (although that doesn’t stop the ESFA and the National College trying). Indeed, academy legislation is the first time in UK legal history that a government has used primary legislation to alter the terms of contract. By prioritising children we have simply put ourselves in the firing line. Asbestos compliance trumps school improvement. The Equalities Act is more important than SATs. GDPR (so help me) will be more important than SEND.
We all know that this is not true or fair. And this is the gorilla that we cannot see.
Moral purpose is the gorilla that killed Kids Company. And we will be victims of our vocation if we do not get a little more open and honest about how difficult this is.
The only way we can afford to have a moral purpose is to get a whole lot better at creating something from nothing. Fortunately, that’s what Primary schools are really good at.
Click here to read part two of Hugh’s presentation.
As a former Secondary school middle leader, I know how effective a well planned, and well executed intervention can be. That said, I also understand what a detrimental effect a poorly planned, badly-executed one can have! Interventions are incredibly expensive in terms of material cost, staff and student time, and it’s often very hard to
As a former Secondary school middle leader, I know how effective a well planned, and well executed intervention can be. That said, I also understand what a detrimental effect a poorly planned, badly-executed one can have! Interventions are incredibly expensive in terms of material cost, staff and student time, and it’s often very hard to find out what works and what doesn’t, particularly when you’re dealing with larger groups of students. In this blog, I’ll share a strategy that I developed during my time as a teacher, and talk about how Arbor can help alleviate the administrative burden of planning, managing, and monitoring interventions.
Step 1: Define the outcome
The first thing you need to do when planning an intervention is to think about its outcome, or, in other words, what you want your students to achieve by the end of the intervention. The outcome of an intervention should be SMART:
For example, students may reach their Phonics targets by the end of that term, or a student could have 100% attendance over the 4 week intervention period.
Step 2: Carefully plan your intervention
For an intervention to succeed, planning is essential! Your intervention will need to be planned differently depending on the scale, scope and target students. Once you’ve successfully devised an effective, well-planned intervention, it can be used time and time again.
Ask yourself the following questions when planning your intervention:
Image 1: Our MIS helps you plan the dates, participant criteria and outcomes of your interventions, and schedule intervention reviews
Step 3: Start small
I’ve always found that starting small, or using a ‘control group’ of students is a great way to test out your intervention and to learn what does & doesn’t work. It’s much easier to plan your next steps and measure progress when you’re dealing with a small, manageable group of young people, and it’s also a much better way to get feedback from the students themselves. Share the intervention’s outcomes with them and ask them if they think they’re making progress; after all, they are the key stakeholders!
I’ve spoken to schools that have conducted blanket after-school interventions across large sections of the student body, especially during key points of the year like SATs, or GCSEs. This approach is incredibly costly in terms of staff time and financial resource, and often doesn’t yield good results. Start your test groups at the start of the year, learn from them first, then build up to whole school initiatives.
Step 4: Scale up your intervention
Once you’ve got something that works, you’ll need to scale it up. When doing so, it’s always wise to keep the following in mind:
Image 2: How to measure & track intervention costs in Arbor’s MIS
You should have an answer for all these questions before you begin scaling up your intervention, otherwise you might find yourself in a difficult situation.
Step 5: Make sure you’re monitoring progress
It’s easy to start an intervention initiative and expect it to “just work”. I made this mistake early on in my career: if students are leaving my lesson to work with a Teaching Assistant on their literacy, surely that will help them to improve? Ultimately, every child is unique; what works for one student may not work for another. Continually monitoring each student’s progress towards the intervention’s desired outcome is essential. Remember, the outcome must be measurable.
With all of the above, you should be able to lean on your MIS system to do some of this work for you. Arbor’s built-in Interventions module makes planning, monitoring and reporting on interventions easy, and saves you hours a week on repetitive data entry & admin tasks. You can quickly target students and measure the success of an intervention by defining your desired outcome based on student data points in the MIS, and track student’s progress in real time as they progress through the intervention. You can also easily manage intervention costs, timetable interventions and provision maps.
Image 3: Easily monitor how students are getting on via Arbor’s Student Profile as they progress through an intervention
Step 6: Share best practice!
Finally, running effective interventions is a brilliant learning process, not only for your students, but also for you and the other teachers at your school. Sharing best practice with colleagues not only helps others to learn from your successes and failures, but also provides you with valuable feedback from other professionals.
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor’s simple, smart cloud-based MIS could help you manage interventions at your school, send us a message or call us on 0208 050 1028.
Last April, we held the first in our series of free MAT CEO conferences. Over 100 Executive Leaders representing 72 MATs nationally came to London to network, exchange best practice advice, and listen to our speakers discuss strategies for achieving sustainable growth. We had such a positive response from attendees that we’ve decided to hold
Last April, we held the first in our series of free MAT CEO conferences. Over 100 Executive Leaders representing 72 MATs nationally came to London to network, exchange best practice advice, and listen to our speakers discuss strategies for achieving sustainable growth. We had such a positive response from attendees that we’ve decided to hold a second – this time at the Co-Op Academies HQ in Manchester!
The landscape for MATs in England is constantly evolving, and the debate continues around the best ways for trusts to successfully manage growth, including questions over how much autonomy MATs should afford their schools. Whilst a number of studies have been published by the DfE and other research bodies in an effort to guide new and existing MATs as they grow (including this Expectations for Growth Report from 2016), exchanging and learning from good practice remains an effective way for MATs to navigate this landscape.
With that in mind, the next instalment of Arbor’s free MAT conference series will bring together Executive Leaders from across the country in Manchester to hear other MAT CEO & Senior Leaders from different-sized MATs tell their stories about scaling. Speakers including Luke Sparkes (Dixons Academies Trust), Claire-Marie Cuthbert (The Evolve Trust), Mark Williams (The Co-Op Academies Trust) & Karen Burns (Victorious Academies Trust) will discuss scaling everything from their strategy, operations, central team process & systems to their reporting, governance and culture. Also on the program is a presentation from Ofsted’s Regional Director for the North West, Andrew Cook, who’ll talk about what Ofsted looks for in a MAT’s ability to provide school improvement. We’ll finish with a open, roundtable discussion between Northern MAT CEOs about what has and hasn’t worked for them on their journeys so far.
Click here to see the full agenda and sign up for your FREE ticket!
With over 100 delegates from MATs across the country expected to attend, we’ve left plenty of time between talks (and organised a free buffet lunch!) to allow for networking and conversation between delegates. Guests will leave with a series of relevant, practical and implementable steps to take back to their MATs and help them grow sustainably, as well as new MAT contacts to keep in touch with.
Finally, if you can’t make it, don’t worry! We’ll be publishing all the presentations from the conference on our blog, so keep an eye out and keep checking our Twitter & LinkedIn for updates. In the meantime, why not have a read of the presentation given at our last conference by Dominic Norrish, Group Director of Technology at United Learning, about how and when to scale systems within your MAT?
Full programme for the day:
09:45 – 10:00: 4 different ways of centralising data & ops across your MAT
James Weatherill, CEO, Arbor Education
10:00 – 10:30: How to scale culture across your schools
Mark Williams, Director of Education at Co-op Academies Trust
10:30 – 11:00: Ofsted’s new framework & MAT’s capacity for school improvement
Andrew Cook, Regional Director for the North West, Ofsted
11:00 – 11:30 : Networking break
11:35 – 12:05: How to centralise your back office to help scale
Will Jordan, Education Sector Manager, PS Financials
12:10 – 12:40: Improve collaboration within your MAT and across school phases
Claire-Marie Cuthbert, CEO at The Evolve Trust
12:40 – 13:40: Lunch
13:40 – 14:10: A new model to make your MAT structures more agile & responsive
Luke Sparkes, Executive Principal at Dixons Academies Trust
14:10 – 14:50: Roundtable
Phil Crompton, Former CEO at Trent Academies Group
Karen Burns, CEO at Victorious Academies Trust
Chris Kirk, Ex-Partner for Education at PwC, formerly GEMS DfE & Director at CJK Associates
14:50 – 15:20: MAT Mergers: what to do right and what to avoid!
Speaker TBC
15:20 – 16:00: Networking break
Our take on Analyse School Performance (ASP) The DfE launched its new, slimmed down service called Analyse School Performance (ASP) to replace RAISEonline in April last year. ASP is intended to be a sister service to Compare School Performance (which helps you benchmark your school’s performance), and was designed to be a simpler and more straightforward service than RAISEonline.
Our take on Analyse School Performance (ASP)
The DfE launched its new, slimmed down service called Analyse School Performance (ASP) to replace RAISEonline in April last year. ASP is intended to be a sister service to Compare School Performance (which helps you benchmark your school’s performance), and was designed to be a simpler and more straightforward service than RAISEonline. In theory, this sounds great – but what’s it actually like using ASP for meaningful performance analysis?
At first glance, ASP does seem easier to use and more useful than RAISEonline. It’s not flashy – but to get a quick overview of your data, ASP works well. The charts are clearer to read than in the old RAISEonline, and some less frequently used data (like confidence intervals) have been dropped, which makes it easier to digest your data at a high level.
But what about if you want to dig deeper into your performance? Below we show you how ASP can help your Senior Leadership team get an overview to ask the right questions – but how you’ll need to use other performance analysis tools like Arbor Insight to go one level deeper and help you answer them.
Using Arbor alongside ASP
As in the old RAISEonline, ASP shows users an overview of headline and key measures for your school. The problem is, seeing your performance at such a high level doesn’t help you truly understand why your school performed as it did.
Analysing Progress 8 in ASP
For example, after seeing this chart on Attainment 8 in ASP, schools might wonder:
Analysing Progress 8 in Arbor
Services like Arbor can help you answer these questions. Our reports (like the example shown above) use trend data to help you see how your performance has changed over time, and we benchmark your school not just nationally and locally, but against similar schools and Outstanding schools too.
The DfE has also introduced scatter graphs in ASP. These graphs are helpful in that they allow schools to see individual students’ attainment on a key metric, and identify whether there are any trends with other measures. For example, the scatter graph below shows the correlation between KS2 prior attainment and KS4 Progress 8 score.
An example scatter graph in ASP
Again, whilst this graph is good at giving an overview, schools might need to look elsewhere to answer key questions this graph raises such as:
Benchmarking different groups in Arbor
In Arbor we help schools answer these questions by using plain text call outs to explain how significant a trend is. We also benchmark different groups within your school against each other, and against national and local averages to help you see your performance in a more holistic context.
Use Arbor to give you the edge in discussions with Ofsted, and to provide context to your governors
Using Arbor Insight reports, like the ones shown above, can give you an extra advantage when an inspector calls. Our reports can help you show things like:
Arbor Insight reports help you present the real story behind your data – sometimes this isn’t clear just from looking at your average headline measures for the current year. Once you understand the real picture you can have much more constructive conversations with stakeholders like Ofsted and your Governors to help you focus on your priority areas for the year ahead.
Want to find out more? Read our blog about how Arbor Insight can help your governors get to grips with data here
When you’re picking IT systems for your school or MAT, the options can be overwhelming. As every provider has a USP or ‘unique selling point’ to help them stand out, it’s easy to find different parts of competing systems more appealing. Maybe your business manager likes the features in one payment system, but your catering
When you’re picking IT systems for your school or MAT, the options can be overwhelming. As every provider has a USP or ‘unique selling point’ to help them stand out, it’s easy to find different parts of competing systems more appealing. Maybe your business manager likes the features in one payment system, but your catering team prefers the interface of another. Trying to combine them, and get the best of both worlds, is rarely a solution.
1. It saves money
This is the obvious problem with running systems in parallel. Schools who try to get their money’s worth and use every feature they’re paying for will not only become expert users in their chosen system, but will be able to cut down their unnecessary costs. For the two big software packages used to run your school, a Management Information System (MIS) and a Financial Management System (FMS), you also need to consider the cost of training. You only need one of each, and you should only pay for one of each.
2. It gives your staff back their time
In a recent survey of 11,000 NEU members, 82% of Secondary teachers reported that data collection was not streamlined in their school, and required them to enter data twice. Around 65% of both Primary and Secondary teachers described the amount of data they had to collect as unmanageable. This is indicative of the biggest problem with running disconnected or competing IT systems – they contribute heavily to staff workloads.
Your school systems should interface seamlessly to minimise data entry, using a feature like our secure, open API. This is a great way to reduce data entry between different types of system, and there are some systems which very rarely need to share data anyway, such as your MIS and FMS.
On the other hand, for systems which are designed to do the same thing, data can never be streamlined, as competing businesses preserving their intellectual property will rarely spend resources building integrations for one another. Some level of double entry will always be required.
3. Your data will be safer
Under GDPR, schools are obligated both to protect students and guardians from data breaches, and to keep their information up to date. Choosing secure systems in the first place is important for protecting sensitive information, so you should always check for an internationally recognised certification like ISO 27001 when you buy. However, data breaches don’t only come from attacks and system faults, but from human error. The more times you need to enter data, the more chances human error has to slip in.
Multiple systems, especially systems which aren’t connected through a secure API, are more likely to be inaccurate. Inaccuracy can seem annoying but harmless when it’s a small change, but when you look after hundreds or even thousands of children, little problems quickly get bigger. A wrongly recorded meal choice can mean grumbles from one student, or a severe allergic reaction from another!
By getting the most out of each of your systems, and simplifying your data collection processes, you can save both budgets and workloads from undue burden.
We’re on a mission to transform the way schools operate, and part of that involves reducing unsustainable workloads by bringing as many systems as possible into one place. If you are an Arbor MIS customer, check that your school is using every feature properly to reduce the time you spend plugging data into other systems.
Our schools love the fact that Arbor brings all of their data into one central system, reducing the number of systems they use and saving staff hours of time manually copying and pasting data from one system to another. If you’re not yet an Arbor MIS customer, you can request a free demo and a chat with your local Partnership Manager anytime through the contact form on our website, or by emailing tellmemore@arbor-education.com or calling 0208 050 1028.
This blog has been written for Arbor by Oliver Kean, Service Development Manager at Governors for Schools. One of the first things governors realise when they start is that the role involves data. A lot of data. Data on attainment, about progress, on different groups, data on pupils’ attendance, punctuality, behaviour incidents. And it’s not
This blog has been written for Arbor by Oliver Kean, Service Development Manager at Governors for Schools.
One of the first things governors realise when they start is that the role involves data. A lot of data. Data on attainment, about progress, on different groups, data on pupils’ attendance, punctuality, behaviour incidents.
And it’s not just data focused for their own school. Governors are presented with data on national, local and similar schools so they can benchmark their performance to identify areas where they might be able to do better.
