This article is designed for Secondary schools who are Onboarding to Arbor. It details what steps you need to take after your final site is released, but before your whole school have access.
Please also continue to work through the tasks outlined in your Onboarding Workbook.
Key tasks to complete when you first receive your final Arbor Site, and before you Go Live.
Log in to your new Arbor MIS
Your Onboarding Manager will email you when your site is ready with login instructions. Please refer to this guide for login issues troubleshooting.
When you are ready for other members of staff to log in, you can send them a welcome email that includes their username and a link where they can set their password, or simply send them the URL of your site. Remember to check your Business Roles and Permissions before allowing the whole school access.
Check your School details
Once you access your Arbor site, go to School > School Details to verify everything.
If you plan to use communications, you must add a school email address in the Contact Details section. Remember to set up 'Permitted senders' for emails, SMS, or in-app messages
Check your team’s business roles and permissions
Before you allow your school to log in to Arbor, it is important that you check all business roles and permissions to ensure all users have access to the areas of Arbor they need.
Arbor migrates business roles based on staff contracts from your previous MIS. If no contract was stored, you'll need to manually assign them a role. We strongly recommend you check which permissions are attached to each Business Role by following these instructions.
We understand that you may want to tailor access by adding extra permissions for staff members in your school - you can get help here on how to do this.
Check your Migrated Data
Now that you have access to Arbor, it's crucial to ensure all your school data has migrated as expected. Use your completed data checks and counts from your Arbor Implementation workbook to cross-reference.
The Data Migration Report compiles information from your previous MIS, including student numbers, demographics, and medical conditions. You'll find it at School > Data > Data Migration Report. Make sure to check the report thoroughly. Once you're happy, click Download QA Report, then the Sign-off button. It's crucial to sign this off within the first 2 weeks of going live, and please raise any discrepancies with your Support Team immediately.
The Data Quality Dashboard is a central page that highlights data issues or errors in Arbor. It's a great tool for quickly identifying areas that need attention and for bulk editing data. To access it, navigate to School > Data > Data Quality Dashboard.
Timetables & Taking Attendance
We highly recommend checking your timetables in Arbor before staff start taking attendance to ensure everything is perfectly set for your students and team.
Due to the way databases such as SIMS store timetabling data, watch out for classes taught by two teachers during the same timetable slot. If you have lessons with one class taught by two teachers during the same timetable slot, this creates two separate slots on Arbor that will need to be merged post-migration
The easiest way to resolve this is to add one of the teachers to one of the timetabled slots, then remove the redundant slots.
Teachers access registers via their Arbor Calendar. Administrators use the Attendance Dashboard for all classes.
Set and plan future cover
Any cover you have already set for future lessons will not be migrated. Please follow these instructions to assign cover in Arbor.
Adding a Subject and Year Group to your courses and classes
This concept of a Subject is unique to Arbor, so not something that is stored in your previous MIS. This step is important to support and enhance the reporting you will now have access to in your Arbor MIS. Get help here to add subjects to your courses.
Set up your Third Party Integrations
Now your site is live, you'll be able to go in and set up any third party connections by navigating to System > Partner Apps (API Users). For further instructions on setting these up, please see this guide.
Check Behaviour Types and Severities
If you want your staff to be able to record behaviour incidents from day one, we recommend you check and amend the behaviour types and severity types that have migrated to ensure these are setup how you want them.
Once you have completed onboarding, if you want to explore the full potential of the Behaviour Module, we would encourage you to purchase a Behaviour Consultation with a specialist trainer to fully assess your needs and requirements moving forward.
Remove Guardians with no linked Students
Ensure you check and remove any guardians with no linked students by going to School > Data > Data Quality Dashboard > Guardians > Guardians with no linked students. Full instructions can be found here.
When migrating from SIMs via backup file, some Next of Kins will also have had an extra guardian profile created on Arbor. This is due to the way data was stored in SIMS in the past, and isn't something Arbor can resolve on migration. You must remove these profiles from Arbor in bulk before releasing Arbor to your wider school team, and the person will still show as Next of Kin on the staff profiles
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.