Meeting Management - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations)

This article is the fifth in our series on Setting up Guardian Consultations (Parents' Evenings). This guide covers how to manage meetings and manually assign timeslots to meetings once you have planned them and added staff availability.

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)

You may need to book a meeting for a parent or teacher manually, for example, if a given parent does not use the Portal or App, or if your consultation takes place in an Academic Year that has not started yet. 

Additionally, you might find that you need to adjust some of your meetings once availability has been set or meetings have been planned in bulk, or that you need to delete a meeting completely. This guide takes you through how to manage these scenarios.
 

Booking a meeting manually as an admin

Parents can book meetings themselves via the Portal or App during the self-scheduling period you set when creating your consultation. However, you can also manually assign time slots to meetings as an admin.

To do this, go to Students > Parents & Guardians > Guardian Consultations and click on a consultation to access its Overview, or book meetings directly from the student profile.

If you opt for the Consultation Overview, view bookable meetings by Staff Members, Registration Form or Course in the Meetings section. Alternatively, click "All Meetings" on the left-hand side to view an overview of all meetings associated with your consultation.

You can change the view in the Meetings section using the grey dropdown. All Staff, Registration Form and Course names are clickable. If you click one, you are taken to a new page where you see how many meetings have been booked for that staff member or form.

On both the All Meetings page and the form/staff/course-specific pages, you can:

• Click on a meeting 
• On the slide-over, select a time using the Time slot drop-down 
• Confirm the booking using the green Book time slot button

The available slots depend on the duration of the meetings, the staff member's availability and any other (custom) meetings that have already been booked with the staff member. 

Available slots match the meeting duration and repeat in increments based on the start time of a staff member's availability. For example, if a staff member's availability starts at 16:00 and meetings have a duration of 10 minutes, the slots you will see are 16:00-16:10, 16:10-16:20 and so forth. 

If a custom time slot is booked with a duration different from the other meetings, the next available slot will start immediately after the custom time slot ends. Using the same example, if the staff member has a custom meeting slot of 15 minutes at 16:10, the next available meeting will be from 16:25 to 16:35.

In the Attendees section, check all guardians attending the meeting and uncheck those who are not. If you chose to allow separate meetings for different guardians when adding meetings, you'll see a schedule separate meetings for unchecked guardians?* checkbox.

Checking this box while leaving a guardian unchecked will prompt Arbor to create a second meeting for that child, which can only be booked by the unchecked guardian.

You can also book a custom meeting timeslot (you choose the exact times and duration of the meeting slot) by clicking the Book custom time-slot button to set up a slot different to those available in the Time slot dropdown.

Once meeting slots have been booked, you will notice that the 'Meeting Booked' numbers on the overview page have changed, as a meeting has been booked.

Changing meeting times

You may need to change the meeting time once it has been booked. Follow these steps to do so:

• Click on the meeting you want to change
• Set a new meeting time
  • Use the Time slot dropdown to choose a preset time slot and duration
  • Use the grey Book Time slot  to specify a custom time and duration
• (Optional) Set a location for the meeting using the Room dropdown
• Click the green Book Time Slot or Book meeting to confirm your changes 
   

Changing the room for meetings

If you need to change the room for all meetings, select all unbooked meetings using the tick boxes and then use the bulk action to cancel the unbooked meetings. You'll then need to set them up again with the new location.

For meetings that have already been booked, first unschedule them one by one by clicking on each meeting and selecting 'Unschedule' on the slide over. This will allow you to delete and re-add the meetings with the correct location, along with your unbooked meetings. 

Alternatively, if you have multiple time slots to choose from, click on the meeting you wish to change, select a new time slot and location in the Reschedule section of the slide, and then click Save new time slot. Next, click on the meeting again and change the timeslot back to the original slot, ensuring you keep the correct location set.
 

Changing attendees

If you need to change your meeting attendees after you have planned them, you can. This can be very helpful if the meetings you schedule involve multiple staff members (for example, staff who share the teaching of a class or are responsible for a registration form), but not all staff members are able to attend the meeting. Or, if you need to split two teachers who teach the same class across the meetings for their class.

