The Arbor School Management suite brings together best-in-class, specialist tools to support operations across your whole school or trust, and streamline the most time-consuming tasks and processes your staff face today. 

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What’s new in Arbor MIS

Basket in the Parent App

Parents can now buy multiple items quickly and efficiently by adding items to their Arbor Parent App basket, letting them make one transaction rather than several. Learn more.

Track assignments in the Student App

Following your feedback, students can now mark assignments as complete, and download attachments in the Arbor Student App. Students can easily track the tasks they’ve completed, and teachers don’t need to manually update the status of each assignment. Learn more.

Arbor AI Dashboard

If you haven’t already, make sure to take a look at the Arbor AI Dashboard, where you can review your school’s AI usage, and see how much fair use credit you have available. Learn more.

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What’s new in MAT MIS

Updates to Browse Institutions page

We’ve updated the Browse Institutions page on the MAT MIS to display as a list view by default. We’ve also added more table columns, including URN, Establishment Number, UKPRN, and Capacity, to give you quicker access to the details you need.

BI Connector updates

We’ve added a range of new and powerful datasets to the BI Connector. There’s a new Business Role Assignments dataset so you can check everyone has the right level of access, new attendance benchmarks that exclude guest students, and brand new benchmarks for special and PRU schools. Plus, our National Data Connector now includes pupil forecast figures from ONS to help you plan for future demographic changes.

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What’s live in Arbor Labs

Arbor Labs is the home for beta releases in Arbor. Test and influence our latest innovative features before anyone else. 

Current live Arbor Labs include:

Ask Arbor 

Ask Arbor – Student App

Suggest Cover

Create Custom Report

Auto Absence

Create intervention

Suggest formula

Student Dashboard

Venn Diagram Analysis

BI Viewer

Make sure to visit the Arbor Labs page in Arbor Labs to join a beta today. Learn more here.
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.

The post What’s new in January? appeared first on Arbor.

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Who is Habitude?

Habitude is the process and work automation platform for MATs. It uniquely gives trust central teams an education-specific, drag-and-drop workflow builder to automate any manual process in your MAT – from onboarding a new staff member, to managing in-year student admissions, approving expenses, pulling together an EHCP review, and much more!

Founded in 2022, Habitude was born from a simple insight: as MATs grow, so does their complexity. Work can get lost, move slowly or become invisible amidst that noise.

With Habitude, MATs can capture any of the trust-wide processes which flow between different systems, people, and datasets, and turn them into workflows which run automatically – keeping everyday work flowing, and your central team focused on the important stuff.

Why do MATs love Habitude?

Habitude can do anything from auto-sending emails when something needs actioning, to updating MAT systems, editing files, and refreshing information in spreadsheets. It does this all quickly and reliably, whilst showing you its progress so you have full visibility of all your tasks and progress at a MAT central team level.

Already used by 34 MATs and 290 schools, including LEO Multi-Academy Trust, Red Kite Learning Trust, and Dartmoor Multi-Academy Trust, Habitude currently replaces 10,000s admin tasks daily for trust central teams. Their top 5 most popular workflows include:

• Onboard a new staff member
• Follow your complaints procedure
• Approve a new role going live
• Off-board a staff member
• Manage an EHCP annual review

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Why did we want to bring Habitude into the Arbor family?

Because we believe that Habitude aligns with our mission to transform the way schools work for the better, and because we believe their product solves a real problem we hear about from the community of 700 trusts using Arbor today.

As MATs grow and work with more schools, processes, people, and systems, we’ve seen the increased operational challenges and complexities they encounter first-hand. Habitude ensures that as a MAT grows, so does its control over all its processes, meaning trusts can ensure compliance and save their staff huge amounts of time. This felt like a natural complement to Arbor MIS, and an exciting, new way for us to make a difference to the working lives of school and trust staff together.

With Arbor, SAMpeople, TimeTabler and Arbor Finance all now part of the Arbor School Management Suite, Habitude gives us a unique way to help MATs using Arbor deeply join up the processes that flow between them. We’re particularly excited about the opportunity for MATs using Arbor and SAMpeople to get the benefit of seamless staff onboarding, offboarding, annual review management and more via Habitude.

