This article explains how to add and manage training courses for staff in the School MIS, including setting up courses, adding training events, and managing staff participation. It also covers the permissions required and the process for deleting courses and events.
You can set up training courses and events on courses to track which staff have undergone which training, such as first aid.
Please note that Staff Training is included in our Perform packages. All other Arbor packages won’t have this feature by default. Want to upgrade or find out what package you’re on? Just get in contact with our Partnership Team by emailing customersales@arbor-education.com
Permissions
Please note that you’ll need the All Staff: Basic HR Administration permission to create and edit training courses. If you don't have the permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.
Setting up a new course
Adding the course
Go to School > All Staff > Staff Development > Training Courses > All Training Courses. You can view all the current training courses set up, or add a new one by clicking +Add.
A slide over will appear for you to enter details about the training course you are creating, then click the green Create training course button.
Can't select an Organiser? Add it to your Linked Organisations as an Educational Institution.
Adding the training event
Next, you will want to add a Training Event for this course and add staff members. Click on the Training Course name and a slide over will appear showing the course details. Select More to reach the Training Course Overview page.
Click the Add Event button.
A slide over will appear for you to enter details about the Training Event you are creating, then click the Add Training Event button.
Adding staff
To add staff members to the training course, click +Add.
A slide over will appear for you to select staff members to add. If fees are to be recorded for each staff member, the details can be added here.
The members of staff attending the event will now be listed on the Training Course Overview page. You'll also be able to view them on the Course Attendance page and sort columns based on expiry date.
Removing training
Go to School > All Staff > Staff Development > Training Courses > All Training Courses and click the training, then click More.
Deleting the training
Click the red button on the right-hand side. This will delete the training course completely from your site, including removing it from all staff profiles. This is not reversible.
Can we delete one event?
It isn't possible to delete one event in the training course. You would need to delete the training course and set it up again.
Removing staff from training
Click on the row containing the name of the staff member.
Click the Remove person from course button.
Can we remove staff from one event?
It isn't possible to remove staff from one event in a training course. This is because staff must complete all events to complete the course. If you want staff to not attend all events, please follow these instructions.
Does training add a staff absences or flag cover?
Adding a staff member to a training course will not automatically record an absence for them. This means it also will not automatically flag that cover is required.
You can see how to record absences (which will then flag cover needed) by following these instructions.
Comments
We are finding updating our training records extremely time consuming. There are so many courses that have pulled through from our old MIS
There are loads of repetitions and each time you want to look at /amend any training courses you have to scroll right down the massive list until you find the one you want to amend.
Is there a faster way please that will make it less time consuming and if not, please could we request that another way is investigated as soon as possible?
Thank you
Penny Harrison
Hi Penny,
I completely understand what you mean about this being time-consuming! You probably know that we change Arbor based on feedback and we really appreciate your thoughts on this. We usually collect feedback on our public roadmap so that we can track how many schools are interested in a change and what they want the area to look like in the future so we can make this work the best it can for you. I've checked and we don't have a space for staff training improvements on our roadmap yet but I will bring this up with our team to see if we can add this to it. Once that's done it would be great to have your feedback on this area. You can see how to submit feedback to us here.
I agree with Penny. Logging and reporting on CPD / training is very important in a school environment and this part of Arbor seems to be the only aspect of the MIS that isn't intuitive.
Could training course be linked into header groups (Safeguarding, Health and Safety, Curriculum, Leadership, etc) and then have the events categorised under these to allow easier navigation and housekeeping?
Kind regards
Chris
That is a great idea Chris. Thanks for suggesting the header groups.
Kind regards
Penny
Is there any way of adding staff to the actual Event rather than the course - you may have a course running on different dates and I need to be able to tell which staff attended on which day?
Hi Caroline, to track which staff attend on each day, you could set up an event as well.
Can external training venues be listed for location. The only option I see are internal rooms / gym / sports field?
Hi Sheryl, to add more locations, you would need to set them up.
Recording training courses has always been so unwieldy in Arbor. Great if all staff are attending a first aid - super quick. However, during our various lockdowns, many staff completed online training courses. I have a 1inch thick pile of certificates from staff. It would be fabulous if I could upload certificates to their records rather than havaing to set up courses, then events, then allocate them to the course.
Hi Bev, I can see that you've previously asked this here. This would need to be submitted as feedback as this isn't currently possible.
