This guide provides a high-level overview of Arbor AI tailored specifically for school administrators and Senior Leadership Teams. Here, you will learn about the core AI features available to you, how your monthly usage allowance works, how access is managed across your school, and where to find these tools so you can start reducing your daily administrative workload.
What Arbor AI features for Admins and SLT are in our package?
Admins and Leadership have access to all of the core Arbor AI features by default, including Ask Arbor, the Ofsted Inspection Companion, Suggest Comms, Suggest Student Summary, and Suggest Formula.
Please: Auto Absence is a paid add-on and is not included in the standard suite of AI features.
Ask Arbor: Your conversational AI assistant. As an admin, you can use the Assistant on any page to instantly query whole-school data without clicking through menus. For example, quickly check how many students were late today, or identify the year group with the highest behaviour incidents this term.
Smart Reports: Pre-built, AI-powered report templates. Generate an Ofsted Inspection Companion report to pull together statutory attendance, absence, and suspension data into a single, comprehensive narrative within seconds for a Monday morning inspection meeting.
Suggest Formula: A natural language calculation builder. Describe what you need to calculate in plain English within the Custom Report Writer (e.g., "calculate a student's average mark across all science subjects"), and the AI will build the formula for you.
Suggest Comms: AI-assisted drafting for emails and SMS. Instantly draft a nuanced, professional email to parents regarding ongoing behavioural concerns, adopting your preferred tone and language.
How often can we use the AI features monthly, for free?
Your school's Monthly Free AI Allowance is shared across all users at your school. Each time someone interacts with an AI feature, it uses a small portion of your AI credits. Different actions use more or less of your allowance.
Your school's specific free monthly allowance is tiered based on your school phase and your Arbor MIS package (Core, Comms, or Perform).
Across all of the users at your school, you get the following approximate usage included in your package:
Primary and Special Schools: Depending on your tier, you receive between ~300 and ~600 Ask Arbor interactions per month, plus ~2,000 actions using other AI features (like Suggest Comms).
Secondary Schools: Depending on your tier, you receive between ~100 and ~200 Ask Arbor interactions per month, plus ~2,000 actions using other AI features.
What happens if we run out? Will we be charged?
You are always in control of your budget. If your school uses up your monthly allowance, your AI features will simply pause until the next month. There are no unexpected or hidden costs.
If you find your school regularly exceeding this limit, affordable AI Subscriptions are available to increase your capacity. Get in touch with us to discuss a top-up subscription at customersales@arbor-education.com.
Where do I find Arbor AI features?
You find Arbor's AI features seamlessly integrated throughout your MIS. The main Ask Arbor assistant can be opened from any page by using the Ask Arbor button in the top menu, and the other features, like student summaries and AI-drafted communications, are found where you normally would take these actions manually (on student profiles and when drafting communications, respectively).
You will know when a feature is powered by AI because you will see the Arbor AI icon next to it.
Which AI Features should I try, and what can I use them for?
Arbor AI is built seamlessly into your MIS to help turn requests into actions. To get the best results, try to keep each prompt or request focused on just one topic. Here are the core features you can use to save time on daily administrative tasks.
Suggest Formula
The Suggest Formula feature helps you quickly build advanced calculated formulas for your Custom Reports. Tell Arbor what you are trying to calculate in plain language, and it will generate the formula for you.
Examples you could try:
- Divide each student's average attendance across the academic year into different bands, for example: “Very high”, “High”, “Meeting expectations”, and “Cause for concern”.
- Calculate a student's average mark across each of their subjects.
- Highlight any students with more than 10 behaviour points.
- Concatenate a student's first name and last name.
Student Summary
The Student Summary feature provides an instant overview of a student, bringing together their key data points such as attendance and behaviour. This is ideal when handling queries from parents or stakeholders across your school quickly and on the fly.
Examples you could try:
Provide an ad hoc student summary for a parent who has asked how their child is getting on at school.
Provide an overview of this student's attendance, behaviour and academic performance in light of their persistent absence for our Attendance Officer.
Suggest Comms
The Suggest Comms feature helps you quickly draft bulk letters, emails, or SMS messages to parents, guardians, or staff. This feature also allows you to draft communications in multiple languages at once, or in a language of your choice, all from a natural language prompt in English.
Examples you can try:
Send a letter to parents about the importance of having good attendance and remind them of the school's attendance policy.
Draft a letter about an upcoming school trip (e.g., field trip, religious education trip, trip to another school).
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Send a whole staff email thanking them for their hard work this academic year, whilst calling out some of the key achievements that the school has achieved together.
Ask Arbor`
Ask Arbor is your built-in AI assistant, designed to quickly pull up information, assist with reporting and provide instant insights from anywhere in the MIS.
Find a full discussion of Ask Arbor for Admins here: Ask Arbor for Admins and SLT
Smart Reports
Smart Reports are AI-powered report templates. These report templates are optimised to bring a large amount of data across your school together in a single report quickly, while being very efficient with your AI credits.
For example, quickly generate an Ofsted Inspection Companion report that combines attendance, absence, and suspension data into one comprehensive narrative at the click of a button, at short notice.
How do we use our school's AI allowance responsibly?
Because your school's AI allowance is shared across the whole school, it is understandable to be cautious with how AI is used in Arbor.
While this is a legitimate concern, our Free Allowances are designed to be sufficient for everyone in your school to feel the benefits of Arbor AI and, in practice, few schools actually reach their monthly limit.
That being said, there are things you can do to use Arbor AI efficiently and responsibly:
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Back-and-forth messages in Ask Arbor can quickly use up more of your allowance than you bargain for. To keep conversations to the point, familiarise yourself with prompting best practices and use our Prompt Libraries if you are not confident writing your own prompts.
The more targeted and precise your prompts, the less you will use per prompt and the lower the chance that you have to refine or clarify your prompt before you get the output you want.
- Make use of the History feature in Ask Arbor to find previous chats easily, rather than starting a new chat about the same subject
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Personalise Ask Arbor to provide context about you upfront so that the AI does not have to ask for these details, and you do not have to clarify them every chat.
- Use Ask Arbor only when you need to. Compared to Ask Arbor Assistants, other AI features like Student Summaries and Suggested Communications use less of your allowance per output. So, familiarise yourself with every Arbor AI feature and choose the right tool for the job.
- Monitor your usage to identify actions or users who use up outsized portions of your allowance.
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