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How will Arbor and Habitude work together?

Initially, Habitude will remain a separate system which Arbor MATs can choose to buy into. 

Next, we’ll be bringing the Product and Engineering Teams at Habitude and Arbor together to work on bringing Habitude’s functionality into both Arbor’s School MIS and MAT MIS. This will give all schools and trusts using Arbor the game-changing ability to create and edit workflows in Arbor, connect Arbor to key tools like Google and Microsoft, automate forms, and manage eSignatures and approvals. We’re really excited to share a roadmap soon – watch this space! 

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Welcome to Ed, Izzi & Josh!

I finally wanted to end by saying a huge welcome to Habitude’s founders, Ed Butcher and Izzi Dorrian, and Lead Developer Josh Sutheran. Because of your background as former MAT leaders, Trustees and teachers you’ve built a brilliant product and community of users, and we’re excited to work with a team who are so passionate about making a lasting, positive impact on the sector. I can’t wait to see what we achieve together!

Want to learn more about Habitude? Come and see the product live at Bett from 22nd-24th January 2025 (we’ll all be at stand SJ31), or book a call with Habitude here to get a personalised demo for your trust.

The post Welcoming Habitude to Arbor appeared first on Arbor.

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Our favourite School MIS releases

Settlement summary report

We’re working on making payment reconciliation a less manual and time-consuming process. Our new ‘Settlement Summary’ report lets you group payments by Description, Accounting Code, or Customer Account Type so you can easily reconcile weekly payouts according to your school’s needs. Learn more. 

Arbor Student App

Give your students a convenient and intuitive way to access day-to-day school information, understand their progress, and receive in-app messages. The app makes communicating with students straightforward and simple, without the need for another third party system. Learn more.

Integration with helloData

We’re excited to partner with helloData to give you even more ways to visualise and analyse your assessment data! With our new integration, schools can set up their assessments and enter marks in Arbor, then use helloData’s interactive reports to analyse performance and identify your school improvement priorities quickly. Learn more.

Easily find past mail merges

We’ve made it quicker and easier to find your sent mail merges for email, SMS, in-apps and letters. Choose between ‘exact word’ match or ‘include any words’, or apply a date range to narrow down your communication search results. Learn more.

New BI Connector Datasets

Throughout autumn we’ve added lots of new datasets to our BI Connector – over 30 in total! Analyse even more of your school data, including Payments, Point Awards, Houses, Gifts and Talents and much more. We’ve added the English Deprivation Indices Dataset to our National Data Connector, so you no longer need to download and import the data in manually. A full list of BI Connector datasets is on our Help Centre.

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Our favourite MAT MIS releases

Consent Types Pushdown 

Align your schools’ consent types with our new pushdown in MAT MIS! Set consent types across your trust, giving you full oversight over consent collection and recording, and more robust data for safeguarding. Learn more.

School Ofsted details in MAT MIS

Head to the brand new Ofsted Inspections page in your MAT MIS to see Ofsted details for all your schools in one place – it even includes your schools not yet using Arbor. Learn more.

Staff Development in MAT MIS

You can now keep development records for central team staff and support their CPD aims in the same way you can for school staff. We’ve added Training Courses, Appraisals, and Objectives to the Staff Development area of MAT MIS. Learn more.

SAMpeople Data Connector

Analyse your HR data alongside your MIS data! Stream your HRIS data from SAMpeople into your BI tool, so you can easily spot trends and make informed decisions with your HR and MIS data. Learn more.

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.

The post Autumn term 2025 in review appeared first on Arbor.

The Arbor School Management suite brings together best-in-class, specialist tools to support operations across your whole school or trust, and streamline the most time-consuming tasks and processes your staff face today. 

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What’s new in Arbor MIS?

Arbor Student App

The Student App is here! Give your students a convenient and intuitive way to access day-to-day school information, understand their progress, and receive in-app messages. The app makes communicating with students straightforward and simple, without the need for another third party system. Learn more.

