Setting up your Nursery registers for the first time

If you have recently moved to Arbor, you must set up your Nursery course using a special structure to enrol students into the correct registers. For nursery students, you will need to set up morning and afternoon modules for each weekday.

You can do this in two ways: either manually creating each timetable slot, or by automatically scheduling a nursery registration form. This guide takes you through both processes. 

Both methods require you to create a course containing 10 modules (sub-courses) - two for each day of the week (AM and PM). Each module has a timetable slot attached, and these timetable slots create your registers.

Permissions

Please note: These permissions include more abilities than those listed below, so please review each permission carefully before assigning them to any user.

• School: Academic Structure: Administer - Create new courses and registers.
• School: Teaching: Administer - Schedule registration forms.

If you don't have the permissions that you need to complete setup, the admin team at your school will need to assign you these permissions using these instructions.

Option 1: Setting up your Nursery registers manually

A. Add the Nursery course

To manually set up your nursery registers for the first time:

1. Go to School > Programmes > Courses or Students > Enrolment > Academic > Courses > Overview.

   On the main course overview, your current course will look something like this:
   
   

2. Click the green '+Add' button to add a new Nursery course on the slide-over.

3. You can give the course the same name as the year group (e.g. Nursery) or the name of the class (e.g., Butterflies), whichever you prefer. Then click Add Course to be taken through to the Course Overview page.

   
    

   Top Tip: If you were not taken straight to the course overview, click on the newly created Nursery course (which will have a red message saying '(No Lessons Scheduled)' next to it) on the Students > Enrolment > Academic > Courses > Overview page.

    

B. Add the Nursery Modules (sub-courses)

Next, create Modules for each day of the week AM and PM. Each module corresponds to a register. 

This allows you to enrol students into different modules so that they appear on the register for the specific sessions they are due to attend only.  

1. On the Course Overview page, scroll down until you see the Modules section and click the +Add.
   
   

2. On the slide over, give the Module that makes clear which register it corresponds to (e.g. Monday AM)

   This is the title of your registers - so it will show Nursery: Monday AM (the day and time will change daily for each module added to this course). 

3.  Click Add Module.

   This loads a new overview page for the Module itself; you will know that this is a different module because the top of the page will show the Nursery: Monday AM format, and the Component of section in the very top Admin box will show as Component of: Nursery.

4. Once you've created your Monday AM module, repeat the steps above (to create modules for Monday PM, Tuesday AM, Tuesday PM etc.) untill you have ten modules, one for each AM and PM session in a typical week. 

Top tip: Always check that you are working within the correct course/module so that you don't accidentally add your Tuesday AM/PM courses within your Monday AM etc.

C. Adding more modules

To get back to the main Nursery course:

1. Go to School > Programmes > Courses or Students > Enrolment > Academic > Courses > Overview
2. Select your Nursery Course
3. Repeat the steps above to add the next modules for Monday PM

Once you have added all of your modules, your Nursery course Overview page will look like the image below, with a list of 10 sub-courses in the Modules section.

D. Adding Lesson timetable slots

Now that you've added modules that run from Monday AM to Friday PM, you can add timetable slots to create attendance registers for each sub-course.

To do this:

1. Go to the main Nursery course overview (Students > Enrolment > Academic > Courses > Overview > [click on the course] and scroll down to Modules
2. Click into one of the modules (e.g. Nursery: Monday AM) 
3. Click the grey More Information button on a slide-over to go to the Module page
4. On the Module page, scroll down to the Courses and Classes section.
5. Click the green +Add button in that section
6. On the What would you like to do? pop-up, choose the Schedule multiple lessons option to open a slide-over.
   

7. On the slide-over, tick one weekday box (the weekday that corresponds to the name of the module) 

   In the Lesson Start and End Time fields, add either the morning or afternoon time for the lesson that you want to create for that day, depending on the name of the module.

   The Effective and End dates determine between which dates a register is created. If you need registers for the whole academic year, you might set this to Sep 1st to Aug 31st.
   
   Example: if the Module is Friday AM, and you need the registers for term time during the entire academic year, you tick Friday in the Day of week section and set the start and ends of your morning sessions in the Lesson start and end time fields (e.g 09:00 and 12:00, respectively)and set your effective dates to the first and last days of the academic year.

