Availability and Breaks - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)

This article is the fourth in our series on Setting up Guardian Consultations (Parents' Evenings). This guide covers how to make staff available for parents' evening meetings and how to use staff availability to create breaks between sessions.

The guides in this series are:

1. Introduction - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)
2. Creating a Consultation - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)
3. Adding Meetings - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)
4. Availability and Breaks - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)
5. Meeting Management - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)
6. Specific Setups and FAQs - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)

Availability periods

Now that you have set the overall dates and times for your consultation and you have added your meetings, you can start adding periods of availability for your staff.

Availability periods are the times and dates during your consultation when a staff member is available to be booked for a meeting.

Having an availability period set alone is not enough for a meeting to be bookable, though. Other factors that can cause a meeting to be unbookable are:

• Not all staff who are planned to attend the meeting are available
• Another event a staff member is required to attend is on their calendar at the time of the meeting
• The staff member has an ongoing absence during the time of the meeting

To make meeting slots with teachers available for booking, you need to mark the teachers as available in the Staff Availability section on the left-hand side of the Overview. Periods that do not have availability set for a staff member are not bookable, which is why you can use this section to plan breaks in your consultation, too.

If your guardian consultation spans multiple days, you'll need to set staff availability to ensure that there are no sessions parents can book outside of working hours. If you set up numerous guardian consultations instead, parents can book multiple meetings (one for each day).

Please note: if you have not completed the steps in guide 3 of this series (Adding Meetings) to add a staff member to at least one meeting before adding their availability, you will not see any availability you add for them reflected in the table on the Staff Availability page. To make sure availability appears in the list, please complete the steps in the guide first to plan a meeting with the staff member. Once you do this, you will see the availability you have already added appear.
 

Adding availability

To get started with setting staff availability:

1. Select Staff Availability from the left-hand side menu.

2. Click the +Add button at the top of the page.

   

3. In the slide over, choose between Register Staff Availability (which allows you to set availability for individual staff members) or Bulk Set Staff Availability to set the same availability for all your staff. The following sections take you through both options separately.

Add single staff availability

After you select "Register Staff Availability," a slide-over window appears, where you can choose the staff member you want to add availability for and select their periods of availability.

For example, if Theo is available between 15:30 and 17:00 and between 17:30 and 18:00, I'll need to set up two periods of availability. If the meetings for Theo (set up with the third guide in the series) have been set up with a duration of 10 minutes, this means 7 meeting slots are available to be booked with them between 15:30 and 17:00 and 3 more between 17:30 and 18:00, effectively creating a break between 17:00 and 17:30. 

Enter your choices in the 'Available from' and 'Available until' fields, and confirm by clicking the 'Save Changes' button.

Repeat your actions until you have entered all of the required availability.

Bulk set staff Availability

If you choose 'Bulk set staff availability', a slide-over window opens, listing all staff who have a meeting planned during the consultation. The list allows you to select which staff to apply your choices to by using the tick boxes. By default, all staff members are ticked. You can either leave all selected or deselect the staff members who need a different availability. 

You can select Dates and enter the start time and end time of the period you'd like to set for your staff. Your selection will apply to all staff members with a box ticked once you press 'Save Changes'.

If you need multiple periods of availability, for example, because you have a break between meetings, you will need to repeat these steps for each day and/or period. 

For example, if you have a consultation across two days, and on the first day we do one set of meetings between 16:00 and 17:00, and on day two we do a set between 15:00 and 16:00 and 17:00 and 18:00, you would need to repeat your steps 3 times to set this availability for all of your attending staff.

Once you have saved your staff's availability, you will see that Availability periods set up for all staff in the Scheduling Status section are marked with a green tick on the Overview Page.

Removing staff availability

To edit or remove staff availability, navigate to Staff Availability on the left-hand side of your Consultation Overview. 

To remove availability in bulk, use the tick boxes to select the availability you wish to remove and use the green Bulk Action button to Remove Staff Availability for multiple availabilities at once.

To remove or edit a single staff availability, click on the staff member's name next to the Available Between times you wish to change. Next, click the red 'Remove staff availability' to entirely remove the availability, or edit the times and dates (Available until and from) and press 'Save Changes' to confirm your edits.