New BI Connector Datasets

We’ve released a whopping 24 new datasets to our BI Connector! Analyse even more of your school data, including Payments, Point Awards, Gifts and Talents and much more. A full list of BI Connector datasets is on our Help Centre.

Wraparound Care and Clubs

We’ve made improvements to managing wraparound care, including the ability to show specific weekdays when cancelling sessions, as well as an updated registration status for wraparound care clubs. Plus, we’ve made it simpler for parents to see which clubs their children are signed up to on the Parent Portal.

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What’s new in MAT MIS?

Consent Types Pushdown 

Align your schools’ consent types with our new pushdown in MAT MIS! Set consent types across your trust, giving you full oversight over consent collection and recording, and more robust data for safeguarding. Learn more.

School Ofsted details in MAT MIS

Head to the brand new Ofsted Inspections page in your MAT MIS to see Ofsted details for all your schools in one place – it even includes your schools not yet using Arbor. Learn more.

SAMpeople Data Connector

Analyse your HR data alongside your MIS data! Stream your HRIS data from SAMpeople into your BI tool, so you can easily spot trends and make informed decisions with your HR and MIS data. Learn more.

What’s live in Arbor Labs

Arbor Labs is the home for beta releases in Arbor. Test and influence our latest innovative features before anyone else. 

Current live Arbor Labs include:

Ask Arbor – NEW

Ask Arbor – Student App

Suggest Cover

Create Custom Report

Auto Absence

Create intervention

Suggest formula

Student Dashboard

Venn Diagram Analysis

BI Viewer

Make sure to visit the Arbor Labs page in Arbor Labs to join a beta today. Learn more here.

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.

The post What’s new in November?  appeared first on Arbor.

We also know that in fast paced schools keeping staff, parents, and students in the loop can be challenging – especially when you’re dealing with multiple systems and changing information.

That’s why we’ve built the Arbor Student App – so you can easily communicate with your students, and they have the information they need to understand their own progress and performance – on the device they use the most.

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Introducing the Arbor Student App for iOS and Android

The Arbor Student App gives students a convenient and intuitive way to access day-to-day school information. It makes communicating with students straightforward and simple, without the need for another third party system, or relying on parents.

Remove another third party system: Send all your comms from Arbor, without the need for a separate comms system just for students.

Encourage students to be accountable: Students can see their behaviour points and exactly when and why they’ve been awarded them. Plus, upcoming assignments and their attendance record.

Speak directly to your students: Whether it’s a non-uniform day or a room change reminder – easily send in-app messages to any group of students.

Fewer questions for you: Students’ can get to their calendar in seconds, and with Ask Arbor, powered by AI, students can find out information about their day without relying on office staff*. 

*Ask Arbor in the Student App is currently available in Arbor Labs

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For more information on the Arbor Student App and how to bring your student engagement workflows into Arbor, visit our Help Centre.

The Student App is available in our School MIS Comms and Perform packages. 

Not sure if you have access? If you’re a customer, get in touch at customersales@arbor-education.com and the team will be happy to help.

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The post The Arbor Student App is here appeared first on Arbor.

Welcome back to the second half of the autumn term! We hope you had a good start to the autumn term and have been discovering some of our latest exciting improvements and brand-new features across Arbor MIS.

The Arbor School Management suite brings together best-in-class, specialist tools to support operations across your whole school or trust, and streamline the most time-consuming tasks and processes your staff face today. 

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What’s new across Arbor?

Settlement summary report

As part of our improvement to make payment reconciliation a less manual and time-consuming process, our new ‘Settlement Summary’ report lets you group payments by Description, Accounting Code, or Customer Account Type. Letting you can easily reconcile weekly payouts according to your school’s needs. Learn more

New integration with helloData

We’re excited to partner with helloData to give you even more ways to visualise and analyse your assessment data! With our new integration, schools can set up their assessments and enter marks in Arbor, then use helloData’s interactive reports to analyse performance and identify your school improvement priorities quickly. Learn more

Tes Timetable (Edval) integration improvements

For schools using Tes Timetabler, we’ve made improvements to your timetable importing process. You no longer need to end all timetable slots and re-import your entire timetable for small changes. Now, you can master your timetable in Tes Timetable and import only the necessary changes to Arbor. Learn more

New BI Connector data sets

You can now access even more MIS data in your BI tool via our BI Connector. We’ve added a new Attendance Summary dataset to our BI Connector, giving you a student-level summary of year-to-date roll call attendance.

