What is Ask Arbor?

Ask Arbor is your built-in AI assistant, designed to work within Arbor MIS alongside the data you already rely on every day. It understands your role, your school, and what you’re trying to achieve, so you get the insight and support you need, right when you need it. 

What can Ask Arbor do?

With Ask Arbor, you can streamline your daily tasks and access essential information quickly and easily. 

Here’s what it can do:

• Find student information: Quickly retrieve student information
• Access attendance information: Check attendance statistics effortlessly
• View behaviour information: Get insights into student behaviour statistics
• Explore student demographics: Access student demographic data.
• Explore staff data: Staff contract data & staff absence
• Access timetables: Get staff and student timetable information
• Locate free rooms: Find and book available rooms for meetings or classes in real-time.
• Draft an email: Create and customise emails without leaving the chatbot.
• Record absences: Log student absences seamlessly with natural language.
• Works in context: can answer questions about the student group in view e.g. my lesson, year group, course etc.
• Generate PDFs

Not sure what to ask? Have a look at our Ask Arbor Prompt library. 

What can’t Ask Arbor do?

While Ask Arbor is powerful, here’s what to keep in mind:

• It has limited access to data. It can do a lot of things, but we’re still working on expanding Ask Arbor’s functionality. If you have a suggestion for how we could improve it, please give us product feedback.
• It can give different answers to the same questions. Ask Arbor uses an LLM (a Large Language Model), which means that its responses aren’t always the same, even if you ask the same question twice. Most of the time, Ask Arbor will phrase the answer slightly differently, but still give you the same information. If it doesn’t, just ask it again. 

The Different Assistants

Different assistants are available in different parts of Arbor so that the questions you can ask are always relevant to the context you’re in. Simply click the Ask Arbor button to open them. 

The Main Assistant

• Appears in the top-right corner of most pages.
• Works with whole-school data (attendance, behaviour, assessments, timetables, rooms, communications).

What can I ask it?

• What is the attendance for Year 6 today?
• What's the attendance for Year 10 this term please?
• Show me the attendance of pupil premium students this term, broken down by year group
• I'm a bit concerned about year 9's attendance. Please draft me an email to their parents and include these statistics in the email, reminding them how important attendance is.
• One of my governors has just come in and I need a report for all year groups showing their attendance. Can you make one for me quickly, please?
• Thank you. Can you make the same report please, but for behaviour incidents?
• I need to get hold of {student name}’s parents.
• Write an email to {student name’s parents}. They haven’t had a great day with behaviour, and I'd like to invite them to come in for a meeting next week. 
  Let's say Thursday from 4 to 5 pm if they're available.

Classroom Assistant

• Appears on the lesson dashboard
• Focuses only on the students in that class.

What can I ask it? 

• Who are the SEN students in this lesson?
• Where did the students come from before this lesson?
• Are there any pupil premium students in this class?
• Which students in the class are SEN?
• How does the attendance of Pupil Premium students compare to others in the class? 

Pastoral Group Assistant

• Appears on a Year Group dashboard (e.g. Year 6).
• Focuses on assessments, demographics, and attendance for that year group.

What can I ask it?

• How are Year 6 doing in maths?
• What is the attendance for these students?
• Which students have received behaviour incidents today?
• And how are the boys doing in maths compared to the girls?

Switching Assistants

At any point you can open the Main Assistant by clicking. "If you are looking for the main Ask Arbor you can click here instead.” link in the slide over.

Does Ask Arbor have a cost?

Ask Arbor is part of our growing Arbor AI feature set. Arbor AI features are a little different to regular Arbor features, because they're powered by AI credits behind the scenes.

However, because we believe every school should benefit from our time-saving AI features, we’re giving all schools a monthly free allowance to use on standard AI features like Ask Arbor, Suggest Comms, and Student Summary. If your school reaches the limit, you can wait until it resets next month or upgrade to an AI Subscription to keep using Arbor AI without interruption. For more details, see Arbor AI Subscription and Monthly Free Allowance.