8. Click Save Changes to add the timetable slot/register to the module
9. Repeat this process for each module, much the same way that you had to create each module separately.

Important: Make sure that each module has a corresponding lesson timeslot, e.g. the Friday AM module would have a 8am-12pm timetable slot running on Fridays only.

When you go back to the main course overview page now, the red message saying '(No Lessons Scheduled)' next to it will have disappeared.

Your lessons have now been setup and you can now enrol students into these classes.

Option 2: Setting up your Nursery registers via automated scheduling

If you have already set up a Nursery Registration Form and a Nursery Year group, you can use the School > Timetable > Timetable Administration > Schedule Registration Sessions page to ask the system to create your Nursery registers for you (this can also be completed for scheduling other registration sessions).

Note: This only works if the Registration Form has not been used to schedule registration sessions previously; it does not work for forms marked as 'Already Scheduled'.

To ensure this process is completed successfully, you need to check your existing setup (shown below).

A. Checking your Nursery year group setup

The first thing to check is that you have a Nursery year group set up and that this year group has been assigned a Nursery National Curriculum (NC) grade- this will affect your census and reporting statistics, so it is important to complete this step.

If there isn't a Nursery year group listed, you need to create a new one and make sure that the National Curriculum grade shows as N1 or N2.

If you do have a nursery year group listed, follow these steps:

1. Go to Students > Enrolment > Pastoral > Year Groups and check if a Nursery year group is listed there.
2. If you can see this, click the Nursery year group to go to its overview page.
3. On this page, you can see the Curriculum Grade section of the Year Group Overview - this needs to be either Nursery First Year or Nursery Second Year. 

4. If the grade is missing or not a nursery grade, click the Curriculum Grade, and correct it with the dropdown on the slide over before clicking Save Changes.

   

Important Note on Mixed-Year Nursery classes

For mixed-year Nursery classes (N1 and N2 combined), you still need to select either Nursery first year or Nursery second year. If you do not do this, the form will be scheduled as a standard class. 

If the National Curriculum grade should be Mixed:

1. Choose N1 or N2 initially
2. Create your registers 
3. Change to Mixed after you've finished this setup.

B. Checking your Nursery Registration Form setup

You now need to make sure that this Nursery year group is linked to a Nursery registration form group. To do this: 

1. Go to Students > Enrolment > Pastoral > Registration Form and see if your Nursery registration form group is listed.
2. If you can see one, click on the registration form to be taken to the Registration Form Overview page.
3. In the top Registration Form Details section, make sure that the Year Groups field contains the Nursery year group that you just checked over.
4. If it's not, click on the Year Groups field and add the nursery year group from the dropdown in the slide-over.

If you do not see an appropriate Nursery registration form listed, we recommend that you create one and make sure the year group you link this to is a Nursery year group.

C. Scheduling your form group to create registers

Now that you have a year group with a Nursery National Curriculum Grade, and this year group is linked to a registration form for the right year, you can schedule this registration form to create your registers.

1. Go to the School > Timetable > Timetable Administration > Schedule Registration Sessions page.

   You will see all of your registration forms for the current academic year in a table.

   At this point, the Year Group column shows the Nursery year group and the Status column shows Not Timetabled. 

2. Tick the box next to your Nursery Registration form, click the green Bulk Action button and choose the Schedule Registration Forms option.
   
   A slide-over called Schedule Registration Forms then opens.
   
   
    
3. On the slide-over, add in the start and end times for both AM and PM sessions in the top 4 rows.

4. Navigate to the Setup Enrolment Patterns for Nursery Pupils section.

   This is a mandatory field used to choose to use attendance patterns to enrol your students or manually enrol them using the Bulk Enrolment page.

   If you are not sure which option to choose, you can review our guidance here: What are Attendance Patterns?

   Note: If you can't see the Setup Enrolment Patterns for Nursery Pupils section, re-check that your year group has the correct type of national curriculum grade and that it is linked to your registration form group.
   
   

5. Click the green Schedule Registration Forms button to create your nursery registers
6. On the pop-up, click the green Schedule Registration Forms button again to confirm your choices.

This creates nursery timetable slots and registers in the background, which may take a few minutes, especially during busy times.

Once the course has been scheduled, if you go to School > Programmes > Courses, you now see the newly created Nursery course listed with a + next to its name: you can click on this to see the daily AM and PM sessions within the course.