Staff Absence and Cover FAQ

This article covers common questions regarding Staff Absence and Cover in Arbor. If you cannot find an answer to your query in this article, check our dedicated section of the Help Centre on this topic here.

What happens to cover arrangements when a staff absence is edited or deleted?

Editing or deleting a staff absence affects cover arrangements by removing any cover requirements outside the new date range or deleting generated cover, with the original teacher reassigned to the lessons.

When a staff absence is:

• edited to change the dates, any cover requirements outside of the new date range will be removed. The original teacher will be assigned to the lessons.
• deleted, any cover generated will be removed.

The original person with the absence will be assigned to the lessons.

Why are lessons, tutor groups, or registration missing from the cover area?

The cover page in School > All Staff > Cover will show you lessons and registration in line with the Timetable Periods set up at your school. You can see more details on managing cover here: How can I manage cover? 

This means that if registration or certain lessons are missing from this page, you'll need to check your Timetable Periods set up here: Timetable Periods. In the example below, registration is missing because it runs from 8:30 until 9:00 but the timetable periods only start at 9:00.

You might wish to set up an additional period for each day for Registration, this will then show on the Cover page.

Can we report on staff Bradford Factors?

The Bradford factor is a score calculated from the number of absences squared, multiplied by the total absent days, useful for analysing the impact of multiple short absences.

• It is possible to report on this in the MAT MIS using the the Statistics page.
• It is not possible to report on this in the School MIS - If you have any feedback, please submit it here: Single Central Record.

How do I record staff as Working From Home (WFH)?

If you want to record that a staff member is working from home, you can use our 'Working from home' event type. This will mean the event shows in their calendar and they won't be shown as available when selecting staff for cover, and won't appear as free on the Timetable > Free Staff Finder page.

To see more details on managing events, including what permissions are needed, take a look at this article.

• If you want to add a period of working from home for a single staff member, go to their Staff Profile and click the Calendar option from the left-hand menu. Click the slot when you want the working from home period to begin.
• To add a period of working from home for multiple staff, you can do this right from your Arbor Dashboard with the right permissions - just click Favourites > Create event. You can also find their calendar from their staff profile and click into the slot to add an event.

In the slide over, you'll see the new event type of Working from home, as well as a box where you can add multiple participants who will be working from home.

When adding the working from home event, you can choose to either create a one-off event or choose certain times the event will occur each day. We'd recommend the second option, as it allows you to schedule the event during term time only, and remove a single day's event from a participant's calendar if they come into the school for one day.

To see which of your staff are working from home, you can go to School > Timetable > All Timetabled Events (List). You can use the filters, or search for the event type.

Why is a staff member's absence showing as 0 days?

Arbor won't calculate working days and hours lost automatically when you add a staff absence that takes place during a holiday in your Academic Calendar.

When recording staff absences over a school holiday, it records the working days and ours lost as zero.

If you have members of staff who usually work over holidays and are absent, you'll need to edit the absence to manually put in the days and hours lost.

Why is a staff member's absence showing as 0.5 days?

If a staff member works full time, a staff absence of 5 or more hours is counted as a full day, and less than 5 hours is rounded down and counted as half a day (0.5 days).

If a staff member usually works for less than half of a full-time day each day, an absence logged for a whole day will count as 0.5 days rather than 1. This means that if this staff member was off for 2 days, this will total 1 day lost.

This is in line with DfE guidance that if a member of staff is contracted to work less than half a day, any absences should be recorded and if it is for sickness absence, the working days lost should be recorded as 0.5.

Can we record staff attendance marks in Arbor?

It is not possible to store staff attendance in the same way as for students, with an attendance mark for a time period. This is because there isn't the same legal requirement to report on specific attendance sessions as for students, such as for the school census.

This means it is not possible to report on staff attendance, and you cannot view staff with 100% attendance - this would just be a list of staff with no absences logged.

It is also not possible to sync with a third party to pull data into Arbor when staff sign in, such as Inventry, because there is nowhere in Arbor for this data to be stored.

Staff are presumed to be in school (during their logged working periods) unless an absence has been recorded for them. You can see a list of those staff members who aren't in school from School > All Staff > Absences.

Why do Working Days and Hours Lost change when I edit a staff absence?

Recording a staff absence in Arbor allows you to manually set the working days lost and working hours lost, or you can use our automatic calculation that takes into account the staff members working periods.

If you were to manually set the working days and hours lost, saving this will appear as expected.

Upon editing the staff absence, the slide-over will display the automatic calculation. Even if the working days and hours lost were manually input.

Can staff request their own absences?

Staff cannot request or record absences for themselves unless they have permission to administer absences for all staff at your school.

You'll need one of these permissions to view and add staff absences. If you don't have the permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

• Staff Profile: All Staff: Basic HR Administration
• Staff Profile: Cover: Administer
• Staff Profile: Absences: Administer and Staff Profile: Absences: View

Can we set lessons as not requiring Cover in bulk?

The article explains that while classes automatically flag as requiring cover when a staff absence is logged, it is not possible to bulk set lessons as not requiring cover in Arbor. Each lesson must be marked individually as 'Cover not required'.

When a staff absence is logged, any classes and lessons they were due to teach will automatically flag as requiring cover on the School > All Staff > Cover page.

We know that some schools want to bulk set all instances of a class as not requiring cover, for instance when post-16 students have a study period. However, it isn't possible to set this in bulk in Arbor.

To mark a lesson as not requiring cover, you need to mark each instance as 'Cover not required', shown in this article: How do I assign cover?

If you have any feedback about this process, please add it here: Staff Cover Improvements.

How do I cancel arranged cover arrangements?

There are times that when a cover is arranged, these would need to be cancelled. This can be done by going on School > All Staff > Cover. 

Once on the page, click on the arranged section so that you can view all of the arranged covers.

To then cancel any of the arranged covers, tick the covers that are getting cancelled. Click on the Bulk action button and select Un-arrange (Cancel Cover Arrangement).

The lessons will then populate in the Unarranged tab due to the cancelled cover.