They then need to understand what the data is suggesting sufficiently well to construct challenging, relevant questions that hold experienced headteachers and other members of the senior team to account, and identify where it puts the school at risk of not achieving particular performance thresholds that could lead to intervention.
It’s a challenge for all governors, but especially those who are less confident with numbers and statistics (who may nevertheless have valuable expertise elsewhere). Nowadays, everyone involved in school governance is expected to be able to use data to help deliver effective governance. However, it’s clear that not all school governors can. A recent report from Ofsted said:
The ability to understand and query performance data was a common area of weakness … Weak governing bodies rarely provided enough challenge to the headteacher’s interpretation of published and internal assessment information, absence rates and exclusion data. There are also schools at which governors are not given access to assessment information. This limits their ability to challenge leaders.
Data’s rise within the accountability system hasn’t gone unchallenged, however. In response to the accountability system’s seemingly insatiable hunger for ever more complex, in-depth, up-to-date data some teachers have begun to complain that it now represents an unmanageable aspect of their work, and one that distracts them from the core nature of teaching. The oft-repeated complaint that education is about more than just numbers and learning is about more than just stats is nevertheless worth repeating, because it’s fundamentally true. You’d be hard-pressed to find a teacher that went into the role first and foremost to deliver incremental improvements in narrow performance measures derived from assessment results.
Ofsted has begun to show signs of understanding this as it works on a new inspection framework; chief inspector Amanda Spielman recently said that schools that place too narrow an emphasis on their data systems are more likely to suffer falls in performance. But good governors have always known this. They know that understanding the health of a school is equally about the unmeasurable, the emotional and the invisible. That’s why the best governors understand and apply data to their role, but also make sure that they visit school, speak to parents, pupils and staff, look at books, displays, go for lunch, spend time in the staff room, and see the playground. Of course, this places demands on governors’ already limited time and energy – anything that frees them up to see a school, its complexities, nuances and atmosphere ‘in the round’ is to be welcomed.
Attending training on data is one way to get smarter, thus providing more time for governance other crucial activities. Training can help governors to quickly understand what data might be telling us, provide quick ways to assess its robustness and reliability, as well as show us the limits to its usefulness (and where investigation elsewhere might be more appropriate). A quick and convenient way to learn more is to use the Governors for Schools eLearning for an introduction to some of the key concepts and ways to use data.
Moreover, adopting more intuitive data reporting systems, such as that provided by Arbor Insight, goes a long way to providing governors with the information they need in a clear and digestible way, giving them clear leads as they hold leaders to account. Based on Department for Education data, they convert often confusing formats and measurements into something that is far easier to interpret and analyse. As such, it saves headteachers a huge amount of time in preparation and commentary.
While it’s clear that we aren’t about to see a wholesale abandonment of data anytime soon, data literacy for governors is increasingly going to involve thinking hard about proportionality, ease of use and accessibility. Anything that can help schools manage their data and performance analysis, such as Arbor Insight, should be welcomed enthusiastically.
Governors for Schools exists to improve educational standards so that children and young people have the chance to realise their full potential. You can visit their website here.
Reducing time spent on data and assessment is the key to reducing additional teacher workload Much has been written recently by the government and in the press about reducing teachers’ workloads, with polls suggesting that 1 in 5 teachers intend to leave their job because they feel overworked. One of Arbor’s impact goals (which we analyse each year
Reducing time spent on data and assessment is the key to reducing additional teacher workload
Much has been written recently by the government and in the press about reducing teachers’ workloads, with polls suggesting that 1 in 5 teachers intend to leave their job because they feel overworked.
One of Arbor’s impact goals (which we analyse each year for all the schools we work with) is to reduce the time teachers spend on inputting & analysing data so that they can focus on improving student outcomes! So we decided to take a look at the data to see where teachers were spending their time.
By looking at teacher diary surveys, we found that in just three years the workload of teachers has increased by an average of 12%. Put another way, this is a huge 5 days extra work per year for a primary teacher and 4 days extra work for a secondary teacher!
Digging down into the data further, we found that three-quarters of this increase in workload can be explained by an increase in the amount of time teachers are spending on planning, preparation and assessment. Given that it’s doubtful that teachers have been ramping up the time spent on planning or preparation, as this has always been a core requirement, the change most likely comes from an increase in assessment-related work driven by government, Ofsted and school policies on data and reporting.
Following this analysis, if your school can reduce the amount of time teachers spend on assessment and data, you’ll go a long way towards solving the workload problem! To do so requires reviewing how and why you collect, analyse and report on data.
6 steps to reduce teachers’ data workload
Arbor has built a simple 6 step checklist to help senior leaders reduce workload in your school:
Implementing a data workload checklist
We’ve broken down the 6 steps above into a helpful checklist for senior leaders to help implement within your school, complementing the advice given by the Teacher Workload Review Group with an actionable list of key tasks. If it seems too much to take on all at once, just start with one item at a time, and remember that every step you take could help to reduce the workload burden on staff.
Click here to download this checklist as a handy PDF.
By Loic Menzies, LKMco The school accountability system is changing fast. League table measures have been reformed dramatically and Ofsted has been grappling with how it can become a more proportionate and reliable force for good. This has led to a brand new strategy for the inspectorate and recent speeches and publications have started to set
By Loic Menzies, LKMco
The school accountability system is changing fast. League table measures have been reformed dramatically and Ofsted has been grappling with how it can become a more proportionate and reliable force for good. This has led to a brand new strategy for the inspectorate and recent speeches and publications have started to set out a new landscape which will have important implications for how schools use data to reflect, improve and prepare for inspection.
This blog talks about how you can use Arbor Insight Reports to analyse your schools’ performance and set out your plans for improvement. As Amanda Spielman, the Chief Inspector of Schools, put it this Summer: “Rather than just intensifying the focus on data, Ofsted inspections must explore what is behind the data, asking how results have been achieved”. This report should therefore act as a starting point for important conversations and reflection.
At secondary school, the shift to Progress 8 has heralded a new era in which a much wider range of subjects falls under the lens of school accountability and where the emphasis has shifted away from pupils on the C-D borderline. Meanwhile, life-after-levels and the new system of ‘scaled scores’ are now a reality in primary schools across the country. As further shifts come into place over the next few years, the pace shows no sign of slowing.
All this rapid change, and a shift in emphasis towards progress – sometimes from unreliable base lines – is leading to some unexpected and unpredictable results. It is therefore particularly important that you scrutinise data particularly carefully to be clear what it is and is not saying. Ofsted has also made it clear that attempts to predict progress scores are not worth the effort since they are impossible to know in advance. Instead, your school should be prepared to respond to queries from inspectors who will have looked at a range of information in advance including:
Details from the school website – much of which will be data-driven like:
Inspectors will also have looked at key data summaries such as: the Inspection Data Summary Report (IDSR), ‘Analyse School Performance’ (ASP), (which Arbor’s Ofsted Readiness report helps you analyse), and the Level 3 Value Added (L3VA) report. This will help determine any pupil groups that inspectors want to focus on during the inspection. Careful advance scrutiny of your data can therefore ensure you are not taken by surprise. (School Inspection Handbook, p. 15 & 23)
As Ofsted’s National Director of Education explains in relation to the new ‘short inspections’, what the inspectorate wants to understand is:
The two key questions to ask yourself are therefore:
1. What do we do well/less well?
2. What is our plan going forward?
On the other hand, Ofsted has also been keen to insist that:
“Ofsted does not require self-evaluation to be graded or provided in a specific format. Any assessment that is provided should be part of the school’s business processes and not generated solely for inspection purposes.”
Arbor Insight Reports – in particular the Ofsted Readiness Report – are intended to support you in understanding the two key questions above. It should prompt you to consider your strengths and weaknesses and help you dig beyond the headlines to question what might really be going on. This is crucial since the strength of leadership and management is largely driven by “the rigour and accuracy of self-evaluation and how well it leads to planning that secures continual improvement.” (School Inspection Handbook, p. 41)
Key in this is looking across different sources of information to triangulate and reach better evidenced conclusions. As the current Inspection Handbook points out, “No single measure or indicator should determine judgements”, and as Ofsted’s recently published strategy points out:
“While data will always be an important starting point, our inspections should look beyond published data, explore how results have been achieved and in some cases act as a counterbalance to any unintended incentives in the broader accountability system.”
The inspectorate will consider:
According to the DfE Guidance, last updated in August 2017, headline measures for primary schools are:
Key measures for secondary schools are:
Given that Progress 8 is now the headline secondary measure it is important to take into account the following key definitions:
You can find out more about the full range of measures and how they are constructed in Schools Week’s special supplement by LKMco.
Progress 8 at secondary school and relative progress at primary school have shifted the emphasis of school accountability to how pupils with similar starting points are doing in different schools as well as how each pupil is performing – whether they are starting from a high or low baseline. The national and ‘‘schools like you’ measures in this Arbor Insight Reports will help you to scrutinise this and identify your schools’ particular strengths and areas for development. Consider for example:
Throughout your analysis, be wary of making overly concrete conclusions based on small groups, for example, if you only have five black male pupils, do not use statistics based on this to make major claims about their relative performance. Look carefully at the patterns you spot and be prepared to use three-year rolling averages for example to spot longer term trends amongst larger cohorts of pupils. Where this report helps you identify an underperforming group, be careful about jumping to quick fit solutions, Ofsted itself has recently stated that:
“The existence of a gap does not always indicate that an intervention at sub-group level is the right approach. Very often, identifying and correcting institutional shortcomings (for example in curriculum, teaching or behaviour management) will improve outcomes, with disproportionate benefits for lower attaining and disadvantaged students”
It is therefore perfectly acceptable to identify an underperforming group and consider how whole school improvements might address this issue, rather than specifically targeting a new intervention at the group. You can investigate gaps further using Arbor’s set of Gap reports which analyse the performance of pupils in different groups (based on gender, SEN, prior attainment, ethnicity and disadvantage).
If your pupils appear to be doing particularly well, note this, and combine it with different sources of information, including your professional judgement to understand why, and how you can build on this. Ofsted too will look at a range of evidence so be prepared to share how you have brought a range of different sources of information together to plan for improvement. Consider for example how patterns vary across subjects and how you might spread good practice from one area to another.
Explaining and presenting this information however, need not mean putting together extensive and labour intensive pre-prepared packs. As Ofsted has explained:
There will almost invariably be areas in which your pupils are doing well, or groups that are doing particularly well so share your reflection and plans with inspectors. As Simon Eardley, Head Teacher at Orton Wistow Primary School, explains, the morning of his school’s short inspection was all about “dialogue and discussion” and an:
“Opportunity to go through our school self-evaluation evidence and tell the story about our school and to pick out the things we think we thought we were doing well but also the things we’d recognised we needed to get better on… that initial conversation steered the rest of the day.”
By providing this type of information in an easily digestible form, Arbor’s Ofsted Readiness Report helps you prepare for these discussions. Used well, it will be an invaluable part of the tapestry of evidence that you use to support your pupils, raise standards and evidence your achievements to inspectors.
Interested in finding out more about how Arbor Insight Reports can help your school ahead of your next inspection? Drop us a line at hello@arbor-education, give us a call on +44 (0) 207 043 0470 or get in touch via the contact form on our website.
LKMco are an education and youth-development ‘think-and-action tank.’ They support schools, teachers and education and youth organisations by planning, evaluating and improving the way they work. LKMco work to ensure all children and young people receive the support they need to make a fulfilling transition to adulthood by carrying out research and campaigning for action.
With the launch of the completely new, cloud-based SIMS8, it’s now an inevitability that all schools will be switching MIS, it’s just a question of whether they’ll be retraining on the new SIMS or an alternative provider. This is a good opportunity to select the system that best suits your school, LA or MAT and
With the launch of the completely new, cloud-based SIMS8, it’s now an inevitability that all schools will be switching MIS, it’s just a question of whether they’ll be retraining on the new SIMS or an alternative provider. This is a good opportunity to select the system that best suits your school, LA or MAT and provides value for money.
Ahead of your school or group switching, we thought it would be helpful to help answer some questions you might have about the cloud. After all, we’ve been doing it for years!
1 in 5 primary schools and 1 in 20 secondary schools have already switched their MIS to the cloud. This number is increasing at around 18% – we expect over 1,000 schools to switch this year alone! The vast majority of primary school MIS switchers are moving away from SIMS, whilst secondary schools are typically switching from SIMS and CMIS/Progresso.
Most schools have switched for a combination of the following factors:
Typically you can save ~30% on your total systems costs, meaning the cost of support and license fees together. Be careful to compare like-for-like with functionality to calculate this accurately. Oh, and you can get rid of your server, which is an additional cost!
Much more secure than your school server! MIS systems like Arbor’s simple, smart cloud-based MIS have passed security standards such as ISO27001, have been accredited by the DfE to hold sensitive information from ASP, are penetration tested each year and are GDPR compliant. You can read more about our security standards here. We take care of ever-changing security requirements so you can rest at peace knowing your school is compliant.
SIMS has embraced the cloud and launched SIMS8, their completely new cloud-based MIS, so it’s now a question of when not if your school will move! Here is what we know about SIMS8 at this point (accurate as of 6th March 2018) – if you use SIMS we’d urge you to ask your contact for their version as we’re biased ;). Better yet, ask to hear from the schools who use it to see what they think!
It’s now a question of when, not if, you’ll be moving to the cloud. The question is simply which provider you go with – whoever it is, you should ensure they provide value for money and fit your ethos as a school. If you’re with SIMS or CMIS, compare them to 2 or 3 other providers to see who you like the best and make a choice by inviting them to pop in. You’ll be with them for a few years at least, so it’s worth making a considered choice, and it’s as much about the people/service as the product. Oh, and if you’re a MAT, LA or group of schools then you will likely have to conduct a slightly more formal process via a tender as a cloud product is a brand new product and service, so can’t be grandfathered in under the same terms.
Good question! If you decide to stick with SIMS across your trust, you won’t be able to get the full benefits of a cloud-based MIS for your central team & schools until 2019 (at the earliest) as SIMS Secondary isn’t ready yet. It’s worth thinking about whether you’re willing to wait this long, particularly as it means you’ll need to maintain multiple different systems across your trust until then (which is costly, time-consuming, and less efficient than having standardised systems). It’s also whether checking whether the MIS provider you go with lets you manage data, workflows and reporting for all the schools across your MAT from just one system – take a look at our MAT MIS as an example of this.
We know that switching MIS can be a daunting idea, but it doesn’t need to be. Schools & MATs who are thinking of switching MIS often ask us what moving to Arbor involves, so we’ve written this short blog to show how easy it is. You can do it in 5 simple steps! Step 1:
We know that switching MIS can be a daunting idea, but it doesn’t need to be. Schools & MATs who are thinking of switching MIS often ask us what moving to Arbor involves, so we’ve written this short blog to show how easy it is. You can do it in 5 simple steps!
Step 1: Work out whether Arbor is the right fit for your school or MAT
To help you do this, we’ll arrange a meeting with one of our local Partnership Managers. Our Partnership Team meets schools & MATs to talk through how you use data across your school, understand the requirements you have for your new MIS, and show you how Arbor could help by demonstrating the system and introducing you to local schools who use it. If you like us, your Partnership Manager will help you identify the right package for your school and share a contract for you to sign.
You can request a free demo and a chat with your local Partnership Manager anytime through the contact form on our website, or by emailing tellmemore@arbor-education.com or calling 0208 050 1028.
Step 2: Create your personal implementation plan
Once you’ve signed your contract, you’ll be assigned your own Customer Success Manager who will schedule a kick-off call with you to create an implementation plan that’s tailored to your school or MAT. During this call, you’ll talk about what your main objectives are for your new MIS and how we can help you achieve them.
Step 3: Migrate your data
Following your kick-off call, we’ll help you cleanse and migrate your data to Arbor before you start your training. This is to make sure that your data is as clean and accurate as possible before inputting it into Arbor – after all, the data in Arbor is only as good as the data we can import! Once that’s done, we’ve got lots of free resources to help make sure you hit the ground running, including unlimited free online training and a series of videos to show you how the system works. You can also choose to purchase in-person training packages that we’ll deliver for you throughout the year.
Step 4: Get to know your new MIS
Once you’ve launched, we’ll help walk you through the basic functions of Arbor and get the system running smoothly throughout your school. We’ll make sure all your staff are sufficiently trained for day-to-day use of the system, before introducing you to some of Arbor’s more powerful features.
Step 5: Make sure Arbor is a success at your school
Once you’re all set up, we have a dedicated Customer Support Team who are there to support you every day of the week from 8am-5pm by phone or email. We also provide free online guides and training sessions, just in case you want to top up your knowledge! Once you’ve completed your training, your Customer Success Manager will hand you over to your Account Manager. You’ll have termly check-ins so we can see how you’re getting on, and after 12 months you can book an Arbor Health Check to review your first year with us to see what impact Arbor has had on your school’s performance.
It’s as simple as that! Once you decide to make the move to Arbor, we’re here to ensure you get all the support you need so you can immediately start getting the most out of your system. Don’t take our word for it though – see what our schools & MATs have said about moving to Arbor recently:
Stephanie Bass, Business Administration Manager at Bridge Schools Trust
Ruth Davies, IT Manager, St James’ CofE Primary School
Questions you should ask your MIS about GDPR As you’ve no-doubt seen from the relentless marketing by third-parties – GDPR came into force in schools in May 2018! The below is our take on the questions you should ask your suppliers, including your MIS to ensure you’re GDPR ready. Just copy and paste! Why should
Questions you should ask your MIS about GDPR
As you’ve no-doubt seen from the relentless marketing by third-parties – GDPR came into force in schools in May 2018! The below is our take on the questions you should ask your suppliers, including your MIS to ensure you’re GDPR ready. Just copy and paste!
Why should schools & MATs care about GDPR?
GDPR introduced significant new compliance obligations for schools and new requirements for the processing of children’s data, notably increased governance requirements and much higher fines if schools & MATs fail to comply (upto the greater of €20m or 4% turnover). Ensuring compliance is unfortunately a good deal of work, but you can lean on your systems providers to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Questions to ask your MIS
Your MIS is the key source of student and staff information you have in your school, including most of what GDPR would constitute ‘personal data.’ It’s important when preparing for GDPR that you ensure that your MIS is compliant, then you can switch attention to other suppliers and systems that feed off the data in your MIS.
Does your MIS have any current data protection and cyber qualifications (e.g. ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus)
Increased risk, especially for MATs who are data controllers for multiple schools
Is your MIS liable for any act or omission by these sub-vendors?
If you as a MAT pool your data centrally in a dashboard or central schoolview, does that meet GDPR requirements around permissioning and data pooling?
Does your MAT central data meet GDPR requirements ensuring that data is permissioned and each school’s sensitive data is kept separate?
What should your schools be doing now?
There’s a lot of scaremongering by third parties, but Iain Bradley (Head of Data Modernisation) at the DfE has written what I think is a very useful blog that discusses the steps schools should be taking now.
The above steps are often best captured in a data mapping exercise which we’ve done at Arbor, and which Iain from the DfE has done at the primary school where he’s a governor. A copy of the picture is below.
How Arbor can help
Arbor exceeds current data security recommendations. We’re ISO 27001 compliant (the standard in data protection certification), on the government’s G-Cloud framework and accredited to hold sensitive data. We also stress test our processes and procedures by getting tested by third parties and holding cyber qualifications.
We’ve put a presentation together that sums up these points which you can read by clicking here. All in all, GDPR is something that schools should consider seriously, but you should lean on your providers to help alleviate the burden.
Chris recently wrote a blog for us about the 6 phases of growth that MATs go through, and the crises that can follow each phase, as well as how MATs can use an ‘operating model approach’ to ensure that they’re laser-focused on delivering their vision. His latest blog for us looks at the four common tensions faced by MATs when centralising operations, and how to avoid them.
As I approach 25 years in the education sector I can’t remember a more demanding environment for reducing costs and increasing accountability. Whilst we all continue to make the case to government for addressing the many challenges this raises, it’s incumbent on education leaders to manage the resources they have wisely, for the benefit of students.
That’s why Academies that come together into Multi Academy Trusts often do so in pursuit of greater efficiency and effectiveness. Many MATs find that Finance and HR are the easiest services to centralise, followed by Estates and IT. On the education side of things, it is common to see school improvement, Family Support, and Special Needs Support Services benefit from this approach. This all sounds straightforward, but there are four common tensions to be aware of. In this blog I explain what these are, and how to avoid them.
Tension 1: “To the person with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail!” Before you fix on one approach to structuring your central teams, there are five choices to consider:
Tension 2: Balancing ‘build capacity in advance of need’ with keeping overheads low Case studies of MATs who have grown sustainably point to forward planning, with capacity to provide effective support to new Academies. However, I have also come across MATs who created new central roles in anticipation of growth that didn’t happen, due for example, to delays in approval from the DfE, and were left holding an expensive baby. To address this, there are two principles you can apply: (i) The first is ‘often recruiting; occasionally hiring’. You can be scouting for talent before you are in a position to commit, so when you do need to hire you aren’t starting from scratch. (ii) Secondly, build in agility – can you create additional capacity through partnerships or buying in services, until you know you are ready to make a permanent hire?
Tension 3: “To SLA or not to SLA… that is the question” As you move from a service which was managed and received by the same leader, i.e. an Academy Principal, to one which is managed by, say, the Director of Finance, there is a risk of getting caught up in a nightmare of “Service Level Agreements” and supplier/customer relationships. Most MATs take the sensible view that, for an internal shared service, the starting point is colleagues working together to the same end, with defined roles and responsibilities, but without SLAs. On the other hand, if you have decided to purchase from an external Shared Service Centre, or to share a service between MATs, you are going to need more formality, and this usually takes the form of SLAs and a Service Catalogue. This sets out what is delivered, to what standards, who it’s delivered to, and any delegation/escalation arrangements. Whether its internal or external, aim to delegate as much as you can to the front line (with appropriate Schemes of Delegation) so that problems can be solved quickly and easily with minimal need for additional layers of decision making.
Tension 4: 1% Inspiration, 99% perspiration Thomas Edison’s famous quote has some relevance here. Strategy, design and forward planning can be energising, and tend to catch the attention of senior leaders. Important though this is, the really difficult stuff is implementation. Make sure the MAT leadership team is actively involved in leading the change, and that there is Board level sponsorship. You’ll also need a ‘Change Project Team’ to handle planning, resolving difficult problems through negotiation, ensuring that the services to be provided are clear, that they deliver what the users actually need, and that everyone is supported through these changes. You’ll need to think clearly in advance about HR, legal and financial implications of making the change, especially in terms of job roles.
That’s quite a few tensions, and so it’s worth reminding ourselves why it’s important to consider changing the roles of the central team as a MAT grows. In my experience, there are 4 major benefits to be had:
All of this saves time and money to reinvest in improving learning outcomes, and gives the Board a clearer view of what’s going on, therefore reducing risk. This has to be right in today’s challenging times.
Chris Kirk is Director of CJK Associates, an education consultancy. For more information about MAT central teams, operating models and strategy, take a look at his website here.
Five years have passed since the 2013 review of the National Curriculum first gave schools the chance to Assess Without Levels (AWOL).
In this blog, I’ll talk about the initial interpretations of these reforms, the challenges that they created for schools and just how this opportunity can be used to meet the needs of learners more effectively. With over 13 years of teaching under my belt, this blog is informed by my own personal experience, and I’d welcome any stories that you may have about ‘going AWOL’ with assessments in the last few years!
Into the unknown
In 2013 I was appointed Deputy Head of a special school for children with Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs. Assessment reforms had just been announced, so it was a tricky time to venture into leadership as I had to really challenge my own position on assessments (at the same time as getting to grips with being a Senior Leader). I became involved in local focus groups, during which we would collectively try to make sense of what the changes meant for our schools (having been given very little official guidance on the matter!). We spent a lot of time going over our options before ultimately reverting back to a ‘safety in numbers’ approach, deciding to assess using statistically driven systems. In many ways, this wasn’t so different from levels…!
On reflection, this sudden autonomy to assess any way we liked was, whilst being a step in the right direction, perhaps too big a change for many teachers. The majority of qualified teachers practicing in England who were tasked with carrying out AWOL reforms came into the profession after 1989 (levels were introduced at the same time as the National Curriculum to schools in England & Wales under the Education Reform Act 1988). Therefore, most people involved in school level decision making, myself included, had very little experience of assessing in a way that wasn’t primarily focussed on national benchmarking and age-related expectations.
1. Why do we assess? For the school or for the child? The research driving the 2013 assessment reforms discovered that in higher performing jurisdictions around the world, children master fewer concepts but in greater depth. Educators make sure key concepts are mastered before moving students on, rather than pushing them all through curriculum content at a uniform pace. These core AWOL principles have received a wide consensus of support, but haven’t been easily implemented in an educational system where a culture of performance comparison is arguably the primary driver for most decision making.
Knowing that your results are constantly being compared against the school down the road, and that you’ll need to be ready to make a case for your school on an accountability framework at the drop of a hat does create a need for schools to seek external assurances that what they are doing is right. A whole marketplace of curriculum tracking software has therefore opened up to help these schools get this. Numerous standardised assessment frameworks are available to give schools an idea of how their internal tracking fares against other schools also using the system. Whilst this is helpful to schools for the purposes of self-evaluation against national criteria, it’s worth noting that the concepts assessed using these methods are established by externally standardised practice only and are not informed by the contextual needs of the students in the school.
In the pressure cooker environment of school leadership where you are constantly balancing operational demands with strategic decisions, it is completely understandable that opting for standardised approaches is more manageable, and will help you to know if you’re “Good” or not. There is certainly a place for this kind of assessment. However, to improve on this, the context of your learners should also play a large part in determining what else you measure as being appropriate progress for them. This is especially the case for SEN pupils, and in my experience SEMH pupils, where provisioning for individual need is hard work – but undeniably more meaningful and rewarding!
2. The opportunities for AFL in the SEN context Before AWOL, my experience of assessment for SEMH students was that of measuring a specific range of knowledge and skill variables against a national framework and periodically confirming that they were underperforming. I would feed back to them about the ways in which they could improve in these areas but didn’t stop to question the appropriateness of the process itself or the prioritisation of content for them as individuals.
3. When it came to looking at their progress in the purely academic context, they were indeed not making very much. By narrowly focussing on just the academic elements of learning, I was not giving them enough opportunity to build up the cultural capital they would need in order to overcome their difficulties and succeed. It was the learning dispositions such as emotional literacy, self-regulation and conflict resolution that were influencing their lives and decision-making abilities the most, and were also the root cause of academic underperformance in the first place. To be true to the principles of AFL, I needed to incorporate collaborative assessment where pupils became more aware of these metacognitive aspects of learning as well as subject related knowledge and skills.
Aspects of learning such as self-confidence, self-awareness, managing feelings and making relationships receive a lot of attention in the EYFS framework used in early years provision but are broadly left behind in favour of more academic curricula when students reach school age. For many students with SEMH though, these still need to remain at the forefront of their schooling as pushing for academic success can only really be achieved when building from the right social and emotional starting point.
Click here to read the next instalment of my blog, which goes on to talk about how schools can opt for flexible assessments without having to deal with the administrative burden
Data and Insight | MAT Operations | School Operations
Why bother centralising your data? Schools, Trusts and LAs increasingly ask us how they can centralise their data, but they sometimes don’t know where to start and what their broad options are. Most share the common need of wanting to bring their data together to gain deeper, faster insight into their staff and students, save
Schools, Trusts and LAs increasingly ask us how they can centralise their data, but they sometimes don’t know where to start and what their broad options are. Most share the common need of wanting to bring their data together to gain deeper, faster insight into their staff and students, save teachers time endlessly copying and pasting data from multiple systems (and reduce mistakes whilst doing so), whilst saving money by reducing the number of systems they have in the school.
From our work with schools, MATs, LAs and governments we’ve seen a lot of different ways of centralising data, but they generally fall into 3 categories.
When small, it’s best to keep things simple. Whilst not ideal, excel is the quickest, cheapest and easiest tool to get to do your heavy lifting. Most schools will organise data drops at set times in the year, using permissioned worksheets and data validation to minimise errors, and producing graphs and reports that can act as simple dashboards. New versions of excel can even link live to your systems (we do this in Arbor) so that can be pulled automatically from your MIS, meaning no more data drops and data errors! That said, excel comes with hidden costs, it can involve staff double entering data, takes time to fill in, is prone to errors, and doesn’t scale as your school or MAT grows (in fact it gets harder to administer as you grow).
Once a Trust grows to about 5 schools (depending on the complexity of the Trust) the person in charge of collecting and analysing all of the data can often become overwhelmed by the manual process, and as we’ve written about before, this is the time most Trusts look at standardising some core systems to start to automate the process of data collection. It’s worth noting that this step is typically beneficial for all school types; the key is not to leave it too late, as you then end up unpicking all of the manual process within each school.
Once the core systems have been standardised and rationalised into as few systems as practical (e.g. finance, assessment, MIS), then the school, Trust or LA can integrate these systems, ensuring data is only entered once, and use the tools’ internal ability to aggregate their core data and reports. The disadvantage of this approach is the upfront setup time and cost, however if chosen sensibly, these system should be able to payback this in time/money savings within a year or two, lowering overhead, improving reporting capability, allowing the Trust to centralise workflows and communication and ultimately enabling the group to scale.
Without a degree of standardisation in your core systems and data, as described above, achieving an analytics layer can take a lot of time and patience. Custom field names, non-standardisation across schools of assessment, and people simply choosing to record things in different ways at different times lead to increasing complexity. Many systems (like Arbor) integrate with analytics layers such as Microsoft’s PowerBI (which many Trusts are using) out of the box, so once you’ve standardised your MIS, you can spin up an analytics layer in little to no time. This allows you to create custom graphs and charts with the reassurance that the underlying data is accurate – else bad data can lead to bad decisions!
1. Integrate live with Excel/Google: Every table and report in Arbor can be live linked to Excel or Google sheets [slide 18], meaning no more data drops. Schools and Trusts can collect data instantly from several schools, and generate their own simple dashboards, combining MIS, national, HR and external data to create a holistic view of performance
2. Standardising systems: we’ve talked about what systems to standardise and when before. Once standardised, Arbor’s Group dashboards and reports instantly aggregate student and staff data across schools, allowing MATs and LAs the ability to centralise data and take action by logging into systems remotely and performing workflows (e.g. attendance follow-ups)
3. Analytics layer: Arbor integrates with PowerBI out of the box via the excel integration, allowing groups to build their own simple Analytics layers. Our free and open API can also be used for deeper integration with Business Intelligence tools.
This blog is a transcript of the second half of the presentation given by Sarah Pittam at our MAT conference. Drawing on her experience in both top-tier consulting and the education sector, Sarah spoke about MAT governance structures and how to make sure your model works at scale. In this part of her presentation, she
This blog is a transcript of the second half of the presentation given by Sarah Pittam at our MAT conference. Drawing on her experience in both top-tier consulting and the education sector, Sarah spoke about MAT governance structures and how to make sure your model works at scale. In this part of her presentation, she goes on to discuss schemes of delegation, the importance of board papers, and how to make sure LGBs have a meaningful role. Read what she had to say below:
When thinking about your scheme of delegation, you must make sure that:
How headteachers feel about the loss of autonomy is something that hampers Trust growth all the time. They don’t feel comfortable handing over their autonomy to someone who could potentially undermine the potential of their school, the chances of their children, their school’s next Ofsted judgement, and frankly, their career
Don’t disempower your LGBs
When things start going well, it’s tempting to want to centralise the power at the center of the MAT. That is a big mistake: if you become too centralised and have all the decision-making power concentrated within the Trust board, you will disempower your Local Governing Bodies and they will feel marginalised. As a result, you’ll lose the best people on your LGB when they spot that all action is happening at the trust board.
You need good people at the LGB level to get into the detail of the academic performance, to codify that information, hold the executive to account on standards and on outcomes at the local level. Try to find a happy medium. Generally speaking, I’ve found that the three big things LGBs feel strongly that they should be involved in are:
If you can find a way for LGBs to have a meaningful role in the three elements above, give them a reason for being & make them feel empowered, you’ll find it easier to recruit quality people at the LGB level.
If you are a brilliant board, you should be able to answer these questions comprehensively:
Five final points to leave you with:
To conclude, I’ve rounded up the 5 most important points that you should take away from what I’ve talked about today.
1. Firstly, you must define and drive the strategic direction of the Trust and hold the executive to account. These are the most important objectives of the board
2. Give plenty of consideration to your Scheme of Delegation
3. Don’t allow the board of your growing Trust to be dominated by legacy membership. This can be achieved by having a backbone (by that I mean having the difficult conversations early!)
4. Diversity on your board should be about diversity of thought, analysis & professional experience
5. Finally, be ambitious in terms of calibre of people on your board, even if yours is a smaller trust. Look for senior level experience in medium to large organisations
The pace of change is increasing The pace of change in education is increasing fast, with new structures, policies, funding formulae and technologies announced seemingly every month. This is particularly hard to cope with in schools who often have highly embedded, overlapping and complex processes which have been in place for years and never questioned.
The pace of change is increasing
The pace of change in education is increasing fast, with new structures, policies, funding formulae and technologies announced seemingly every month. This is particularly hard to cope with in schools who often have highly embedded, overlapping and complex processes which have been in place for years and never questioned. Top that off with a highly time-pressured environment and it makes change hard. “If you want to make enemies, try to change something,” as the saying goes.
Change is tough but if done right can be transformational
However change is a reality that has to be faced if you want to improve, and rather than ignore it and try to batten down the hatches, Senior Leaders should take the time to learn about how to manage it. If change is well managed, and staggered so as not to overwhelm staff, it can improve outcomes for all stakeholders.
We thought we’d publish our guide for how to manage change (which we use for MIS implementation) so that Senior and Middle Leaders can borrow and adapt it for use inside your school or institution. It’s not meant to be a proscriptive series of steps to be followed, but rather a general guide to help you think through the process and tailor to your own school.
1. Establish a need for change (your “burning platform”) Identify a compelling need for change with a sense of urgency to maintain momentum throughout the project. If you don’t make the need for change compelling or urgent enough, people won’t see the point.
2. Build up champions to drive through change Identify champions who have the capability, capacity and positive attitude to help drive through change. It may start with you (it often does!), but it always helps to roll out within a school, department or team you know will have the best chance of success. Remember you can’t do everything alone!
3. Create a compelling vision outlining benefits for all To get buy in you’ll need a compelling vision. Articulate what success looks like and the benefits this will have for each stakeholder (how much time they’ll get back, how their job will be easier etc). Ideally identify some metrics of measuring success (e.g. number of users logged in, amount of time/money saved, staff satisfaction).
4. Communicate the vision to stakeholders to get buy-in Communicate the vision publicly to get buy in from your staff for the change and to help support the champions you identified. You’ll never win everyone over, that’s fine, but you’ve at least called out the issue and given it support. Change comes from the top, so you need to be seen to champion it.
5. Empower others to act on the vision All too often we see projects fail in schools as change is not staggered so it combines with the pressures of daily school life to overwhelm staff. Instead try to phase in change, identify the right time of year for it, and try to get others to be seen to be successful. Staff will then feel empowered, not threatened or overwhelmed.
6. Create and celebrate short-term wins Try to create quick, meaningful wins to demonstrate success and encourage buy-in. These should be publicised as success stories to galvanise support and overcome inertia. Keep a steady drip of success stories coming to maintain momentum and isolate the naysayers.
7. Measure success and embed change Demonstrate success further by quantifying it against the success criteria you identified earlier, and publicising results. Use this credibility to change other more entrenched systems and processes.
8. Don’t let up! Most change initiatives fail by assuming the job is done before change has taken root. Culture is a strong force that takes time to realign. To create and sustain change will require continued demonstration of success and ongoing dialogue with staff.
Evidence for Change Management Working Arbor has gone through our Change Management process with our Group and Multi-Academy Trust clients. Our Impact Metrics and Net Promoter Scores show consistently high scores given by schools over time, showing that the Change Management Approach and system has helped to create a consistently positive impact, as shown below. That’s one way we measure success, but I’d be keen to hear how you measure yours!
Sample size for each survey >=300
*positively indicates users respond “sometimes, often or frequently”
In this presentation about scaling your data & Trust which I emailed to every MAT CEO last term, I highlighted how central teams often struggle to decide on the right balance between a MAT’s need for central alignment and a school’s desire for autonomy. The argument typically goes that alignment makes MAT operations more streamlined, efficient, auditable
In this presentation about scaling your data & Trust which I emailed to every MAT CEO last term, I highlighted how central teams often struggle to decide on the right balance between a MAT’s need for central alignment and a school’s desire for autonomy. The argument typically goes that alignment makes MAT operations more streamlined, efficient, auditable and cost-effective but at the expense of a school’s individual autonomy, which has often been established over many years.
Some groups talk about ‘earned autonomy’ as a compromise, but this still assumes that a school needs to tow the MAT line until they can prove they ‘deserve’ autonomy. And once schools do ‘earn’ their autonomy under this model, they’ll most likely still be submitting data and using processes that the MAT have designed and embedded in the school.
MAT Alignment vs. School Autonomy
I’d like to challenge the notion that MAT alignment and school autonomy are oppositional. In fact, alignment can enable autonomy if you have accountability and transparency in place.
Alignment Can Enable Autonomy, if there’s Transparency & Accountability
The picture above shows how MAT alignment can enable autonomy, allowing for sustainable growth beyond 5+ schools. The Assistant MAT in the top right example sets clear performance goals, and because it has built the right infrastructure (including standardised systems, instant access to data and auditable processes) it doesn’t mind how the schools go about achieving those goals. If there’s an issue, the MAT will be instantly alerted and can step in to assist the school in fixing, or sit back and monitor how the situation is dealt with. Either way, the schools get autonomy from day 1, and don’t have to earn it, whilst the MAT has the benefit of alignment.
There are other examples shown where alignment does not enable authority. This is typically a conscious decision by the MAT. For example, more authoritative MATs (such as in the top left of the diagram) may choose to have very high degrees of standardisation in terms of systems and processes, leading to low school autonomy. This isn’t necessarily bad – for example, in turnaround schools there may be processes and systems that need complete overhaul.
Standardise systems and give autonomy to people to get the best of both worlds
The key is for MATs and schools to decide on what they want to align or standardise, and what they want to devolve autonomy to schools on. This will depend on your culture, but at Arbor we tend to be of the mind that to create a sustainable infrastructure you should standardise systems to allow for a degree of uniformity and give autonomy to people in how they use those systems. That way you get the best of both worlds. More on that in the next post…
Chris Kirk, Ex-Partner for Education at PWC and formerly GEMS/DfE, has written a blog for us which looks at how using an ‘operating model approach’ can help MATs ensure they’re laser-focused on delivering their vision — The DfE’s 2016 Good Practice guide for MATs remains a useful document 18 months on. It was one of the first
Chris Kirk, Ex-Partner for Education at PWC and formerly GEMS/DfE, has written a blog for us which looks at how using an ‘operating model approach’ can help MATs ensure they’re laser-focused on delivering their vision
— The DfE’s 2016 Good Practice guide for MATs remains a useful document 18 months on. It was one of the first times when MATs were urged to consider their ‘operating model’ – advice which was also picked up recently in ASL’s study, ‘Building Trusts’. However, MAT CEOs often ask me what is really meant by the term. In this blog I offer my take on what one is, why you need it, and how to review and develop it. An operating model is a single overview of what your MAT does, and how it does it. The different elements, such as your approach to school improvement, are pieces of the jigsaw, and the operating model gives you the picture on the front of the box. In this way, it makes the vital link between your vision, mission and strategy, and the details of individual roles, policies and activities. It also provides a connection from support services (such as HR or finance) to core educational services. By getting your operating model right, you make sure you spend your time and money on what really matters, aiming always towards better impact in the classroom. An operating model approach can be applied to all of your capabilities, including: • Educational capabilities – such as the capability to improve schools, deliver quality in the classroom, provide an inclusive education, to engage communities, or to provide students with employability skills and careers guidance • Supporting or ‘back office’ capabilities – such as the capability to manage finances, to support your workforce, to provide technology, to manage your estates or to engage with your communities. I use the word ‘capabilities’ rather than ‘functions’. This is because a function implies decisions have been made about reporting lines, but a capability can exist across different parts of the MAT. For example, the capability to improve schools is likely to be a mix of the quality of leadership, information about performance and how it is analysed for improvement, as well as – potentially – specific teams dedicated solely to school improvement. Similarly, financial capability may not just be in a central finance team, it may also exist in schools. A capability lets you think about the whole picture, not just one team. If you want to review and improve your operating model, I recommend the following steps:
1. Before you begin, make sure you are really clear about your strategy and growth plans, as this determines your operating model needs. 2. Review and understand your ‘current state’, see what needs to change. A useful exercise is to look at each capability you require and ask: – What is this capability aiming to achieve? – Where does it sit? – What people, systems and processes do we need in order to deliver it? – How is it managed and governed? – How do we know if it’s working well? If you do this in an open and questioning way, you should be able to identify a number of issues for improvement. You may find particular issues with one capability; equally you may find some recurring themes, for example that you don’t have the right systems in place across several capabilities, or that your organisational structure is not right. 3. Use a workshop approach to create your ‘Design principles’. This is a good chance to agree what really matters, and resolves differences of view, e.g about standardization vs autonomy, the balance between efficiency and flexibility, the relative priorities for improvement, what your ‘spans of control’ should be, and what the ideal time distances should be between schools, hubs/ clusters and head office, what your pace and approach to growth will be 4. Identify your ‘Future state’ options, and any major costs of getting there, or of operating it (e.g. if you are centralising finance, what new roles are needed; what happens to current school roles; is a new Finance system required?) 5. Create a ‘Road Map’ for the change – what needs to be done first, what can follow later. How will you support Principles and back office services as they make the change, and how do you make sure your education and other services don’t suffer while it happens? 6. Use strong change management approaches, as engagement will be the most important factor in getting things right. Remember that the hardest part is actually implementing it! People often ask me, how long should I expect such a review to take, and what might it cost. For a small MAT of 2-5 schools (who are growing more fluidly) you should think in terms of weeks not months for a review; for a system leader MAT a full review might take 3-6 months. Implementation will of course depend greatly on what is changing, as there could be HR, procurement and contract variations to consider. A small MAT may be able to undertake this work internally; a larger one may want some external support from a suitable consultancy and potentially other professionals (e.g. legal, HR). However, I have heard of MATs spending hundreds of thousands just to consider their back office, and personally I think this is a scandalous waste of taxpayer money – I believe any external consulting costs should be a fraction of this! If you can review and amend your operating model you should reap a number of rewards, in terms of efficiency, clarity of responsibility, time for innovation and improvement, and the ability to adapt to future change. Most importantly you can achieve the benefits of collaboration without an ever-increasing cost in terms of staff time. Teacher recruitment and retention is a vital issue, and the right MAT operating model can help it to support excellent teaching whilst reducing unnecessary workload.