What’s live in Arbor Labs

Arbor Labs is the home for beta releases in Arbor. Test and influence our latest innovative features before anyone else. 

Current live Arbor Labs include:

Student Dashboard – NEW

Arbor Student App

Venn Diagram Analysis

Ask Arbor Cover Suggestions

BI Viewer

Ask Arbor Custom Report Writer

Ask Arbor Absence Notes

Ask Arbor Intervention Setup

Make sure to visit the Arbor Labs page in Arbor Labs to join a beta today. Learn more here 

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.

The post What’s new in October? appeared first on Arbor.

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What’s new in Arbor MIS

Arbor School MIS is the heart of operations and data for schools across the UK. Here are just some of our recent launches and updates: 

Easily find past mail merges

We’ve made it quicker and easier to find your sent mail merges for email, SMS, in-apps and letters. Choose between ‘exact word’ match or ‘include any words’, or apply a date range to narrow down your communication search results.

New datasets in the BI Connector

We’ve added the English Deprivation Indices Dataset to our National Data Connector, so you no longer need to download and import the data in manually. This data gives schools a more holistic understanding of the backgrounds of their students. 

We’ve also added datasets on student houses and house tutors. You can access these datasets, including our free National Data Connector, via Arbor’s BI Connector.

Ask Arbor bulk actions

For schools using our AI powered Ask Arbor features, instead of giving staff permission to use AI features one by one, you can now enable staff access in bulk.

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What’s new in MAT MIS

Arbor MAT MIS is your MAT’s mission control. Here are just some of our recent launches and updates: 

Staff Development in MAT MIS 

You can now manage your staff’s development in MAT MIS. View Central Team staff appraisals directly from MAT MIS and set and manage their objectives the same way you do for your school staff. Staff Development in MAT MIS is ideal if you want to manage your central team’s development but don’t have a full HR Information System. Learn more here 

What’s live in Arbor Labs

Arbor Labs is the home for beta releases in Arbor. Test and influence our latest innovative features before anyone else. 

Current live Arbor Labs include:

Arbor Student App

Venn Diagram Analysis

BI Viewer 

Ask Arbor Cover Suggestions

Ask Arbor Custom Report Writer 

Ask Arbor Absence Notes

Ask Arbor Intervention Setup 

Make sure to visit the Arbor Labs page in Arbor Labs to join a beta today. Learn more here 

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.

The post What’s new in September?  appeared first on Arbor.

We’ve released over 330 new and improved features over the past year. Here are just some of our favourites.

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1. Unique identifiers in data exports: You no longer need to build a whole new custom report for unique identifiers. Select unique identifiers to include in your datasets when exporting student data from any table in Arbor. Learn more here

2. Bulk Edit Assessment Periods: You can now reuse reports from previous terms without manually editing each column. We’ve added a Bulk Edit Assessment Periods button to the Custom Report Writer to make it quicker and easier to edit your custom assessment reports. Learn more here

3. Report on Summative Mark Comments in the Custom Report Writer: Summative Mark Comment is now available as a reportable field in the Custom Report Writer. Perfect for pulling comments into your Custom Report Cards! Learn more here

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1. Update pay scales across your MAT: Save so much time by managing your schools’ pay scales without needing to log in to each individual school site. Update your pay scales in MAT MIS, then push them down to your schools with the click of a button. Learn more here

2. Improvements to meals: No longer have parents ringing the school office to find out what meal choices they choose! Parents can now see which meal they selected after the deadline has passed. Learn more here

3. Post-16 School Census. No more double-counting of planned learning hours when a student transfers. Arbor now only includes programme enrolments between the start of the last year and the autumn census date. Learn more here

