I’m super excited to welcome the schools, trusts and brilliant team behind Habitude to Arbor today. I wanted to take a moment to explain why we’re so excited to bring Habitude into the Arbor family, and to share some of our future plans together – and particularly what this means for the trusts we work with.
–
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
–
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.
–
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!
–
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.