Arranging Cover

Once the availability has been set, a 'Cover required' notification may appear on the overview page of the Guardian Consultation. 

Click on the warning to go to the Cover page on Arbor. Change the date range at the top of the cover page to the date of the Guardian Consultation to see lessons that overlap with your consultation and may need coverage. 

The cover page displays events in the staff calendar that may require assignment due to the Guardian Consultation (check the Cover Reason column to identify which events these are).

Click into the events to either Set as Cover Not Required or to arrange the cover.

Once the cover requirement is resolved, the Cover warning box will disappear from the main page of the Guardian Consultation.

Adding a break in Guardian Consultations

Adding a break using availability (recommended)

You can schedule a break for staff in your guardian consultation (parents' evening) by adjusting the availability period for the staff member. If a staff member is not available for a meeting, the meeting cannot be booked. So, you create breaks by ensuring you add gaps in staff availability.

To add a break: 

1. Go to Students > Parents & Guardians > Guardian Consultations
2. Select your Parents' Evening.
3. Click on Staff Availability from the left-hand menu. This will display a list of staff members and their availability.
4. Click on the staff member you wish to change to bring up a slide-over with their availability.

5. Change the 'Available until' field to the time the staff member wants to start their break, and then click 'Save Changes'.

   
   
    

6. Next, click on the +Add in the top right and add a new availability period starting when the staff member's break ends, and click Save Changes to confirm your selection.

    

 

Once this has been done, you'll see that there are two entries for the staff member on the list - one prior to the break and one after. Parents will be able to book slots for both periods, but not for the break in between.
 

Adding a break using an event

In addition to managing your breaks using gaps in staff availability, you could consider using events to create breaks. To keep your meetings fully manageable from the Guardian Consultations area, this option is less recommended.

Adding breaks using events works because meetings are only bookable for periods where the attendees are not already required to be in another event. Note: This method only works for event participants who are marked as required to attend that event.

If you have a staff member with availability between 16:00 and 19:00, you can add a break between meeting slots by scheduling an event with an attending staff member they are marked as required to attend. For instance, adding the example staff member to an event as a required participant between 17:30 and 17:40 makes them unavailable to book within the consultation at those times too.

More on how to create and manage events and required participants here: Creating and managing events

 

FAQs

Why do I see an "availability for [staff name] has already been registered during this time period" when adding staff availability?

This message appears when a staff member already has availability set during the new timeframe you are trying to set. To avoid this message, you can: 

• Ensure that any new availability you set does not overlap with existing availability for the staff member
• Edit an existing availability instead of adding a new one if you are trying to extend when a staff member is available
• Ensure you edit existing availabilities when adding breaks, before you add a second availability for when a break ends
• Delete the existing availability record for a staff member and start from scratch 

 

Why can I not see the availability I've added for staff in the Staff Availability section?

If you haven’t completed Step 2 (Setting up meetings) and assigned a staff member to a meeting, their availability won’t appear on the Staff Availability page.

To ensure their availability appears in the list, schedule at least one meeting for them. Once you do this, you will see the availability you have already added appear.
 

How do I add breaks if I have already set staff availability?

If you have already set staff availability, you can edit a staff member's existing availability and add an extra availability record to add a break. 

For example, if you have a consultation between 15:00 and 18:00, and want to give a staff member a 10-minute break at 15:50, you would:

• Head to your Consultation Overview (Students > Parents & Guardians > Guardian Consultations > All Guardian Consultations > [click on your Consultation])
• Click Staff Availability on the left
• Click on the existing availability for the staff member 
• On the slide-over, edit the Available until time to the start time of the break (e.g. 15:50)
• Click Save Changes
• Click the green +Add button to add the availability for after the break
• Click Register Staff Availability
• Select the Staff member with the dropdown
• Set the Available from time to when the break ends (e.g. 16:00)
• Click Save Changes

This will add a break, without unscheduling any meetings already booked with the staff member. This means that if a meeting was already booked with the staff member during their break, it will need to be manually rescheduled to a more suitable time or cancelled so parents can re-book for an appropriate time independently.

 

This concludes the fourth guide in our Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations) series. The next guide in our series is Meeting Management - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations).