Ask Arbor for Admins and SLT

This guide explains how to access, navigate, and get the most out of the Ask Arbor Assistant as an administrator or school leader. This is your primary AI tool for retrieving whole-school data, identifying cross-cohort trends, and completing daily administrative tasks directly from your Arbor MIS.

Permissions

To access Ask Arbor, three things need to be in place:

• You need the School: Arbor AI: View Arbor AI permission assigned to your profile. Without this permission, even if they have been given a feature-specific permission, they still won't be able to use Arbor AI. See how to assign MIS permission here.
• You need to have the right Feature Permission.
• Your school needs to be opted in to Arbor AI and the feature you want to use on the school level through the Global AI Permissions.

How do I open Ask Arbor?

You can open the main Ask Arbor Assistant with the Ask Arbor button in the top-right corner of any page of your School MIS.

Clicking this button will open the Ask Arbor slide-over on the right-hand side of your screen, allowing you to chat with the AI without navigating away from your current page.

A note on context-specific Assistants

As well as the main Ask Arbor Assistant, you also have access to more specialised assistants on certain pages. For example, if you open Ask Arbor on Year Group page, you open the Pastoral Assistant version, and if you open it on Students > Interventions > Dashboard you get the Interventions Assistant.

These specialist versions of Ask Arbor a great for specific actions and groups, but if you need Ask Arbor to use data related to your whole school, make sure to switch to the main Assistant using the notification.

What can I use Ask Arbor for?

You can use the Main Ask Arbor Assistant to quickly accomplish tasks such as:

• Analysing Trends and Whole-School Data: Ask the assistant to compare attendance between terms, pinpoint year groups with the highest behaviour incidents, or provide demographic breakdowns (e.g., comparing SEN vs. non-SEN suspension rates).
• Managing Daily Operations: Get an immediate snapshot of your school day by asking to see today's cover list, checking which staff members are absent, or finding and booking available rooms for ad-hoc meetings.
• Reporting for Governors and Ofsted: Command Ask Arbor to generate high-level, narrative-driven summaries of termly attendance and behaviour data. This is perfect for dropping straight into a board report or self-evaluation form.
• Drafting High-Level Communications: Save time drafting highly specific, nuanced communications for challenging pastoral situations or broad parental updates (e.g., "Draft an email to all Year 10 parents regarding the new winter uniform policy").
• Taking Action: Ask the assistant to log student absences or initiate student interventions.

Using the Data Explorer to verify Ask Arbor outputs

It can be tricky to trust the outputs of any AI, especially when you are first starting to get to grips with it. If something does not look quite right or a result is unexpected, it is always good practice to take a moment to explore those concerns.

Helpfully, Ask Arbor is set up for you to easily double-check the data that the assistant bases its conclusions on using the Data Explorer.

To open the data explorer, type a "/" (forward slash) into the text box and select Data Explorer.

On the Explore Calculated Data Points pop-up, you can then see an overview of all calculated data points in connection with your chat. Each row shows the base group the data point was calculated for, a description of the data point, and how many students or staff it applies to.

This lets you quickly check that the calculations the AI performed were based on the data you expected it to use, as well as sense check that the underlying numbers are correct.

You can explore the data points further, and you can even take action for individual students or staff from here by using the Bulk Action button.