Hi, I am finding the same and agree with Penny, Caroline and Bev. This is not a user friendly area of Arbor, infact I do not find any of the staff / HR side of Arbor user friendly. It is frustrating that you create the training course, it the disappears in a huge long list of training courses, you then have to scroll through hundreds of courses to find the right one to then add an event (which is basically the same as the training course) to the add 1 staff member. Caroline is right, it would make more sense to have the title of the training course as say "Working at Heights" but then within that course you add an event that each individual staff member attended. We are the same as Bev, we issue the online training but staff do not always complete it on the same day, so for 1 training course we may have over 100 entries as each member of staff will complete it on a different day. Also there is no way to duplicate a course, at least in Sims you could copy a course and just change the date and you only had to enter the details once and not have to create the course and add an event, I do not see the purpose of adding an event. Also in Sims you could search for a course, you did not have to scroll through a list of thousands of courses to find the one you are looking for. We issue at least 6 annual trainings with 126 staff that is a minimum of 882 courses per year!
This is exactly what I'm trying to say Sam - we need to be able to add people to to training evenr rather than the course do the correct date of attendance shows.
Totally agree with Sam Osborn above. We have tried several routes including the ones suggested, and we still find it very time consuming and cumbersome trying to add any training on Arbor. The promise of Arbor saving us loads of time is actually making a very simple task complicated and extremely time consuming.
We need to record the PDF certificates that we receive from staff and to do so it means repeating the job as it is not just a case of simply adding the certificates on Arbor. You always have to go back to somewhere you don't want to be! (The same with staff absences)
We are looking forward to hearing a positive outcome very soon....
We are paying a lot of money for this service and the response of we should add it to the roadmap is not very helpful - surely Arbor should be checking the software is suitable for all schools, not putting the onus on us to add suggestions to the roadmap that we then have no idea if it is being looked at / thought about or acted upon.
Thanks everyone for agreeing with the original comment and expanding this thread.
Absolutely agree, the training section on Arbor is, well woeful. I currently have 396 courses listed including 17 child protection courses, 5 emergency first aid courses and 16 Paediatric courses. All these courses will need doing again so I will have to add yet another course. It would make much more sense to be able to have paediatric first aid listed once then I can add the date and the attendees to that course.
Hi
I agree with all the feedback above. We moved over to Arbor from SIMS last April, and would like to be in a position where we can confidently use Arbor to record training, particularly for induction and safeguarding, so it is easily accessible, and clear.
Would it be possible to set up a focus group to develop this part of Arbor, as it is a very important element that schools require from the IMS?
I am so with you guys! This is driving me to distraction! I am trying to move from using a spreadsheet to putting everything on Arbor so I can run reports.
I have a ridiculous amount of course/events showing (why do we have to create an event within a course and call it the same thing?). I also want to report on costs ie for the year or per person but I can't seem to do that either - what's the point of putting costs in if you can't report on it (happy to be corrected if this is the case!)
I really thought this system was all singing all dancing but it would appear not!
Back to the spreadsheet I guess!!!
Just reading through the comments/feedback so far and completely agree this is an area that is substandard compared to the rest of Arbor. What an absolute pain to add CPD! Surely this can be developed to make it easier for the user? Why can't a person attending training be added to the event they attend rather than the training? For example, I have 5 staff members who have attended the same 2 day First Aid course but on different dates. The way I see it I have to set up the training for each of them otherwise it shows that they all attended all 5 events if I try to do it under one?
Hi everyone! Really appreciate what you've shared! Our product team doesn't monitor the community, so to highlight this to them, we'd really appreciate it if you'd add all your thoughts for them to consider for the roadmap. You can add your feedback here.
Arbor not monitoring these pages is another issue we have with Arbor, it is very time consuming to add things to the roadmap, I spent a whole day back in February adding things to the road map but you never hear anything back and it is so time consuming finding where to add it, Arbor could get lots of feedback from these pages and just do not seem to be very responsive to the issues we are having, or even seem to really care, all you ever got told is 'add it to the roadmap', there never seems to actually be any help or resolution from Arbor. It would be much more helpful of Arbor who monitor this page to take customer comments and progress them further without us having to trawl through the road map to find someone to add this feedback!
Absolutely agree with SAM. I tried to add something to the roadmap, but it would not let me as we are part of a MAT. Apparently MAT's have a designated person who can add things to the road map. I have no idea who this is. It is also likely that they are based at a secondary school and that their needs and our needs are very different.
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