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1. Tables to Charts. You can now create charts straight from any table with numeric values in Arbor, including in custom reports. Create graphs in your chosen colour and style and export them to add to presentations or share with others. Learn more here

2. Payments visibility in the Parent Portal and Arbor Parent App. We’ve made it easier to view outstanding payments, so you can spend less time chasing parents for money owed. The new Total Outstanding figure on the homepage lets parents know how much they owe the school across all top-up accounts, Trips and Clubs. Learn more here

3. Arbor now integrates with NFER. Our integration with the National Foundation for Educational Research’s free online analysis tool means you can now see assessment data in Arbor MIS and MAT MIS, giving you the full picture of student progress across your trust. Learn more here

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1. Parental Engagement in MAT MIS. See, 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. Improved navigation across Arbor. We’ve made it easier to find your way around Arbor. Use breadcrumbs to see exactly where you are, and navigate between pages more easily. Click on the breadcrumbs to see the parent page, or expand them to see the entire path to the page. Learn more here

3. Printable timetables from the Parent App. You can now easily give your parents the ability to download a printable PDF of their children’s timetable from their Parent Portal. Learn more here

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1. Arbor integrates with SAMpeople. We’re thrilled to partner with SAMpeople so that Arbor MATs can bring a best-of-breed HRIS into their ecosystem. 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. Learn more here

2. Send comms from Trips. Perfect for sending last minute updates or reminders to parents, you can now send SMS and in-app messages from within the Trips module. Learn more here

3. Report on exam fees. You can now report on exam fees in Arbor, which will give you oversight over your exam entries budget and help you plan ahead. Learn more here–

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1. Enhanced BI Connector. We launched our enhanced BI Connector with 2x more data sets and over 1,000 data fields. New data views include Lesson Attendance, Detentions, Interventions, Student SEN Needs and Clubs. Learn more here

2. Custom Data Warehouse. Get a holistic view of your trust and what your data is telling you. Use Arbor’s Custom Data Warehouse to load your data into our managed infrastructure, letting you report on data from all your sources in one place. Learn more here

3. Programmes of study and courses. When withdrawing individual students from programmes, you now have the option to withdraw them from courses linked to the programme instance, saving you time and repetitiveness. Learn more here

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1. Favourite your most used pages. Save the pages and actions you use most often, so you can get to them quickly and easily every day – simply click on the star icon. Learn more here

2. Ofsted and IDACI data in the BI Connector. If you’re using the BI Connector, you can now analyse Ofsted and IDACI data alongside your MIS data! Compare your own Ofsted rating with schools nationwide, or find students’ IDACI decile and postcode with ease. Learn more here

3. Assessment Analysis in MAT MIS. You can now view a full year of Cohort or Mark Level assessment data in MAT MIS rather than just one reporting period per year. Learn more here

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1. Exclude staff from cover. Scheduling cover got easier. You can now exclude staff from cover, so you don’t need to wade through a long list of all staff in the available staff dropdown. Learn more here

2. Search improvements. We’ve made it easier for you to find what you’re looking for in Arbor by adding more fields into the global search. Now when you search, you’ll be shown similar pages and synonyms. Plus, you can now search for your favourited pages too – even the ones you’ve renamed. Learn more here

3. Hide and create exam assessables. We’ve made some updates to exam assessables to make Exam Officers’ lives a bit easier, and avoid manual workarounds. Now you can mark an assessable as ‘do not show’ in the scheduling section of Arbor. Plus, you can create your own custom assessables that won’t affect Entries or Results. Learn more here

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1. Group Staff in the Custom Report Writer. To get more comprehensive trust-wide reporting options, you can now create reports in the Custom Report Writer that cover both your school staff and central team in the same report. Learn more here

2. Lesson observation reporting. To assist in your staff development, we’ve made it easier to export your lesson observation data out of Arbor by adding a new base report for observations to the Custom Report Writer. Learn more here

3. Improvements to managing cover. Don’t want to send your cover emails straight away? To help you plan your cover in advance or remind staff of upcoming cover, you can now email your staff after you’ve arranged cover. Learn more here