In April 2018, our conference on ‘Scaling Sustainably: Centralisation vs. School Autonomy’ in London bought together CEOs and Senior Leaders from over 70 MATs, as well as eight speakers with a mix of business and education backgrounds. John Leonard, independent consultant and tender expert spoke about the key things MATs should consider in order to
In April 2018, our conference on ‘Scaling Sustainably: Centralisation vs. School Autonomy’ in London bought together CEOs and Senior Leaders from over 70 MATs, as well as eight speakers with a mix of business and education backgrounds. John Leonard, independent consultant and tender expert spoke about the key things MATs should consider in order to get the most out of the procurement process, including knowing exactly what it is that you want to get from your new system before you set out to procure. Below we’ve transcribed the first part of John’s presentation!
In this blog, I’m going to show you why you should be streamlining your procurement to benefit from the massive economies of scale it can bring. A common theme in education is the 5 ’W’s (Who, What, When, Where, and Why) – and in procurement this is no different – but with one addition – how?
Consider the following questions as a “toolkit” for gathering all the information you need to run an effective procurement exercise. If you spend the time understanding your requirements and what your expected outcomes are, procurement is substantially easier.
Procurement can be complex, but working through the questions and suggestions made here will help you be the best prepared you can be for effective procurement that gets you what you want, at a price you’re happy with, from a supplier who will work with you and understands you.
Let’s get started.
1. Why procure?
There are countless reasons why, but the most pressing one is to achieve economies of scale, while still getting the technology or platform that you want. By the way, your wants are defined as an objective exercise which we’ll cover in a moment.
Let’s start with an example. Assume you have 15 academies in your trust, and across these academies you have three groups of five – with each group using a different system or technology platform.
Each group has its own costs:
And also consider the cost to you as a Trust to get consistent data from three platforms – whether that is specific reporting information, or simply an assessment of its effectiveness.
Staff moving between academies have to know more than one system, integration between systems either doesn’t work at all or requires another overhead – it can be very very expensive to manage this.
That’s not to say that you have to force each academy to accept a standard, cookie cutter system. You can achieve a balance between low cost/standard systems and high cost/customized systems – and that is achieved through effective engagement with your staff and potential suppliers (see ’Who’ for more detail on that).
Another “why” is the simple legalities of purchasing – in order to demonstrate fairness, every purchase that’s greater than £181,302 ex VAT (click here for the current threshold) over the lifetime of the product HAS to follow procurement guidelines as set out in the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. You may have your own procurement guidelines for procurements below that threshold – and will certainly be bound by the requirements for three quotes as a minimum – but above the threshold, EU procurement legislation as embodied in the Public Contracts Regulations takes effect.
2. What (do I want to procure)?
The exercise you will conduct in engaging your academies goes a long way to defining what it is that you want, and allowing you to get a clear picture of your expectations.
You’ll make the process even easier by defining your requirement in terms of outcomes:
This is where it’s also important to consider the balance between simple/cheap and complex/expensive – neither extreme is advisable, but the right balance depends on the system you’re purchasing and the requirements you set as a Trust. Outcomes-based criteria ensure that you capture requirements from a more holistic perspective – and also ensures that you don’t get caught out later with a system that’s not fit for purpose.
While you can refine a specification to get the closest match to your requirements, if it doesn’t perform the way you want it to, then you’re in trouble. If you define the specification in terms of your outcomes, it makes subsequent management of the platform (and your suppliers) far easier.
Consider the following as a sample:
Knowing what your expectations are here will enable you to build them into a the scoring criteria for the tender itself as a wholly objective series of scores – the Service Level Agreement (SLA) or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that allow you to measure the performance of your system and the supplier you’ve engaged.
Procuring a platform on this basis that subsequently doesn’t perform also gives you far better methods of redress later on.
3. Who needs to be involved in the procurement process?
Well, first consider who can benefit from the system you’re planning to procure. If it’s going to have a wide impact on a large number of stakeholders, then centralising the procurement exercise and making it applicable to all your academies can lower the overall cost, greatly simplify the process, make contract management easier, and get you far better contractual terms. Suppliers will obviously be more attracted to larger procurement exercises too!
You also need to consider who can participate in helping you define your specification. Careful engagement across your academies will make life a lot easier – as the definition of your specification and requirements needs input from your vocal champions – the ones who point out the good and the bad – and your quiet champions too – the ones who just get on and use the system. Being clear about what works for you at present and equally, what doesn’t, helps you get the most out of a procurement exercise – the clearer you can be about your requirements, the better off you’ll be.
If you’re not sure what you need, or need opinion from potential suppliers, this is the time to invite them in for market engagement. You’re perfectly entitled to invite a range of suppliers in to discuss your requirements; good suppliers will also know their market well enough that they will come up with suggestions you may not have thought of.
Once you’ve met a fair representation of suppliers, then it’s time to go back to your internal team, and refine the specification again, so you all agree on what is needed. (N.B. Aa fair number of suppliers is a representative sample of providers for the type of solution providers you’re looking for – one is not a fair number! I’d recommend you see at least three, and more if you can).
I can’t say this enough times – the more collaboration you engage in, the clearer your expectations will be, the specification will be easily understood by potential suppliers, and the procurement exercise will get you the system you want at a price you want to pay.
You can read the second part of John’s presentation here
For a while now, the government has been debating the best way to help MATs grow. On the one hand, Sir David Carter (the National Schools Commissioner) thinks 1,000 new multi-academy trusts will be needed by 2020, comprised of both new MATs forming and many smaller MATs expanding into double figures. On the other hand,
For a while now, the government has been debating the best way to help MATs grow. On the one hand, Sir David Carter (the National Schools Commissioner) thinks 1,000 new multi-academy trusts will be needed by 2020, comprised of both new MATs forming and many smaller MATs expanding into double figures. On the other hand, there are concerns that if MATs grow too quickly it can become harder for them to maintain consistent quality across not only school performance, but financial management, operations, and team processes (especially when they are spread over large regional areas).
This leaves MATs in a tricky place, with some being pressured to grow and take on more schools, whilst others are scaling back to focus on quality of provision. There have been various reports by the Department for Education (such as this one looking at the expansion & performance of MATs), and external bodies like the Education Policy Institute (such as this one on the economic benefits of growing a MAT) to help provide guidance, as well as DfE initiatives like the “Expanding your academy trust” toolkit and the new MAT health checks programme which is being piloted as a method to help MATs achieve “sustainable growth.”
Whilst the debate continues, one of the best ways for MATs to seek guidance remains sharing best practice, advice & guidance with other MAT CEOs and Senior Leaders. With this in mind, we are launching the first in a new series of free MAT conferences this week: “Scaling your MAT Sustainably: Centralisation vs. School Autonomy.”
Together with our partner PS Financials, we’re bringing together education, business and industry leaders to share their own stories about how they’ve scaled their strategy, operations, central team processes, systems, reporting & governance. Our aim is for everyone attending to leave with a series of relevant, practical and implementable steps to take back to their MAT to help them grow sustainably.
Speakers include leaders from the Elliot Foundation, United Learning, and the Mulberry Schools Trust, and there will be plenty of opportunities to network and meet like-minded MATs during the day too.
Click here to sign up for your free ticket: https://scaling-your-MAT.eventbrite.com
Can’t make it? Not to worry! We’ll be sharing recordings of the talks as well as presentations from the speakers on our blog after the conference, so check back here soon. You can also email us at tellmemore@arbor-education.com to let us know if you’d like to attend similar events in future.
Hope to see you there!
Agenda
10.00-10.20: Introduction: How scaling strategies vary by degree of MAT centralisation vs school autonomy
James Weatherill (CEO at Arbor Education)
James will illustrate how scaling strategies vary by the size/complexity of your MAT, as well as the level of autonomy vs centralisation you desire for your schools
10.20-11.00: Strategies for scaling sustainably
Hugh Greenway (CEO at The Elliot Foundation)
Hugh will highlight the pressures and pitfalls to scaling, as well as different strategies to plan for and manage this growth
11.00-11.30: How and when to standardise systems
Dominic Norrish (Group Director of Technology at United Learning)
Dominic will speak about his experience in centralising systems, including when and why you need to standardise and how to manage school expectations
11.45-12.15: Refreshments (biscuits, tea and coffee)
12.15-12.45: Scaling culture and maintaining your sense of identity as you grow
Vanessa Ogden (CEO, Mulberry Schools Trust)
Vanessa Ogden will discuss ways you can maintain a cohesive set of values and identity for the MAT, whilst allowing schools to express their individuality
12.45-1.20: Building out your MAT operating model and central team functions
Chris Kirk (ex Partner for Education PwC, GEMS, DfE)
Chris will explore the 5 different stages of MAT growth, including how this affects your choice of management processes, central team structure and systems choice
1.20-2.10: Lunch
2.10-2.40: Utilisation of analytics and centralisation to drive financial health and efficiency
Will Jordan (Education Sector Manager at PS Financials)
Will demonstrates how you can centralise HR, finance and education reporting at scale, producing dashboards for your staff and board to make quicker, better decisions, without all the manual data drops
2.40-3.10: How to procure effectively to achieve economies of scale
John Leonard (Independent Consultant)
John will walk you through his guide and toolkit for how MATs can procure more effectively to achieve savings, whilst reducing the admin burden of big tenders
3.10-3.50: Governance structures that scale
Sarah Pittam (Consultant, Adviser and Project Manager in Education & Associate of Cambridge Education)
Sarah combines top-tier business consulting and education experience to show how different governance structures and processes can scale effectively as your MAT grows
3.50 – 4.00: Final refreshments
At a recent residential programme for MAT CEOs we were discussing different models for improving schools across a MAT, and how any chosen strategy needed to change and adapt at different points in a MAT’s growth. I was reminded of the ‘Greiner Growth Model’, which I first used when I was a Strategy Partner at
At a recent residential programme for MAT CEOs we were discussing different models for improving schools across a MAT, and how any chosen strategy needed to change and adapt at different points in a MAT’s growth. I was reminded of the ‘Greiner Growth Model’, which I first used when I was a Strategy Partner at PwC, and I’d like to share how this shows MAT leaders the 6 phases of growth they might go through, and some potential pitfalls that accompany them (which might sound familiar!)..
The 6 phases of growth (and the crises that accompany them!)
Professor Greiner observed that in fast growing organisations, the management practices that were ideal in one phase of growth may eventually bring on a crisis as the organisation outgrows them. The resolution of this crisis creates a new model of management.
The Greiner Growth model has six phases :
How the growth model applies to MATs
If the pace with which fast growth leads to a crisis is, as Greiner said, a factor of speed of change in a sector, there can be few sectors that have seen such dramatic changes as Multi-Academy Trusts. In contrast to schools, which have been with us for hundreds of years, MATs were only created in line with the sponsored academies programme 16 years ago, and the number of MATs has risen 88% in the past year alone. MATs are growing not just in number but size, with the number of MATs with over 10 schools growing by 68% in the same period.
MATs are put through rigorous stress tests by DFE before they can become sponsors, and at various stages of growth; but even if the management approaches were right at those points, the Greiner model predicts, and therefore helps us to manage, the points at which those practices are outgrown.
The size of a MAT is only one factor to consider when choosing how to manage. The appropriate management style will also relate to other aspects of complexity, such as the chosen approach to curriculum, pedagogy and school improvement, the geographical spread, the difference in context of different Academies, and whether the MAT covers a mix of Special schools and a range of phases of education, or just one phase.
Stage 1: 1-4 schools – a crisis of leadership
In a small and young MAT growth can be achieved through ‘creativity’. In this phase, which might consist of a single Executive Head / CEO in charge of up to 4 schools, there are few formal management activities at the MAT HQ level, and head office communications are frequent and informal. The small senior leadership team are collectively driven by their belief in the MAT, and its mission for students. However, as the MAT grows, it becomes too large for such informal ways of working: it cannot provide adequate reports to the Board on finances, and it needs to be able to take on new schools which were not part of the original discussions about mission. The founding Headteacher-turned-CEO may or may not have the appetite for more formal management. Sadly I have come across many MATs that have allowed the early warning signs to develop into a full blown crisis of leadership before they have taken action.
Stage 2: 3-15 schools – a crisis of autonomy
The Greiner Growth model would suggest that a MAT of anywhere from 3-15 schools may be well served by growth through ‘direction’. At this point the MAT puts in place functional structures, with specialised IT, HR, Finance and other roles. Proper accounting systems, budgets, common work standards, and formal communications are needed. The Growth model suggests that it is possible for a MAT of this size to be led from the top, with Heads of School and Executive Heads focused on running individual schools. Professional teaching communities, focused by subject and age range, would set standards and make sure they were being applied across the MAT.
However, with further growth, the MAT needs to create ‘clusters’ of schools which can work together, and potentially also Regional structures. At this stage, the Growth Model predicts a growing tension between the clusters/ Regions and HQ, and the new directive approach may begin to fail. Regional leaders of sizeable groups of schools may feel restricted by the central hierarchy, believing that they know their local context better than staff in HQ, but can’t take initiative. The Greiner model predicts that a crisis of autonomy will follow. To move forwards, a new model of delegation will be needed, but it may be hard for the leaders who rescued the organisation from its early chaotic struggles to give up their directive style, and equally hard for Regional/ hub leaders to take that responsibility off the CEO.
Stage 3: 7-70 schools – a crisis of control
This leads us to MATs with a mix of Regional and Hub structures, making use of increased levels of ‘delegation’. These decentralised structures motivate Regional and hub leaders to respond to local needs, and work with middle leaders to push forward subject excellence and other solutions. The role of the HQ is to manage by exception, using reports from the field. Communications to staff would more frequently be from the region/ hub than from HQ. The professional subject (and other) communities would continue to meet nationally as well as regionally, but the role of deciding how to implement the practices emerging from these communities would be devolved to the region, cluster or schools.
The very wide size band for this phase relates to earlier comments about the many other factors that affect complexity, although this tends to emerge from ~7 schools. It is not certain to me that a large MAT necessarily needs to outgrow this phase, but this delegative management style will in turn face challenges. Sizeable Regions, hubs and schools enjoying greater autonomy will start to run their own shows, resisting HQ requirements for reporting or interventions. A crisis of control may emerge, which if not addressed will lead to those regions breaking away from the MAT entirely. Of course, this may be a reasonable outcome, but a pro-active HQ will at least want to be aware of the alternative options. Whilst there may be a temptation for the MAT HQ to try to regain control and re-centralise management, this will usually fail due to the vast scope of operations involved at this stage of growth. Instead, what is needed at this point is for the MAT to shift its management style to co-ordination.