For a more detailed run-through of how to change staff, please refer to our How to Change Staff for Guardian Consultations guidance. 

The basic steps are these:

• Tick the boxes next to the meeting(s) you want to change
• Use the Green Bulk Action button and select Change Staff Members
• Use the Change staff attending to dropdown to specify which staff members should participate in the meeting (s). Leaving a staff member off the list effectively removes them from the meeting
• Confirm your staff selection using the green Change Staff button

Changing guardian attendees cannot be done in bulk. Instead, you need to:

• Click on the meeting you wish to alter
• Select Change Guardian Attendees on the slide-over
• Tick and untick guardians as needed
• Confirm your changes using Change Attendees

You can find more on this process here: Change the guardians in a Guardian Consultation meeting
 

Removing meetings

You might also find that you have planned meetings you need to remove. Depending on whether a timeslot for the meetings you want to remove has already been booked, the process is different.

You can find the whole process for deleting meetings here: Deleting Guardian consultation meeting

For meetings that do not have a timeslot booked (recognise these by the red Not booked cells in the Time Slot column in the meetings table), you can cancel these in bulk with these steps:

• Tick the boxes next to the meetings
• Use the Green Bulk Action button and select Cancel Unbooked Meetings
• On the slide-over, confirm the cancellation by clicking Cancel Unbooked Meetings

Any meetings you ticked that were booked (the Time Slot column for these will be green and have a date and time listed) will not be cancelled. If you still wish to cancel these, click on the relevant meeting, select 'Unschedule' on the slide-over, and then use the bulk action to cancel the meeting. There is no way to unschedule meetings in bulk.
 

Sending communications 

You can send communications (email, SMS, in-app messages and letters) to a student's primary guardians from the All Meetings page. 

• Head to All Meetings in the left-hand menu of your consultation
• Tick the relevant meetings
• Use the green Bulk Action button and select your preferred communication method
• Create your communications as you would any other message

Note: You cannot add a merge field for appointment times. If you wish to share these in your message, you will need to add them manually or advise guardians to check the exact appointment times on the Portal or App using this guidance: Booking Guardian Consultations (Parent's Evenings) on the Parent Portal or Parent App

FAQs

How do I remove a whole registration form from a consultation?

To remove a whole form group from your guardian consultation, remove all of the meetings planned with the form group from your consultation. To do this:

• Head to your consultation's overview (Students > Parents & Guardians > Guardian Consultations > All Guardian Consultations > [Click on your consultation])
• Scroll to the Meetings section and change the grey dropdown from Staff Members to Registration Forms
• Click on the form group you want to remove
• Unschedule any booked meetings (these have a green date and time in the Time Slot column) one by one (click on the meeting, click Unschedule on the slide-over).
• Select all of the meetings with the tick boxes (these should now all say Not Booked in the Time Slot column)
• Use the Bulk Action and select Cancel any unbooked meetings 
• Head back to your consultation to confirm the form has been removed
   

Can I change meeting lengths in bulk?

No, it's not possible to bulk change the length of already planned meetings. You can:

• Change the duration of meetings one-by-one using custom timeslots
• Delete your (unbooked) meetings and then re-add them with the correct length 
   

Why can't we select a timeslot when booking meetings?

For meetings to be bookable, all staff members attending must 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 must have matching availability set in the Availability Section of your consultation for the same time slot to be bookable. This is because Arbor expects every staff member assigned to a meeting to be present; if staff cannot all be present simultaneously, the meeting cannot be booked.

In addition to organising staff availability within your consultation setup, you also need to make sure they are not already engaged in another activity at the time of the consultation, such as 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.
 

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

No, it is not possible to quickly send a reminder in bulk to parents to let them know their appointment times, nor can you send communications directly from a guardian consultation.

If you want to send out a reminder:

• You can create a User-Defined Field and populate it 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 to send these in bulk
• Send emails to parents individually from the guardian consultation page

This concludes the fifth guide in our Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations) series. The next guide in our series is Specific Setups and FAQs - Setting up Parents Evenings (Guardian Consultations).