If you have nursery students, you need to schedule registration a little differently because not all nursery students attend full time (10 sessions of education a week). Making sure Arbor knows whether a nursery student is due to attend ensures your attendance data remains accurate.
Follow the guidance below to schedule your nursery registers before following the instructions in the New School Year Setup Step 6 - Registers for Primaries.
How long will it take?
This step usually takes schools around 30 minutes to set up and add students to the right registers.
Which setup option should we use?
There are two ways of making sure students appear in the right registers only - using enrolments or using Attendance Patterns. We’ve included some details about each below.
Option 1 - Manage registers through enrolments
New students must be enrolled in their lessons.
On our Students > Enrolment > Courses > Bulk Enrolment page, you can enrol students into the right registers, add an end date if their enrolment will be changing and see what registers students are enrolled in at any point in the year.
Option 2 - Use Attendance Patterns if students attend the same times every day of the week
Using the Attendance Pattern method, you can include students in all morning roll call registers, all afternoon roll call registers, or both morning and afternoon roll-call registers.
For most schools, we recommend option 1 instead, as you cannot use Attendance Patterns for students who do not attend during the same times every day of the week. For example, a student attends all day Monday-Wednesday but doesn't attend Thursday or Friday, or a student attends afternoon only on Monday and mornings the rest of the week.
Can we use a combination of the two options?
We don't recommend using a combination of options 1 and 2, as this process can be hard to manage. You would need to select to use Attendance Patterns when scheduling your registers. To enrol students, you would need to:
- add an Attendance Pattern for students who are full time, morning only or afternoon only (shown in option 1 below)
- manually add students who do not have an Attendance Pattern (shown in option 2 below)
Setting up your nursery registers for next year
Step 1 - Create your registers
Go to the 6. Registers step of your New School Year setup.
Select option A. Schedule Sessions from Registration Forms.
This will bring you to a list of all the registration forms you have. Tick the box next to your nursery registration form(s), then click the Bulk action button to select Schedule Registration Forms.
A slide-over will appear where you enter the start and end times for the Registration Forms you have selected.
Enter the start and end times, making sure your Morning end time falls at the beginning of lunchtime (to prevent errors during Census), and your Afternoon end time is the end of the school day. Leave a gap for lunch.
Select which option you will use.
You can see that they've been timetabled. You can click into these to view more information.
If you've chosen to use enrolments, when you return to step 6 (by clicking Setup in the left-hand menu), you will now see this banner and structure.
If you've chosen to use Attendance Patterns, when you return to step 6 (by clicking Setup in the left-hand menu), you will now see this banner and structure.
Step 2 - Add enrolments or Attendance Patterns
If you’ll be using bulk enrolment, you’ll need to add enrolments for your nursery students. Whenever you have a new student you’ll need to repeat this process to enrol them.
Click the Nursery bulk enrolment button on Step 6 of the New School Year Setup, or go to Students > Enrolment > Courses > Bulk Enrolment and change the academic year to next year.
Using the filters
The page will default to show the lowest nursery year group at your school but you can click into the filters at the top of the page to change this.
- Use the Students who are... filter to narrow down the students to a particular year group. This ensures the table loads if you have loads of students.
- Use the Course year groups filter to narrow down the registers you can display in the table. If you select a year group here, we'll only show the registers linked to that year group, or that aren't linked to any year group (for when you have mixed year groups).
If you select to only show certain courses, these will display in the table.
Enrolling students
Tick the boxes next to all the students who will be attending your school at the same time. Click the Bulk action button and select Bulk enrol students.
In the slide over, choose the dates they should be enrolled into these registers for, and select the registers, then click Enrol students.
The enrolments will then process in the background. This can take some time for the enrolments to completely pull through onto this page, so you may need to refresh your page to get them to show.
Repeat this step until all of the students are enrolled in the right registers.
Deleting an enrolment
If you've added an enrolment incorrectly, you can remove it (as long as you've not already started taking attendance for this register).
Tick the boxes next to all the students who you've added incorrectly, then click the Bulk action button and select Bulk delete student enrolments.
In the slide over, choose which registers to remove the enrolment into.
Changing enrolments into registers
If a student is changing the sessions they are attending for, you can end their current enrolments and add new ones.
Tick the boxes next to all the students who you want to change enrolments for, then click the Bulk action button and select Bulk end student enrolments.
In the slide over, choose which registers to end the enrolment into.
The students will then no longer be enrolled into those registers from the End date you select. You can check the students' enrolment has changed by using the date selector in the filters.
If you’ll be using Attendance Patterns, you’ll need to set these for your nursery students. Whenever you have a new student you’ll need to set their Attendance Pattern to make sure they appear in the right registers.
Click the Review Attendance Patterns button on Step 6 of the New School Year Setup, or go to Students > Enrolment > Year Groups and select the next academic year from the drop-down menu. Select your nursery, then click the Attendance Patterns option from the left-hand menu.
Click the Bulk Set Attendance Patterns button to select the enrolment start date and pattern, then select the students this applies to. Once you are happy, click the green Set Attendance Pattern button.
To change an existing Attendance Pattern you’ll need to delete it then add a new one. Click the Attendance field then click the Delete button in the slide over.
FAQ
If this step is locked, you'll need to go back to these steps and mark them as complete by clicking Mark as Complete:
- Academic Calendar
- Year Groups and Registration Forms
- Custom Groups
Please see our guidance here: Can I reset a step in the New Year Setup?
There is no need to mark nursery students with an X code.
Because you can choose exactly which registers nursery students will appear in, they won't appear on registers when they're not due to be in school.
There will be no attendance mark recorded for them. In the background, Arbor will treat this the same as if they had been marked as an X code for statutory attendance reporting e.g. in the census.
Yes, you can! The Bulk Enrolment page can be used for all year groups.
You can see all of the options for enrolling students in registers here: Enrol students into lesson registers in bulk
If your nursery doesn’t run Monday - Friday or doesn’t run with an AM and PM session every day of the week, you’ll need to remove the extra timetable slots.
Return to Step 6 of your new school year setup and you can see a full list of all the registers. All you’ll need to do is click into each one that you need to remove. For example, if my nursery doesn’t run on a Friday afternoon, click into Friday PM. Then click the delete button on the overview page.
If you need to change which registers a student should appear in, the action you'll need to take will depend on whether you use enrolments or Attendance Patterns to manage your nursery.
- Enrolments - follow the instructions here to add an end date for their enrolment into their current registers, then add a new enrolment into their new registers: Changing enrolments into registers
- Attendance patterns - see how to change a student's Attendance Pattern here: How to change a student's attendance pattern so they appear in the right registers
What's next?
The next step in the New School Year Setup Process is to set up the registers for the rest of your registration forms.
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