Stage 4: 30-100 schools – a crisis of red tape
A very large MAT managing through ‘co-ordination’ would focus the HQ on leading formal planning procedures, and allocating budgets carefully based on clear business cases. The MAT HQ would retain some technical functions, such as data processing. Many other operations would be decentralised to ‘Territories’, that is groups of Regions. Consider that by this stage, each region might be the size of many of today’s medium-sized MATs. The HQ would still retain an oversight function, but would be unlikely to intervene directly, as by this point, individual Territories should have sufficient capacity. As with Stage 3, it is unclear if a MAT would necessarily outgrow this phase, but the model suggests that the signs it is failing will be when the formal systems for planning and investment across HQ, Territories and Regions create a crisis of red tape, alongside growing mistrust between HQ , Territories, Regional leaders and local teams.
Stage 5: 50-150+ schools – a crisis of growth
A MAT which was so large that it outgrew co-ordination should focus on growth through ‘collaboration’, the preferred style of some of the world’s largest organisations. The HQ would focus on setting behaviours, social role modelling, and interpersonal interaction, and would apply very few formal coordinating systems. HQ would act through consultation, not direction. A matrix of Territories and professional functions would help to maximise the benefits of people with the same skills collaborating, whilst allowing for geographical responsiveness. Simplified control systems would use real-time information about a few things that really matter, to inform daily decisions. Frequent conferences of senior leaders (territorial and functional) across the MAT would address problems, and CDP funded by HQ will focus on teamwork and conflict resolution (territories and regions would have devolved budgets for other forms of CPD such as subject specialisms). Experimentation and innovation will be fostered and encouraged.
The main limit on MATs moving beyond this phase is likely to be a constraint on the number of Academies which find the MAT to be a good fit, leading to a crisis of growth. In fact, this constraint may come up at any of the earlier stages, and lead to a final type of growth, through mergers and alliances.
Stage 6: Mergers and alliances (any size) – a crisis of alignment
MATs may find themselves considering mergers and alliances at any stage of growth. There will be two main scenarios: either because a highly performing MAT is asked to take on all the Academies in a low performing MAT (for financial , educational, or both reasons) ; or because a MAT has identified a need to grow further, in order to access the benefits of greater size, but cannot do so through taking on individual schools – perhaps because there are none in a suitable location that fit the MAT’s values and focus. At this stage, MATs will consider growth through mergers and alliances. There have been relatively few examples of the second ‘voluntary’ scenario to date, due to the complexity of MAT Boards deciding to merge unless they are forced to. It is likely that in this scenario, as well as full mergers, other models will emerge, such as groups of MATs sharing services, or ‘reversible’ decisions to create a merged MAT which continue to allow separation in future if this does not have the benefits they wanted.
If the right steps are not taken before and after merger there can be a crisis of alignment. There there will be particular challenges if one MAT is in a different phase of management style than the other. For example, a MAT growing through ‘Direction’ merging one growing through ‘Creativity’ would need to be clear about the tighter expectations. A ‘Collaborative’ MAT merging with a ‘Directive’ one might find that the Directive MAT can continue to operate in a semi-autonomous fashion for a while; but there is a risk that it never feels fully part of the family. The act of merging may trigger a need to enter a new phase of growth with a different management style. The MATs’ respective approaches to topics such as standardisation, and choice of curriculum, will be important factors.
Above all, it is vital that the new identity is shared and owned not only by staff, but by pupils and parents.
In our blog “The common barriers to scaling a MAT”, we looked at some of the key areas of debate surrounding the biggest challenge to scaling faced by MATs today (this was also the theme of our first MAT conference in London in April this year). One of the biggest challenges MATs face is getting
In our blog “The common barriers to scaling a MAT”, we looked at some of the key areas of debate surrounding the biggest challenge to scaling faced by MATs today (this was also the theme of our first MAT conference in London in April this year).
One of the biggest challenges MATs face is getting the right infrastructure and systems in place to support growth. We invited Dominic Norrish, Group Director of Technology at United Learning, to speak about his experience of deciding how and when to scale systems within a MAT. We’ve summarised his presentation below.
How to decide when to scale systems within your MAT
Dominic talked about how the degree of MAT centralisation vs. school autonomy at your Trust is one of the biggest challenges to deciding how to scale systems. Exactly where your MAT sits on the scale of full autonomy vs. full centralisation, or at least where people perceive your MAT to be, is the product of your values and culture. The problem this sliding scale creates is to do with the locus of control (the perception of where authority to make a decision sits) between schools and the MAT central team. The locus of control will always be in tension, since both sides have limited views of the others’ reasoning and drivers. This is often what makes it hard to decide how to scale.
To help overcome this, Dominic suggested applying the principle of subsidiarity to all decisions about whether or not to centralise a system. The principle of subsidiarity dictates that if a decision can be taken at a local level, it should be. To determine whether this is true, Dominic suggested asking 3 questions when considering whether a system should be scaled across your MAT:
If the decision is not most effectively carried out by a central team or if there is no benefit to all schools in your MAT adopting the same approach, and if there are no operational benefits, the decision can be local. By contrast, United Learning decided to roll out a single assessment system (Hegarty Maths) across all its schools in 2016 because there was an educational benefit to using the same approach across all schools. Similarly, Dominic said that this principle would suggest that core operational systems, such as Finance, MIS & HR, should be scaled centrally.
When to scale systems within your MAT
When you decide to scale systems comes down to the size and age of your MAT. As the number of schools in your MAT increases, it goes through 4 stages: The Honeymoon Period, The Rubicon of Regret, The Difficult Middle Years, and Converging Needs & Attitudes.
The Honeymoon Period
This is the stage where your MAT has c.2-15+ schools. At this point, appetite for centralisation is high, and the cost/complexity of centralising is relatively low. This is what makes “The Honeymoon Period” a good time to centralise:
These are the fundamental systems that should be in place for any young MAT as it grows since the cost of changing them at any point in a MAT’s life is disproportionately high (which is why MATs often put off these changes until it’s too late). Making these requirements clear to schools considering joining the MAT.
The Rubicon of Regret
This is the stage where your MAT has 20-30 schools. “The Rubicon of Regret” as the point at which your MAT has not centralised many (or any!) systems, and now regrets that decision since the cost & complexity of centralisation at this stage is high (but not impossible). This in turn makes the appetite for centralisation low.
Before “crossing the Rubicon”, MATs should centralise:
At any time in your MAT’s growth
From 30 schools upwards, the cost and complexity of centralising systems only continues to rise, but so too does the appetite for centralisation as MAT central teams see the value of doing so after the “Difficult Middle Years.”
However at any time in the life of your MAT there should be a really high barrier for prescribing the systems teachers use to teach. United Learning, for instance, have stopped doing this altogether. This is because the likelihood of consensus forming around a single product/approach is extremely low, whilst the cost of changing current products and practice rarely delivers ROI (rolling out the same smart whiteboards as an example – does it matter whether all your schools use the same one?). In this case, it would be far better to support schools in driving their own digital strategies.
Click here to see Dominic’s presentation in full
In 2020, United Learning chose to move all of their 72 state schools to Arbor MIS. Find out more about their decision on our blog.
We’ve now added all the presentations from our conference on scaling culture, strategy, processes, procurement, and governance to the blog. Why not have a read here.
Dr Vanessa J Ogden, CEO of Mulberry Schools Trust, spoke at our MAT conference about scaling culture and maintaining your sense of identity across your MAT as you grow. During the first half of her talk she stressed the importance of creating a set of values that is shared by everyone in your MAT in order to maintain
Dr Vanessa J Ogden, CEO of Mulberry Schools Trust, spoke at our MAT conference about scaling culture and maintaining your sense of identity across your MAT as you grow. During the first half of her talk she stressed the importance of creating a set of values that is shared by everyone in your MAT in order to maintain your trust identity as you scale. In this blog, we’ve picked out the key pointers from the second half of her talk, which focused on the importance of ‘remote leadership’ when bringing about changes in culture in schools to align with the values and identity of your trust. Read part two below:
‘Remote leadership’ is a term used by Tim Brighouse to describe his approach to education leadership at scale. I think it is highly applicable to MAT leadership, and I have found it incredibly useful when thinking about the importance of the CEO as a leader of outstanding education provision. It is important to note that culture and identity in MATs applies here. The Mulberry Schools Trust’s model is premised on the CEO being a leader of education expertise. Business acumen is important, but knowing how to create outstanding schools in contexts of challenge is the focus and so education leadership expertise – with it being the central business product, if you like – is what is needed in the CEO. There are other MAT models where business skills are at the forefront of the CEO’s leadership and education expertise is held in the roles of directors of education – and this can also be very effective – but for us, the view is that if you want universally outstanding schools, the top job is to know how to do it and what this looks like, providing you have skilled financial, legal, estates and HR leaders working closely to you that you can properly hold to account.
‘Remote leadership’ of school communities thus becomes very important for a CEO. How do you bring your practitioners with you? How do you ensure they buy in to the vision, values and culture of the work in hand?
Remote leadership for a MAT entails a number of things:
Securing a strong and widely shared commitment to the MAT’s purpose and values across a large group of people requires close communication, despite being more remote, and commitment from practitioners to a vision. One of the lessons I have learned about education and the implementation of any initiative at any level is that those who have a fairly autonomous position e.g. as a classroom teacher – in that they are inpidually responsible for pupil outcomes and the quality of their practice – can destroy it by simply not doing it or doing it differently. To be a lastingly successful initiative, they must agree with its importance and find its implementation rewarding.
Getting that commitment means two things. First, if your leadership is more remote, the immediacy of your communication is less and so every contact is vital. The authenticity of such communications is important and so linking them to genuine passion and values is essential.
Second, understanding and using the power of story is a key aspect of remote leadership in the task of scaling up culture and retaining identity. Stories of success create energy and when bringing about change in culture in a school to align with the values and identity of your trust, the use of supportive, affirming and speculative language is helpful – as well as finding those with a can-do philosophy to help you yield the buy-in from the community that you need in school transformation to align with the MAT. It needs to be recognized in scaling up culture that in this task perhaps more than any other you cannot enact your leadership alone. If successful change in this respect is going to take root for the long term, you need to develop a team around you that can replicate this work and a central infrastructure to enable faithful development. And so we are back to my first point about the structural things you need to do to enable your identity to go to scale.
I have seen this model of remote leadership enacted elsewhere in recent times in perse fields of business and government: once on a visit to the Dyson engineering plant in Malaysia last month and 2 years ago on a visit to meet Barack Obama’s administration team at the White House. The recruitment and staff development process that supports scaling up culture and identity was plain to see in both cases. After all, what could be more important than the work Obama did to address inequality and social justice in the US?
So, I conclude by going back to the photograph above, as it has become symbolic and powerful for us as a Trust. It both shows the context of our work and the social justice issues we need to address about inequality. A great education is the key to a better and more prosperous future. It is also the means of providing greater social harmony within communities and human enrichment where the obstacles prevent engagement with the resources around you. The rainbow, therefore, is the promise. It is our Trust’s promise and it is the vision you buy into when you join our schools.
There have been some very difficult moments along the way, and there are more to come I am sure, but it is an expression of what we believe to be possible – a vision of hope for continued improvement in outcomes not just amongst the pupils within our family of schools but, through partnership and school-to-school support, improvement across the system. It is not growth for growth’s sake but a considered and thoughtful response to educational change and the requirement for us to support – along with Challenge Partners – a great school-led system.
We brought together 100 MAT leaders to discuss how to ‘scale sustainably’ In April this year we brought together 100 MAT leaders from over 70 organisations to discuss different strategies for scaling their MAT sustainably, with a focus on how these varied by the degree of centralisation vs. autonomy the MAT chooses to give to
In April this year we brought together 100 MAT leaders from over 70 organisations to discuss different strategies for scaling their MAT sustainably, with a focus on how these varied by the degree of centralisation vs. autonomy the MAT chooses to give to schools (click here for the agenda). This generated some great presentations from our speakers from Elliot Foundation, United Learning and others which we’ll write up on this blog over the coming weeks, as well as some lively debate about what challenges senior leaders are having with scaling. We held the conference to highlight emerging good practice beyond the highly centralised model of MAT operations that is highlighted in the press. It’s clear that a one-size-fits-all approach is overly-simplistic, and that strategies and barriers to scaling vary both between different MATs, and within a MAT as it goes through 6 phases of growth.
The first point that was noted was that a MAT’s scaling challenges varies by the culture and size of the MAT. We’ve written previously about how culture and the degree of MAT centralisation vs. school autonomy is a key driver of how a MAT scales systems, processes and people, and how different strategies may suit different school types. For example a MAT of outstanding schools will often have a different culture and degree of centralisation than a MAT of turnaround schools.
Being deliberate and setting clear early expectations about what you will centralise (systems, processes, roles) and what you will devolve autonomy to heads to decide was seen as essential in helping smooth the scaling process, and get ahead of problems that would be exponentially harder to solve retrospectively as the MAT grew. Most speakers agreed that despite it seeming easier to devolve decisions to schools at the outset, making bold decisions to centralise some aspects and capitalising on early enthusiasm would help in the long run.
The mean average number of schools per MAT in the conference was ~5, which as we’re previously written about is exactly the time that MATs should be looking to put in place the infrastructure to help scale, typically involving the centralisation of systems. Most MATs in the room had centralised their finance function early on, and were now looking to capitalise on early momentum to centralise their MIS, assessment and HR functions, as this helps to get a single view of MAT data, improve transparency and audit of process, and provide the foundation for scaling your central team. As we’ve mentioned previously, it’s at ~5 schools (depending on phase) where manual processes and systems cause your team to break. Try to tackle this before it becomes a problem.
We polled our audience of 100 about what their greatest barrier to scaling was, shown in the chart below. The biggest response by far was the ‘catch 22’ of scaling – needing funding to scale the central team/impact of the MAT, but requiring scale to access more funding. This was commonly reported by all MAT types and sizes, but most prominently in MATs of 4-15 schools who were struggling for financial viability. These MATs were often entering into a period of unsustainable growth, driven by the imperative to become financially viable – the conversation was focused on what MATs could do at this stage to smooth what is always going to be one of the hardest phases of scaling. Recognising this early, and preparing the infrastructure and team was seen as vital, reflected by the fact that centralising roles and systems came in at number 2 and 3 on the list. Setting up clusters and changing operating models was commented on by larger MATs as a challenge (often linked to how to manage these), as well as finding suitable schools to join the MAT. Several MATs were changing their governance model, and debating how far to centralise committees and responsibilities. Perhaps most surprising was the fact that finding the right people came so low down the list of barriers. The pool of talented individuals with experience in scaling impact across schools isn’t vast, and perhaps MATs underestimate this challenge or overestimate their capabilities in this regard.
We will be updating this blog over the coming weeks with presentations from our speakers covering how MATs can effectively scale their culture, strategy, systems, processes, procurement, and governance. For now, click here to see my presentation including some of the points above.
