You may have created an extra student profile accidentally, perhaps after importing a CTF or adding an applicant and not matching them to an existing student profile.
You can easily identify and resolve suspected duplicate records for:
- student duplicates in preparation for DfE School Census (shown below)
- guardian duplicates to improve communication to guardians and save costs on avoiding to send multiple text messages to the same guardians
- staff duplicates in preparation for DfE School Workforce Census
Please note that once a profile merge or deletion has been carried out this cannot be undone, so be sure to carefully check the profiles you intend to merge or delete before carrying out the operation.
Merging or deleting duplicate student profiles
When the system has been able to identify a duplicate student, everyone with the School: General Admin: Administer permission (your admin team, Head Teachers and SLT by default) will see this in their to-do list.
To resolve the duplicate, click the item in your to-do list, or go to School > Data > Data Quality Dashboard and scroll down to Suspected Duplicates > Students.
On the Suspected Duplicates page, you'll see any pending, unresolved and resolved duplicates, and merge requests pending approval. Arbor colour codes the potential matches based on how many fields on both profiles are the same.
Click on a duplicate to decide how to merge or delete them. You can use the comparison table to help you decide which profile to keep. More guidance on which to choose can be found in the Which resolution should I use? drop-down.
You won't be able to delete or merge any students who have attendance marks logged on their profile:
- If neither students have attendance marks, you'll be able to choose which profile to merge with the other or choose to delete one.
- If one student has attendance marks, you'll only be able to merge the profile without attendance marks into the one with attendance marks or delete the profile without attendance marks.
- If both students have attendance marks, you will only see the option to keep the records separate.
If you need to delete any student's attendance marks to enable a merge or deletion, you can do this following these instructions.
When merging, blank fields in the kept profile will be filled by information from the merged profile, and if conflicting information exists for a field, the information from the kept profile will be kept.
Click Resolve to implement the changes.
If you are choosing to merge a duplicate, this must be approved by another staff member in your school who also has the School: General Admin: Administer permission. Select which staff member you would like to request approval from, confirm your choice and click Request approval.
Please note: both you and the approving staff member must have an email address on their profile in order for the approval and resolution emails to be sent through.
You will then see a message that an email has been sent to the approver.
The merge request will then move to the Pending approval tab until it is rejected or approved by the staff member.
You cannot mark it as approved, but you can mark the request as not approved to reject the resolution, for example, if you selected the wrong one. Please note: this will not recall the email to the staff member.
The staff member who has been asked to confirm or reject the merge will receive an email with a link to the duplicate, and a notification in Arbor.
They can then choose whether to approve the merge or not.
If they approve the merge, the profiles will be merged, the requester will get a notification and an email, and the duplicate flag will move to the Resolved tab.
If they do not approve the merge, the requester will get a notification and an email, and the duplicates will move back to the Unresolved tab.
Deleting an applicant who has never been enrolled
If the student is an applicant and hasn't been enrolled in your school, you can delete them yourself from their student profile.
Type the student's name into your search box and hit enter to go to the master search. Click All results from the left-hand side and click the one that has a note of 'Applicant'.
On their student profile, select Enrolment from the left-hand menu, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click their application.
In the slide over click the orange Edit button, then click the red Delete Application and Student button.
Deleting a student who is not flagging as a duplicate
Please note: You should only ever delete a student who never actually attended your school eg. they never arrived and had attendance marks put in by mistake or duplicate profiles of existing students that you need to remove.
To delete a student, you'll need to make sure they haven't had any attendance marks recorded on their profile. If they do, you'll need to remove the marks using these instructions.
Then scroll down to the bottom of their student profile to the Admin Function section and select Delete Student.
Select whether to also delete any guardians who are only linked to this student's profile, and confirm that you understand the consequences. You can then delete the student.
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