Tag: Data and Insight
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The Data Drop: National phonics results 2025
Phonics results are in, and in this edition of The Data Drop, we’ve crunched the numbers to see how this year’s outcomes compare with previous years, including across different demographic groups. If you’re new here, The Data Drop is our regular blog series where we share insights from our data warehouse, which holds data from…
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The Data Drop: Which school clubs are the most popular?
The Data Drop is back! And this time we’ve taken a look at which clubs are the most popular across primary and secondary schools. For those that are new here, The Data Drop is our series of blogs where we share insights from our data warehouse (containing the data of over 7,000 schools.) In this…
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How Arbor keeps your school data safe
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)…
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The Data Drop: Have GCSE Results been affected by attendance and the pandemic?
We’ve crunched the numbers on over 3 million GCSE results to see how students have performed in their GCSEs this year versus last year. Over the past two years, there’s been a lot going on for both students and schools. These are the first normal “post-COVID” GCSEs, where students will most likely have studied for…
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The Data Drop: A Level Results Day 2024
We’ve had a really successful A Level results day at Arbor. Whilst our schools have been busy crunching their own data, we’ve been looking at the national picture for A Levels. As schools continue on the road to recovery after COVID, we wanted to compare the 2023 data to this year’s results to see if…
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Using Live Data in Policy Making: How Arbor and the GLA worked together to monitor Universal Free School Meals in London
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By Sara-Jane Millar (Principal Policy Officer for the Greater London Authority, UFSM Policy & Strategy), Hamish Child, Hazel Scourfield, Ulrik Street-Poulsen and Phil Bell (Arbor’s Data Team) – Background to the London scheme In 2023, the Mayor of London committed to fund Universal Free School Meals for all state-funded primary school pupils, as a one-year…
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Live National Benchmarks, now in Arbor’s BI Connector
The national education landscape is constantly changing – now more than ever before. Many schools have still been playing catch-up post-Covid, with attendance rates slow to increase, and suspensions on the rise. In a time where many of these trends are unprecedented, it’s more important than ever that school and MAT leaders have timely, relevant…
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The Data Drop: Three insights that should be on the new government’s mind
With Labour winning the election and ending 14 years of Conservative leadership, the new Education Secretary faces a difficult challenge. Attendance hasn’t recovered from the pandemic, schools are still struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, and wellbeing across staff and students is at an all time low. So, where should the new government start? Too often,…
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The wait is over for DfE Primary Assessment Benchmarks
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…
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The Data Drop – Attendance of Pupil Premium eligible and SEN students
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…
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The Data Drop: Staff absence in schools
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…
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What does a School Data Manager do?
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…
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5 ways School Data Managers are using Microsoft Power BI
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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. …
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5 easy steps to build a BI dashboard with your Arbor data
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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,…
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Announcing the new Understanding Your MAT Report – out now!
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…
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Breaking the link between deprivation and attainment in schools – article by Loic Menzies
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…
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What is BI and how can it help my trust?
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…
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KS1 & KS2 data for your MAT is now available in Group Insight!
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…
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How to reduce data entry at your school
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…
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A data manager’s guide to analysing your Key Stage 4 data
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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…
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KS1 & KS2 disadvantaged data is now available in Arbor Insight!
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…
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4 practical ways to centralise school data & back office ops
— 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…
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The DfE’s ASP service helps you ask the important questions – Arbor can help you answer them
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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.…
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How school governors can get to grips with data literacy
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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…
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6 steps to reduce teachers’ data workload
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…
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Ofsted, data and a school system in flux
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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…
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3 ways of centralising data for schools, MATs and LAs
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…