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1. Arbor Labs. Beta releases have a new home where you can test and influence our latest innovative features before anyone else. Learn more here

2. Synonyms in the search bar. Every MIS names things a bit differently. Now, you can search using the terms familiar to you, and we’ll show you the most similar area and what it’s called in Arbor. Synonyms in the search bar are based on terminology from SIMS, Bromcom, ScholarPack, Integris and Timetabler. Learn more here

3. New bulk actions for club sessions. To make club management easier and quicker, you can now log behaviour points and incidents for a specific club session for multiple students at once. Learn more here

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1. Live National Benchmarks in the BI Connector. We’ve expanded our popular Live National Benchmarks feature. We’ve added this functionality to the BI Connector with even more data sets. Updated daily and covering key metrics including Attendance, Suspension and Permanent Exclusion Rates, and Trip Rates – the benchmarks give you the crucial national context you need to lead your school. Learn more here

2. Arranging Cover. We’ve created a brand new Arrange Cover page to bring your cover information together in one place to give better visibility over staff availability and workload, helping you to make informed decisions about cover quickly and easily. You no longer need to have multiple tabs open at the same time, you can now compare absent staff’s timetables at the same time as cover requirements. Learn more here

3. Logging absences on the Parent Portal and Arbor App. Your parents can now log absence notes through the Arbor Parent App or Parent Portal. You can access all absence requests in one centrally managed place, letting you identify and action unexplained absences much earlier in the day and giving you more time to focus on supporting students and families to improve their attendance in school. Learn more here

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1. Staff Development in MAT MIS. You can now manage your staff’s development in MAT MIS. View Central Team staff appraisals directly from MAT MIS and set and manage their objectives the same way you do for your school staff. Staff Development in MAT MIS is ideal if you want to manage your central team’s development but don’t have a full HR Information System. Learn more here

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To keep up-to-date with all our latest releases, visit our Change Log. Or, find out what we are working on next and give feedback on our Product 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.

The post Arbor’s year in review appeared first on Arbor.

SAMpeople and FusionHR are education HR specialists. Their HR and recruitment software, payroll bureau, and HR advice and consultancy helps over 1,700 schools and trusts stay ahead of critical people tasks, confidently navigate challenges, and create outstanding places to work and learn.

I wanted to explain why we chose to acquire SAMpeople and FusionHR, and what this means for the schools and trusts we work with.

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Why are we bringing school MIS and HR together?

At Arbor, our mission is to transform the way schools work for the better. And we’ve always believed the best way to do that is by building software that makes a meaningful difference to the working lives of school and trust staff. 

We’re really proud that over 6,000 schools and 400 trusts use Arbor everyday to understand their data, work better together, and manage operational work.

But getting the right MIS in place is only one part of the puzzle when it comes to supporting happier working lives in schools. With over 950,000 staff working in schools, getting an easy-to-use HR system, and HR advice you can trust, play an equally important role in shaping the wider culture of a school, and improving the day-to-day experience of teachers, support staff, and SLT. 

In particular, we know that MATs require people software specifically suited to their needs to help them grow and scale effectively – and MIS systems do not have the right functionality for this as MATs scale. As a result, far too often the schools and trusts we work with tell us they’re still using spreadsheets or paper-based systems to manage their teams. 

So we’re thrilled to welcome SAMpeople and FusionHR into the Arbor family today to change all of that. By working together, our goal is to help MATs bring a best-of-breed HR system into their ecosystem – helping them manage their full people experience from recruitment, to onboarding, to staff development, to cover management, and much more. Importantly, using Arbor’s Data Warehouse, MATs will finally be able to see all their data in one place, including HR, recruitment and MIS data side-by-side, giving leaders a single view of your trust. 

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Why SAMpeople and FusionHR?

We wanted to work with SAMpeople and FusionHR because they uniquely blend education HR expertise with leading people management software. Their core product, SAMpeople, is the fastest-growing HR system for schools and trusts. Thoughtfully designed by in-house people specialists with years of experience supporting trusts and schools, it brings together everything you need to get oversight and visibility across your trust, centralise policies and processes, and make life easier for staff and HR teams alike.