Dr Vanessa J Ogden, CEO of Mulberry Schools Trust, spoke at our MAT conference about how to scale culture and the importance of maintaining a strong sense of identity across your MAT as you grow. She highlighted the need to create a set of values that are shared by everyone when scaling, from your company members and directors
Dr Vanessa J Ogden, CEO of Mulberry Schools Trust, spoke at our MAT conference about how to scale culture and the importance of maintaining a strong sense of identity across your MAT as you grow. She highlighted the need to create a set of values that are shared by everyone when scaling, from your company members and directors through to your school principals, senior teams and Local Governing Bodies. Read on to learn the 5 key ways that you can scale culture at your MAT using values-driven leadership
This photo shows my ‘place’ – where I started my headship in 2006 and where, on 1st May 2017 (after a 7 year journey) the Mulberry Schools Trust was born. The end of the rainbow (with its mythical pot of gold) is right in the City of London. To the side is one of the tower blocks in Shadwell where pupils in my catchment area live – one of the many similar blocks with overcrowding and damp, where people have little personal space or privacy or money. Poverty is patchwork across our country in the same way and so all MATs encounter it in some way. I’ve seen this at close hand through my work chairing the board of the Somerset Challenge and the National Schools Forum for Teach First.
The point of stating all of this is that it means our work at Mulberry Schools Trust is heavily influenced by the need to counter the dynamics of ‘place’ – to counter the close nature of urban financial and social disadvantage shown in the photo, open up opportunity, deal with inequality, offer routes to prosperity, stability and security, and to work towards greater social harmony and human flourishing. As a result, the Trust’s culture is framed by a set of values that are quite specific to this task. In a way, we have chosen to ‘specialise’ as a MAT in this work at this point.
From my experience, I cannot stress enough the importance of values-driven leadership at all levels as you grow. Values frame the culture that is created in all organisations and are easily diluted as you scale up, so values shared by your company members and directors through to your school principals, senior teams and Local Governing Bodies are critical.
Our values at Mulberry Schools Trust
Scaling up your organisational culture and maintaining your identity requires senior leaders to place values and a deep understanding of the context of your schools at the heart of your work. There is a dynamic relationship between a school, its context, its culture and the values which frame that culture. Understanding that dynamic is very important when thinking about scale.
Context or ‘place’ affects education. A school both influences and is influenced by its community. Where a school is situated has a profound, multi-layered effect on its character and the challenges it faces. In turn, good schools enrich their communities and can have a regenerative effect.
Our values are absolutely aligned with carrying out this task. They hold that:
1)Education is a public good: The chance to be educated is a human right and state schools should provide a high quality education for every child regardless of the barriers. An education should provide rich intellectual and personal development for inpiduals and communities. It should equip young people for employment, making a contribution to the economy as well as enabling them to sustain themselves financially
2) The Trust’s work should make a further system-wide contribution to educational improvement beyond being a MAT: Hence being a significant part of Challenge Partners and standing shoulder to shoulder with other school leaders to work collectively for an outstanding school system
Scaling culture as you grow
A fundamental question for us is how we retain these values so strongly and protect our culture from erosion across a growing number of schools. Even within the relatively small 4 square mile patch that my MAT currently occupies, the ‘place’ in which each of the three secondary schools is located is quite distinctive and affects each school’s culture differently. If spread across a wider geographical area and sometimes amongst quite far-flung regions for some MATs the challenge is magnified. However, there are a number of things that have been important for us in going to scale:
Statement of identity, vision and values: having a very clear sense of identity and of the vision and values of the Trust that is written down and shared effectively with the whole MAT community has been fundamental to our work. Helpfully, there is a track record of success already to back its importance, and that success also provides authenticity for people. This is an essential ingredient in education leadership – both in inpidual schools and at scale Governance: building a Trust board of committed trustees and company members that share our values has been very significant. There have been hard conversations and some very difficult moments connected with building the Board and holding true to our values – particularly when faced with issues of equality. Ensuring that our LGBs are similarly robust has been important too so establishing an appointments committee for the board, having board development, evaluation and training as well as a robust SOD and a handbook have been key to ensuring we retain our identity and culture across an expanding number of schools
Policies that reflect our values too: what becomes a central policy adopted fully by all and what becomes a statement of policy principles for all schools to follow is an interesting discussion. I am also well aware that what you do in a small MAT might be different to a larger one: take curriculum and approach to teaching and learning, where the values of an institution are also expressed. Having a ‘loose-tight’ approach works fine when as the CEO you have time to talk regularly with the principal and to review practice. When you have a larger MAT and take on schools in special measures, for example, a non-negotiable curriculum model that everyone follows is an easier way of quality assuring what is done. I’ll come back to this point at the end because there are more compromises to be made either way on this particular aspect of a MAT’s practice
School leadership: school principals are obviously critical to the retention of culture and identity when going to scale. Either you appoint like-minded leaders who already share the MAT’s culture, values and approaches (we have done this twice now) or you create a talent pipeline that brings people through internally – which we are also doing – but this takes longer to establish. Like others, we have a strong internal leadership development programme which draws upon the talent within our Trust and a headteacher in training / deputy headteacher in training programme which is bespoke and personalized as well as group programmes and courses. The way you interview to test ‘fit’ for a school is, as you know, a sensitive and complex process – but worth investing time into to get the right appointment. And not appointing if it’s not right is always a brave decision
Community: integral to school improvement is the relationship between a school, its context and its community. Investing in external relationships and finding the right ambassadors to enable you to build trust and confidence amongst wider stakeholders helps enormously. Schools in marginalized communities are the community glue and I continue to see the gulfs between groups of different heritage made visible by the events of recent time – such as Brexit, the Syrian conflict and terror attacks. Islamophobia is rife and suspicion between people is unhelpfully fueled by media and social networking sites. Our values around schools’ wider role in social cohesion are strongly held and so for us, work in this domain of scaling up is very important
The close attention of the CEO to these elements of a MAT’s work is essential in scaling up culture and retaining identity, and the work in it over three years to six years is considerable but worth the investment. Facilitating strong governance, nurturing senior teams, building relationships with school communities and having a keen eye on policy implementation are for us the key things that we have considered and continue to develop.
Independent educational consultant John Leonard recently wrote a blog for us about the most important things that MATs should consider before setting out to procure, including knowing exactly what it is that you want to get from your new system and how procurement can help you achieve economies of scale. Part 1 went over the
Independent educational consultant John Leonard recently wrote a blog for us about the most important things that MATs should consider before setting out to procure, including knowing exactly what it is that you want to get from your new system and how procurement can help you achieve economies of scale. Part 1 went over the reasons why MATs should procure and explained what you need to know beforehand. This second part of the blog will cover the timescale of implementing your new system (when), which sites will this system impact (where) and finally some helpful guidelines and government specifications (how). We’ve transcribed part two of his presentation below!
In my last blog, I spoke about how procurement is key to helping MATs achieve economies of scale, as well as the most important factors to consider for MATs setting out to procure. In this blog, I’ll go on to talk about the rest of the procurement toolbox, including the when, the where and the how of procurement.
Allowing sufficient time for a well run procurement exercise starts long before you start writing the tender document. A typical timeline looks something like this (your experience and the scope of the procurement will cause this to vary, of course):
1. Initial requirement definition: finding your champions, getting their opinion, turning that into a draft specification
2. Refine the requirement: get together as a group to review the draft and find out what you don’t know
3. Market testing: get suppliers to review your spec, present their solutions, and make suggestions
4. Re-refine the requirement: agree what your final spec will be now you have some market intelligence
5. Write your tender: concentrate on your requirements and the scoring criteria; the rest can be based on standard templates
6. Issue a contract notice: (guidance online will help you do this)
7. Issue your tender to interested suppliers
8. Allow 30 days for tender clarifications, etc.
9. Close your tender and evaluate results
10. Announce the successful supplier
11. Provide feedback to all bidders
12. Allow a 10 day standstill
13. Start contract negotiations
14. Commence pilot (if applicable)
15. Test with your pilot group
16. Larger scale rollout
That’s a lot to cover, but doing all of that will make sure you get the results you want. If you rush it, you’ll hate the results or something won’t work. As a rule of thumb, allocate about half your time to speccing the requirement, 25% to the procurement, and 25% to award negotiations.
Where will the system go?
You have a number of factors to consider here. First, and most obvious, how many sites/staff/students is this system going to impact? The larger the number of sites, the better your economies of scale, but the larger the number of opinions and input you’re going to need to get something that works for everybody. Also consider what other systems or methods of work this solution has an effect on. Does your solution integrate? What other systems must change to accommodate your preferred technology?
And while we mentioned “when” as a measure of the procurement timeline, also think about the future. Can this solution scale to add more academies, thousands more students and staff, and still do so at an effective cost? Your tender document will need to spell out the number of staff and students who will be expected to use your system, where they are, and what the likelihood is of additional users/sites joining the system later.
If you want to scope the tender to allow you to add further sites later on – or even create a mini framework to add other MATs later – your tender document is where you need to state this; it will make suppliers far more likely to be clear about their terms or be prepared to offer better ones for the chance at more business in the future.
How do I start?
This guide written by the government should be your starting point, as it gives a lot of information about current procurement guidance.
This page in particular goes into a lot more detail about the specifics of EU compliant public procurement.
Remember, the threshold at present is £181,302 – that’s the ex VAT total contract value of the solution you’re procuring. Anything over that, and you will have to follow public contract regulations (PCR). Unless you’re substantially under that value, it helps to use the PCR as a guideline for procurement – that way you know you’re not going to be challenged (or at least the chances are minimal).
Take advice and guidance from procurement agents if you can. One I can recommend is 4C (https://www.4c.co.uk/) – they have a lot of experience and can do as much or as little of the procurement exercise as you need.
Last but not least – it bears repeating – please be sure that your requirements are clear, documented well, and explained where there is room for ambiguity. If a requirement is not clear, you’ll know straight away, as suppliers will bombard you with clarification requests. The less ambiguity you have, the easier it is to procure, score, and award contracts. Remember to base these on expected outcomes rather than being too specific. All of this removes the chance of nasty surprises later on.
In Summary
Effective procurement is about getting what you want, for the best price you can afford.
Having clear, agreed answers to the previous points will make your journey so much easier, and will reap rewards countless times over. Allowing yourself time to define the requirements and run the procurement in an orderly fashion will make a big difference when it comes to appointing a supplier, and using the scale of your MAT will also enable you to leverage benefits that can’t be matched by individual academies.
We’ve been gathering feedback from the dozens of different MATs we work with on what core measures they’ve been tracking to monitor success. Measuring staffing is clearly vital, as it typically accounts for 70%-80% of a school’s budget, but we find that the measures MATs and schools are currently using vary wildly. Some opt for financial measures that
We’ve been gathering feedback from the dozens of different MATs we work with on what core measures they’ve been tracking to monitor success. Measuring staffing is clearly vital, as it typically accounts for 70%-80% of a school’s budget, but we find that the measures MATs and schools are currently using vary wildly. Some opt for financial measures that focus on efficiency and cost, others look at Net Promoter Scores that focus on satisfaction, all depending on the culture of the MAT or school, which we’ve analysed in previous posts. Below are some that we’ve seen with their benefits and drawbacks:
1) Staff cost per pupil: split by % child facing vs. % non child-facing, % SLT vs % teachers (supply vs. FTE) vs. % back-office A basic indicator but one that can reveal a lot if benchmarked and analysed correctly. Looking at the splits of % child-facing vs. non-child facing can reveal heavy management layers or inefficient back office process taking resource away from front-line teaching. The split between SLT, teachers (supply & FTE) and back office can help to drill down and identify where schools might be over or underspending.
2) Cost per subject Used by MATs such as Outwood Grange in their dashboard, this can help schools rationalise subjects to make efficiency gains (such as a vocational subject taken by 6 students year on year). The exact calculations can be tough to produce without the right systems able to combine academic and financial data.
3) % staff receiving performance-related pay increase A contentious measure, as there is no right or wrong answer, but worth correlating to pupil attainment and progress measures. This can also be further broken down by Key Stage and subject.
4) Net Promoter Score (NPS)/satisfaction + staff comments Most schools agree staff satisfaction is a key measure of long term health, and even though satisfaction may not always be high it’s worth knowing when it takes a dip so you can intervene to reduce turnover. Some schools and MATs such as Elliot Foundation are starting to use Net Promoter Score to measure this. Arbor uses a tool called Ask.nicely to monitor the health of all our schools, which automatically sends out 100 emails a day to different school stakeholders, allowing us to segment responses by role (email us to find out more). Note that the comments provided as feedback are perhaps more useful than the data in helping management understand school strengths and areas to improve.
5) Complaints Number of complaints by role or school, as well as the verbatim complaint itself combine with Net Promotor Score as a useful indicator. Again the comments in the complaints themselves are often the most useful.
6) Retention/Vacancies Staff turnover is often 20%-30% in some schools and MATs, far higher than the 15% national average. Retention is a vital measure to at least know, even if it’s not monitored as frequently as satisfaction or NPS. Vacancies by number and type of role is also useful to understand retention and where issues lie, and it can be obtained relatively easily through the census submission, although it’s a lagging indicator (by the time a vacancy arises it’s too late to intervene).
7) CPD cost as % staff pay Not investing in staff can lead to high turnover, but many schools and MATs are guilty of underinvesting in staff who then stay and don’t progress. Monitoring overall CPD as a % staff pay allows benchmarking between different schools and MATs to see if you’re developing your staff. Clearly just monitoring the cost won’t tell you if the CPD has been effective. This should be assessed in appraisals.
Ultimately the measures you choose depend on the culture your MAT or school wants to foster. Purely financial measures with no balance will focus on efficiency, whilst focusing entirely on staff satisfaction can lead to lax financial management. Having the systems to automatically report on staffing measures is key to reduce excel sheets flying around. Arbor’s MAT and School MIS can centrally report on all staff and student measures, giving SLT the reports and dashboards they need in one click to monitor performance. Get in touch to find out more.
School automation is a bit like having an automated robot which takes all the tediousness and drudgery out of manual data entry and repetitive tasks. All you need to do is set the criteria for what you want the robot to do and, once the action is triggered, the robot will take care of the
School automation is a bit like having an automated robot which takes all the tediousness and drudgery out of manual data entry and repetitive tasks. All you need to do is set the criteria for what you want the robot to do and, once the action is triggered, the robot will take care of the task for you without any extra clicks or work. For example, you might want your Headteacher to get a text message whenever there is an exclusion, or a pupil’s guardian to be notified when their child has 100% attendance, or any incident involving bullying to be automatically escalated and the child assigned a detention.
