Glossary of Arbor AI Terms

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Allowance Refresh

Arbor AI

AI Features / Tools

• Ask Arbor – answers questions about your school or students.
• Suggest Comms – helps you draft emails, letters, and SMS.
• Student Summary – generates quick reports about a student.
• Create Formula – turns your descriptions into tables or formulas.

AI Subscription

A paid plan that gives your school a larger AI allowance. It ensures you don’t lose access to Arbor AI even after your free allowance runs out.

AI Subscription Balance

AI Usage / Usage Credits

Auto Absence

A separate, paid add-on feature that automatically transcribes parent voicemails and creates pending absence notes for Attendance Officers to review.
 

Context-Specific Assistants

Versions of Ask Arbor accessed from specific pages (like a Lesson Dashboard or Year Group page) that automatically filter the AI's focus down to the exact group of students you are currently viewing. Includes the Classroom Assistant and Pastoral Group Assistant.
 

Global Personalisation (School Context)

Overarching rules, terminology, and expectations set by your administrators that Arbor AI will automatically consider whenever it generates responses or drafts communications across the school.
 

Hallucination

A term used when an AI generates a response that sounds highly plausible and confident, but is actually factually incorrect. Arbor uses RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to heavily reduce the risk of this happening.
 

Human in the Loop

The concept that Arbor AI acts as an assistant, not an autopilot. It will never take autonomous actions (like sending an email or logging an absence) without a human user reviewing and approving the action first.
 

Interaction / Message

• Asking “Show me attendance for Year 9 this term” = 1 interaction.
• Asking “Write a letter to parents about the school trip” = 1 interaction.

Intervention Assistant

A dedicated version of Ask Arbor accessed via the Interventions Dashboard, specifically designed to help staff set up student interventions.
 

Main Assistant

The default version of Ask Arbor accessed via the top-right corner of the MIS. It searches whole-school data, meaning you must use specific filters in your prompts (e.g. "for Year 6").
 

Monthly Free Allowance

Prompt

Your instructions or questions for Ask Arbor. Your prompts shape how the AI responds and acts.
 

Smart Reports

Pre-built, AI-powered report templates designed to instantly compile massive amounts of statutory and whole-school data into one narrative view (e.g., the Ofsted Inspection Companion).
 

Suggest Comms

An AI drafting tool built into Arbor's communication workflows that can instantly write, format, and translate messages to parents or staff based on a brief prompt.
 

Suggest Student Summary

A tool on the student profile that automatically pulls together a student's attendance, behaviour, and attainment data, combining it with your personal notes to create a cohesive summary.
 

Threshold Notifications (80%, 90%, 100%)

• 80%: Heads-up notification
• 90%: Second notification
• 100%: AI access pauses unless you buy a subscription
   

VEST Formula 

A framework to help you write powerful, direct commands for Ask Arbor. It stands for [V]erb + [E]ntity + [S]pecifics + [T]imeframe.