Guardian Consultations (parents evening) FAQ

This article covers common questions regarding Guardian Consultations in Arbor. If you cannot find an answer to your question in this article, check our dedicated section of the Help Centre on this subject here.

Are guardians notified of cancelled meetings?

No, Arbor does not notify guardians if a meeting has been cancelled or unscheduled. If you need to make any changes to scheduling, you will need to reach out to impacted guardians.

Can we create guardian consultations for applicants?

No, it is not possible for students to have guardian consultation meetings if they are an applicant and are not yet enrolled. However, you can use custom meetings to set up future guardian consultations for when the applicant is enrolled.

Can I send a reminder to parents of their guardian consultation time in bulk?

No, it is not possible to quickly send a reminder in bulk to parents to let them know their appointment times.

If you want to send out a reminder in bulk, you can:

• Create a User Defined Field and populate this with the appointment times.  Once you have done this you can send a mail merge with the user-defined field as a mail merge field.
• Send emails to parents individually from the guardian consultation page.  Our Setting up Parent's Evenings (Guardian Consultations) guide explains how to do this.

How do we create guardian consultation meetings for new missing students?

If you've got new students added after the guardian consultation was set up they won't automatically have meetings set up for them. 

To schedule them, just click +Add in your guardian consultation to create meetings in the same way you set up meetings initially (shown in step 2 here).

Please note: When following step two in the above guidance, ensure that you schedule these as a custom meeting only.

Don't worry - this won't create duplicate meetings for the other students, it'll just create new meetings for the new students.

Can we do online guardian consultations in Arbor?

No, Arbor does not offer a functionality for facilitating online guardian consultations. We would recommend setting up a guardian consultation as normal and then sending communications to guardians to advise that meetings are taking place online. From there, you can use a third-party video call service such as Zoom or Google Hangouts for the actual meetings. 

Why are we not able to select a timeslot when booking meetings?

For meetings to be bookable, all staff attending need to be available at the same time; otherwise, any dropdowns you see when booking timeslots will be empty.

A staff member is available for a meeting if their availability has been set in the Staff Availability section of your consultation and if they have no other events in their calendar (such as meetings, absences, lessons and placeholder events to block out the consultation on their calendar) during the availability periods set in the Staff Availability section. 

This means that if you have multiple staff attendees, all of those staff members need to have matching availability set in the Availability Section of your consultation for the same time for a slot to bee bookable. This is because Arbor expects every staff member assigned to a meeting to be present; if staff cannot all be present because they are not available at the same time, the meeting cannot be booked.

In addition to organising staff availability within your consultation setup, you also need to ensure they are not already doing something else at the time of the consultation, like attending an event or teaching a lesson. Please refer to our Why can't a slot be booked for a Guardian Consultation? guidance to help you manage this.

Why can I not see the availability I am adding for staff in the Staff Availability section?

If you have not completed step 2 of your consultation setup (Setting up meetings) and added a staff member to at least one meeting before adding availability, you will not see the availability you add for that staff member reflected in the table on the Staff Availability page. In order for their availability to appear in the list, make sure you go back and complete step 2. Once you do this, you will see the availability you have already added appear.

How do I manage Guardian Consultations for split families?

Guardian consultations can be a little trickier to manage when guardians don't want to have a meeting together.

• When setting up your guardian consultations, make sure you allow guardians to book separate meetings by having this box ticked (you can see how this will look for guardians here).
• You can also manage the guardians in meetings using these instructions. Top Tip: Both Legal and Primary guardians can be down as attending a guardian consultation.

For more details on the tools at your disposal to manage this, please refer to our Managing Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations) for split families or separated parents guidance.