Just as sales and marketing automation have transformed the private sector, so too we think that school automation will transform the education sector over the next 5 years by saving staff time on repetitive administrative tasks, allowing them to concentrate on teaching and learning activities. The timing for this is as much driven by technology as it is by cost savings and time pressure, with the IFS stating that school budgets will decline by 7% in real-terms over the next 5 years, meaning schools will have to look for smart ways to start making savings without increasing staff workload.
There are 3 immediate ways we see school automation helping to save staff time, all of which can be implemented immediately:
1. Automate reporting With senior leaders spending around 4.4 hours per week on data analysis, automation can help save time by having reports built, scheduled and sent to those who need them automatically. It also cuts out time spent on manually gathering data. The example below shows a school report on 100% weekly attendance being built and automatically scheduled to send to all pastoral leaders at 8am every Monday morning ready for registration. You could of course build more complex reports for governors, heads of department or headteachers using any reporting template you like too!
2. Automate escalation Staff spend 8.0 hours per week on administration, much of which is taken up by behaviour management and escalation. This escalation can be automated – allowing, for example, detentions to be assigned automatically for certain behaviours, senior staff to be instantly emailed for trigger behaviours such as bullying, and parents to be notified of repeated good behaviour – all without any additional data entry. At the MAT level, this allows groups to monitor and report on a school’s behaviour policy, ensuring that it’s consistently delivered.
3. Automate chasing Staff spend 3.8 hours per week on parent and guardian interaction, and although much of this is essential, some of the communication is repetitive and can be automated. For example, communication around late payments, attendance year-to-date below 95%, and good behaviour on a particular day could be automatically scheduled in your MIS. Chasing staff for late marksheets or incomplete registers can also be automated, saving administrators valuable time.
How do I try this in my school or MAT? Workflow and data automation is now commonplace in businesses, but old-fashioned school MIS systems have held schools back. All of of the above is now possible in Arbor, and some other integrated, cloud-based MIS systems, so ask your provider for more information or get in touch with us for a demo to see how Arbor can help automate your repetitive admin and data tasks and give your staff their time back!
In my last blog, I highlighted the 4 different basic MAT personality types: Authoritative, Micromanaging, Entrepreneurial and Assistant. I showed how start-up MATs (usually a mixture of Entrepreneurial or Micromanaging) can cope with manual processes and dual staffing, but once they get to a certain size, this starts to break. The diagram below, from DfE
In my last blog, I highlighted the 4 different basic MAT personality types: Authoritative, Micromanaging, Entrepreneurial and Assistant. I showed how start-up MATs (usually a mixture of Entrepreneurial or Micromanaging) can cope with manual processes and dual staffing, but once they get to a certain size, this starts to break.
The diagram below, from DfE commissioned analysis, shows when this typically happens.
When do MATs change their infrastructure?
People start to break before ~5 schools
At the start, MATs are small and can cope with manual processes and procedures, spreading staff across multiple institutions, and allowing schools a certain degree of discretion over how they manage themselves. However, as the number of schools approaches 5, the central team (who often also work within a school) become overstretched. Late nights catching up with their day job in the school, the burden of gathering and analysing data on excel from multiple schools, chasing staff for updates and generally cranking the admin wheel to get management the information they need in a timely manner is too much. People break.
Getting the right infrastructure in place & letting systems take the strain
Typically this is when MATs begin to look at letting the systems they have take the strain. This is so that every additional school the MAT takes on doesn’t increase the challenge exponentially. Most MATs we speak to are defining a core set of non-negotiable systems and processes that all schools will be required to take on to streamline data and processes. Standardising systems gives MATs the infrastructure to grow, whilst allowing schools autonomy in how they use these systems.
Standardise the MIS after finance
The first system to be standardised is typically the finance system, as this helps fulfil basic compliance. Most MATs are opting for PS Financials as it does a good job of aggregating financial information across the Trust. But the next system that MATs tackle subsequently is the MIS as they want to centralise their student and staff information. Just as MATs find their legacy finance system unable to cope with the demands of operating in a multi-school environment, so too over 50% of the largest 10 MATs are changing their MIS, moving away from SIMS or CMIS to cloud-based MIS systems that allow instant access and aggregation of their data across multiple sites. Robert Hill, the former DfE advisor, who has written well on the subject of MAT data makes this point well in his blog.
The case for operating a MAT MIS
Operating across multiple sites presents unique challenges for MATs. MAT leadership need instant access to data to ensure their schools are performing effectively, and at present this is a laborious task to collect. More than just data, MAT leaders need the ability to instantly log in to school systems to audit workflows and ensure consistency, flagging issues and following up with staff where necessary. This demands not just a dashboard, but a better, more efficient system with which to centralise data, streamline workflows and operate your MAT, which is why most of the large trusts are actively moving away from SIMS, RM and CMIS, and many small and mid-sized trusts are now doing similar.
Arbor has built the first MAT MIS which allows leaders live, instant access to DfE, Ofsted, in-year progress and MIS data in one central dashboard and custom reporting tool. More than just a dashboard, the MAT MIS allows leaders to receive alerts for important events such as exclusions, and drill right down from the group into any school’s MIS and analyse performance in a few clicks. This centralisation of data and ability to action workflows from the MAT saves around 30% on software licenses, and hours of time gathering data and communicating with staff.
Find out more information by clicking here, or just email me at james@arbor-education.com and I’d be happy to connect you with one of our MATs or come out to show you our MAT MIS myself!
I’ve already discussed the 4 different MAT personality types based on how much they standardise vs. give schools autonomy, as well as at what stage of growth MATs tend to standardise MIS systems. From our discussions with 100s of MATs, we’ve learnt some great lessons about how the 4 types of MAT scale their systems and people. I’ve summarised what we’ve
I’ve already discussed the 4 different MAT personality types based on how much they standardise vs. give schools autonomy, as well as at what stage of growth MATs tend to standardise MIS systems.
From our discussions with 100s of MATs, we’ve learnt some great lessons about how the 4 types of MAT scale their systems and people. I’ve summarised what we’ve learnt below:
Authoritative MAT This MAT type combines a high degree of MAT alignment with lower school autonomy, and as a result has highly standardised systems and processes. Many of these MATs have built their own custom systems or integrations, such as the Praising Stars system developed by Outwood Grange, or the Assembly data system built by ARK. These systems are typically built and administered by a large central team who are on hand to assist with data analysis and school improvement where needed, taking the burden off schools. School workflows and processes are similar in each school and can be audited by the central team.
Micromanaging MAT This organisation type is usually found in start-up MATs with challenging schools. Typically there isn’t enough of a top-slice to pay for a large central team, and one or more of the SLT in the lead school will typically act in a dual role both in their school and the MAT. There is typically not much standardisation of progress or MIS systems across the MAT, and as a result each school typically submits data manually via Excel in half-termly or termly data drops. This limits the complexity and timeliness of the data, meaning light data at the MAT level that is only reviewed a few times per year. Reliance on the people in the small central team is great, and as I’ve discussed, people start to break at around the 5 school mark.
Entrepreneurial MAT This organisation type is usually found in start-up or informal MATs. Each school has high autonomy, and there isn’t much MAT alignment around systems or process. The data that does get collected at MAT level is usually light and done via regular Excel data drops. Like the micromanaging MAT, there is only usually a skeleton central team, with a member of school SLT playing dual roles as data lead for both the school and Trust. This is usually acceptable under the current Ofsted framework as long as the schools are high performing, but two things make this position fragile. Firstly, this system can’t scale beyond a handful of schools, as the central team will start to break under the chaos. Secondly, if Ofsted’s health checks prove to be heavy-handed, entrepreneurial MATs may have their work cut out to gather the data in a timely manner. Assistant MATs Usually found in groups of high performing schools, this type of MAT has standardised their ‘non-negotiable’ systems – typically the finance, MIS, progress and HR systems – leaving the rest at the discretion of schools. This allows for a semi or fully-automated data collection similar to the Authoritative MATs, as well as the ability to transparently view what is going on in each school without interfering. The small central team only get involved to help add extra capacity to their schools, such as building reports or analysis, setting up the behaviour policy in the system, or communicating with staff. Schools have autonomy in how they use the system, and the MAT get the core data they need with high levels of accountability.
Whatever your MAT personality, standardising your MIS is a step 50% of the largest 10 MATs are already starting to take as they move away from SIMS or CMIS. Arbor’s MAT MIS can help centralise all your core student and staff data in dashboards for instant benchmarking and reporting, automates school workflows to save staff time, and allows you to take action to improve outcomes. Why not book a quick demo by emailing me at jweatherill@arbor-education.com or ask one of our MATs why they made the switch?
In this presentation about scaling your Trust and my last blog, I highlighted how the central team need to decide on the right balance between a MAT’s desire for alignment and a school’s desire for autonomy, as this will define their systems, processes and, ultimately, culture. Looking at the diagram below, you can see the 4 different
In this presentation about scaling your Trust and my last blog, I highlighted how the central team need to decide on the right balance between a MAT’s desire for alignment and a school’s desire for autonomy, as this will define their systems, processes and, ultimately, culture.
Looking at the diagram below, you can see the 4 different personality types I suggest, and the culture that each one generally has as a result.
How Alignment and Autonomy Influence Culture
Authoritative MAT
Often seen in MATs with a high proportion of turnaround schools who have weak operational processes that need replacing. These MATs have a large central team to help ensure a high degree of alignment with the MAT, and deploy a largely non-negotiable, tried-and-tested set of systems and processes within each school, leaving little variation.
Assistant MAT
Often seen in MATs with high performing schools and strong headteachers/leadership teams. These MATs have defined, clear goals agreed with their teams and a certain set of core non-negotiable systems and data that they have aligned schools around, leaving peripheral systems and processes at individual schools’ discretion. The central team is relatively small and nimble, able to respond in a timely manner and help schools where they need extra capacity or assistance
Entrepreneurial MAT
Often seen in local, start-up MATs with high performing schools and leadership; people know and trust each other. There is typically only a small topslice, so the central team are small, usually having a dual-role split between an individual academy and the MAT central team. Systems and processes are non-standardised, and schools have wide discretion over how they manage themselves. Data collection is manual and light, often using excel, meaning little central oversight.
Micromanaging MAT
This sounds bad, but it’s sometimes necessary. In challenging start-up MATs taking on turnaround schools there is no budget or large central team to roll-out a set of tried and tested systems and processes. The MAT has to take a hands-on approach, often with staff seconded from the lead school into the poorer performing schools. It can feel quite full-on for the schools, but here the entrepreneurial approach may not be viable!
I should say that the framework above is intentionally simplistic – you can’t easily define culture or put schools and MATs in a box. MATs often behave differently with different schools, and there are many more dimensions to culture. But frameworks are useful as they stimulate debate, so where do you sit and how do you plan to scale? My next blog provides some more detail on this. Watch this space…
Chris Kirk, Ex-Partner for Education at PwC, and formerly GEMS DfE. recently wrote about the 6 phases of MAT growth (and the crises that follow), explaining how as MATs grow in size and complexity the leadership style needs to flex, else crises can occur. Below Chris has summarised what type of MAT fits into what
Chris Kirk, Ex-Partner for Education at PwC, and formerly GEMS DfE. recently wrote about the 6 phases of MAT growth (and the crises that follow), explaining how as MATs grow in size and complexity the leadership style needs to flex, else crises can occur.
Below Chris has summarised what type of MAT fits into what phase of growth, as well as what early warning signs to look out for to avoid the 6 common crises he highlighted from occurring.
Summary: What to look out for, and what to consider doing about it
Five practical tips
This is the time in pre-opening when the EFA cheque book is out for IT which can be a hugely daunting task for the uninitiated. I’ve spoken extensively about the following topics and am surprised they’re still up for debate. This is only the case in Education (which is what we’re all trying to change!).
1. Use the Cloud
2. Put staff efficiency and training first
3. Obsess about integrations
Just having a brilliant team and a great idea isn’t enough if people don’t know about you and can’t talk to you about it. You won’t have the resources of an open school (lots of teachers, a printer, a kettle…) to market your offer, so you have to do lots and lots of events, flyering,
Just having a brilliant team and a great idea isn’t enough if people don’t know about you and can’t talk to you about it. You won’t have the resources of an open school (lots of teachers, a printer, a kettle…) to market your offer, so you have to do lots and lots of events, flyering, talking to people in person, going to find them as well as getting them to come to you and using technology to reduce the effort and increase the quality of communications.
Be present We spoke to hundreds of parents in person to get our school full for opening, via our own events, the feeder schools, park and playground trips and small gatherings in coffee shops or local community centres organised by keen parents. We met families on Good Friday to reassure them we’d be open on time and would provide the kind of education they wanted. If the only tangible thing your school has is your team and a prospectus, then your team have to be out talking to people. This includes your Principal Designate, who may not be used to such a street-facing role.
Be available We had a Skype phone that could always be answered by someone knowledgeable from any location (and you can keep the number when you move to full land phone) so parents got the same response they would get from calling an open school. I cannot believe how many free schools don’t have a phone number, considering how many calls parents make to us. Parents need to talk to you, for reassurance as well as practical details.
Advertise Advertise effectively. Bus rear-end ads have given us the best return, they’ll be seen in the right geographical area by all people and you can normally get a good deal if you haggle. Use Mailchimp, Eventbrite and other free and effective tools for making you stay better engaged with your parents, as any growing business would.
The brilliant team This is a bit motherhood and apple pie but in pre-opening there are three crucial roles in addition to the founding team (which you should keep as lean and capable as possible):
Don’t expect all the ICT to work perfectly on day one unless you have some good on your side managing it. Make sure you have back up plans e.g. access to a 3/4G connection for when your broadband is not installed on time (this can take 6 months at least).
Collecting and Protecting your data: The Data Roadmap
Good housekeeping, safety and security of student data starts as soon as you receive applications. If you’re using collaboration tools like Google Apps for School, make sure you have signed the right model funding agreements for data processing outside the EU. Make a single person responsible for Data Security and Quality and put in place good practices before school opens. This will make the preparation for your pre-registration checks, opening day and first census all the more easy.
Make sure things you want to communicate electronically can be viewed on phones as well as computers to reach the widest possible audience. Arbor is free for Free Schools in pre-opening so you can use Arbor to send SMS to parents and begin building up profile data.
You can save yourself lots of time and errors with things like Google Forms or Survey Monkey, that can help you collect information from parents and new staff electronically, and leave you time to focus on the harder-to-reach parents, who might not have internet access or English as a first language.
In the next blog, I’ll focus on ICT in free schools.
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