Introduction to Interventions in Arbor

What are interventions?

An intervention is any action that a school takes with a child or group of children outside normal day to day lessons with the aim of improving student progress, attainment and/or well-being. Interventions are an essential part of the day to day running of all schools, regardless of their size, status or age group.

• In some MISs, there's a different area to schedule an 'alternative curriculum' for students who will be out of lessons. You'd then need to set up an Intervention in a separate area to track their progress against their goals.
• In Arbor, this can all be done in one place with timetabling built-in using Interventions. You can easily manage the students in interventions when they join and leave throughout the year. You can measure the costs of the intervention by each staff member (any staff, not just limited to teachers), and whether it's had an impact by tracking whether the students have met certain outcome criteria.

Please note: The Arbor Interventions module is available as part of the Perform package.

Each intervention should:

• Have an impact that is closely monitored weekly or monthly etc
• Monitor cost needs
• Have a high level of student turnover
• Have specific outcomes
• Target a group of students
• Have outcomes that can be measured

How do interventions work in Arbor?

Setting up and using interventions

There are three types of interventions you can set up:

• Ad Hoc Interventions - these can be used to record when a student is in a different place than their normal lesson. You can see how to set these up here: Ad Hoc Interventions
• Interventions as an Alternative Curriculum - schedule timetable slots for the students to have dedicated time to work towards outcomes that you set. You can see how to set these up here: Setting up an Intervention, editing it and enrolling students
• Interventions to track student outcomes only - set up in the same way as above (without timetabled sessions), these interventions won't take the student out of their regular classes but can be used to track student group's progress or attendance for example.

Once the interventions are set up, you can add or remove students, and take attendance where you're running an alternative curriculum.

Finally, you can make sure students are achieving their outcomes: Review an Intervention. You can also track provision mapping and intervention costs. 

Intervention examples

Examples of Interventions you can run in Arbor:

• Academic e.g. a regular, scheduled after-school Maths booster, or a reading catch-up session
• Statistic-based e.g escalated attendance interventions for students with high rates of absence
• Behavioural e.g. a six-week anger-management course, or a behaviour support plan
• Pastoral e.g. a one-hour session each week to boost students' self-esteem, a mental health support workshop or SEN cohort interventions
• Ad hoc e.g. one on one interventions lead by a Teaching Assistant, group work in a different room, or a behavioural time-out
• Monitoring e.g. a group of students are assigned to a staff member for monitoring to get notifications and track their progress on the Homepage.