Changing your assessment policy

This article contains some tips about what to do if you're currently using Arbor assessments and want to change your policy.

For setting up assessments for the first time, get started by following these Introduction to Arbor Assessments guides:

• Primaries
• Secondaries
• MATs

MAT-wide assessment policy

If you're part of a MAT wanting to change your MAT-wide centralised policy, please note that changing the assessment policy across all your schools can take some time to implement well. You'll need to consider:

• whether your schools will only use your trust-wide assessments or continue also using their own
• if you want to move marks from existing assessments using our marks migrator
• how often you'll be collecting data - assessments need to be using the same assessment periods for your MAT analysis to work (Termly or Half-termly, not custom)

As such, we recommend booking an Assessment Consultation.

To book in your consultation, please email your Account Manager at accountmanagers@arbor-education.com. You can also see more information about the training we offer here: Personalised Assessment Training Service.

School assessment policies

If your school isn't part of a MAT or use Arbor Assessments independently, you can make changes to your setup at any time. However, we would usually recommend doing this at the end of the year/start of new year.

For any large changes in policy, we would also recommend booking an Assessment Consultation.

Ready for the start of the new year

You won't need to 'switch off' anything. You'll just need to not copy over the old assessments to next year's Annual Policy.

Not deleting the assessments means that if people need to view analysis for previous academic years they can! Bear in mind that if you have changed your marking scale it will be difficult to compare data across years.

Then at the start of the new academic year, you'll need to set up your new assessments from scratch and add them to both your Assessment Framework, and your Annual Policy for the new school year. You can see how to do this here for Primaries and here for Secondaries.

Mid-year changes

If you're sure that you need to change your policy during the academic year, you'll need to decide whether you want to keep the assessment data within the old assessment, or transfer it to the new assessment and remove the old one.

If you want to keep your old assessments

• just stop using them (you may wish to rename them so it's clear to your staff to not use them).
• you'll then need to set up your new assessments from scratch and add them to both your Assessment Framework, and your Annual Policy for this year. You can see how to do this here for Primaries and here for Secondaries.
• bear in mind that assessment periods will be blank until the first period with marks.

If you want to transfer your data

For summative Assessments where you'll have the same assessment periods:

• you can use the Summative Assessment Marks Migrator.
• you'll need to first set up your new assessments from scratch and add them to both your Assessment Framework, and your Annual Policy for this year. You can see how to do this here for Primaries and here for Secondaries.

For other assessment types, you'll need to:

1. download your assessment data for each academic year the assessment ran. For summative assessments you can do this from the Students > Assessments > Summative Tracking > Export page.
2. set up your new assessments from scratch and add them to both your Assessment Framework, and your Annual Policy for each academic year you have data for. You can see how to do this here for Primaries and here for Secondaries.
3. add the marks back in - you can bulk import summative marks or Ad Hoc data, but formative data must be added manually.