The team behind SAMpeople also share our passion for changing the way schools work for the better, making them the perfect partners for this next step. 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.

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What does this mean for Arbor and the schools and MATs we work with?

With SAMpeople, TimeTabler and Arbor Finance in our group, Arbor can now offer a family of best-of-breed management software to schools, trusts and LAs. All of the products in our group already integrate deeply with Arbor MIS, giving school and trust teams an easy way to manage staff data and workflows across their organisation, and one place to visualise their data. We’ll be working next on bringing our products together into an integrated suite of tools.

Ultimately this means Arbor can help save staff time with an even greater proportion of back-office operations, helping schools to transform the way they work for the better. We’re particularly excited about the possibilities this unlocks for flexible working, simpler cover management, and easier staff onboarding. We’ll also soon be able to provide better insights to school and trust leaders on the interplay between budget, staffing, school management, and scheduling. Watch this space!

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Will we continue to offer SAMpeople to MATs using other MIS software?

Absolutely. We strongly believe that all schools deserve to use the best tools and software, and that they should have choice – regardless of which MIS they use. 

We will also continue to support schools and MATs using Arbor with a different HR system.

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What will happen next?

We plan to use our increased size and scale to focus on improving product innovation and support across all our brands, and customers should see a marked increase in value as a result.

I’m excited for this next stage in our mission, and look forward to hearing your thoughts!

P.S. Interested in seeing SAMpeople? Click here to book a demo with their team

The post Welcoming SAMpeople and FusionHR to Arbor appeared first on Arbor.

In my opinion, one of the most exciting releases of the summer term was the launch of Arbor Labs! The new home for beta releases on School and MAT MIS, where you can test and influence our latest innovative features before anyone else. Live betas include:

AI Custom Report Writer

AI Custom Report Writer Formula Fields

BI Viewer

AI Absence Notes

Ask Arbor Assistant

Make sure to check the Arbor Labs page, where we’ll continue to add new experiments. Learn more here

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Favourite releases for schools

1. Live National Benchmarks in the BI Connector. We’ve expanded our popular Live National Benchmarks feature that we launched last year. We’ve added this functionality to the BI Connector with even more data sets. Updated daily and covering key metrics including Attendance, Suspension and Permanent Exclusion Rates, and Trip Rates – the benchmarks give you the crucial national context you need to lead your school. Learn more here

2. Cover improvements. We’ve created a brand new Arrange Cover page to bring your cover information together in one place to give better visibility over staff availability and workload, helping you to make informed decisions about cover quickly and easily. You no longer need to have multiple tabs open at the same time, you can now compare absent staff’s timetables at the same time as cover requirements. Learn more here

3. Logging absences on the Parent Portal and Arbor App. Your parents can now log absence notes through the Arbor Parent App or Parent Portal. You can access all absence requests in one centrally managed place, letting you identify and action unexplained absences much earlier in the day and giving you more time to focus on supporting students and families to improve their attendance in school. Learn more here

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Favourite releases for MAT central teams

1. Group Staff in the Custom Report Writer. Get comprehensive trust-wide reporting covering both your school staff and central team in the same report using the Custom Report Writer. Learn more here

2. Staff Contract Post Custom Report. We’ve added a new type of report in MAT MIS for Staff Contract Post. This gives you salary/contract information for all school and trust staff in one place. This new report will let you combine everything in one easy step and help you to spot check any gaps in data ahead of a Workforce Census, rather than logging into each school. 

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Favourite releases for both schools and MATs

1. A smarter way to search. We’ve added even more ways to find what you’re looking for in Arbor. You can now filter your search results by the type of information you’re looking for, start your search with a question, or search using the terms familiar to you. We’ll show you the most similar area and what it’s called in Arbor. Learn more here

2. A brand new sidebar. Easily get to your essential everyday tools from any page in the MIS with the sidebar. Jump into your Favourites, Calendar, Notifications, or Emergency Alerts with just one click. Learn more here

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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.

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