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The Headlines

In-house Examinations

You can now set up and run In-house exams in Students > Examinations > In-house Exams. Schedule exam instances and sittings, then enter candidates and provide Access Arrangements.

You can set up your Exam Timetables and Assign seats in the same way you would for any exam, just go to Timetabling.  

For more guidance on setting up In-house exams click here, or for entering candidates click here.

 

Single Staff Record

All schools have to keep a single central staff record up to date to make sure all checks and precautions have been made to keep their students safe. We’ve now created a dedicated page which can be found under School > All Staff > Single Central Record.

 

Staff Cover

In addition to our Cover Required table, you can now see the number of lessons teachers have covered in Cover Provided by going to School > All Staff > Cover. Use the ranking to see who needs cover, and who’s been the most generous with their time!

 

Today’s Attendance in Detentions

Detention staff can now see whether a student has attended their other lessons today. Just click on a student from the Detention Session Dashboard to view an enrolled student’s attendance for their lessons that day. Great for figuring out if they weren’t in the last lesson - are they going to turn up to the detention, or does someone need to go looking for them?

 

Probation Periods and Reviews

You can now add probation periods and probation reviews to staff contracts, and see whether reviews have been passed, which probations are coming to an end, or have had no decision set. Just go to School > All Staff > HR Admin > Contracts and click the Pay Review Dates tab, or go to the Contracts section of a Staff Profile.

 

Collate Labels and Reports

When printing labels for students, you can now collate them by year group, registration form or house (or just print them in alphabetical order). Just go to School > Communications > Labels.

 

We’ve also added this feature to Custom Reports!

 

Communication Templates

You can now link Communication templates to a Custom Report. Create a report in the Custom Report Writer, then go to School > Communications > Templates to create an Email, SMS or letter template using data from the report as merge field. Perfect for following up with parents about low attendance marks!

 

What else is new?

• We’ve received requests from schools asking whether other staff can print labels without getting access to all school comms. Now you can! Click here for more information.
• A staff member’s Communication history can now be viewed from the staff profile as well as from Communications.
• Learning hours can now be managed on the student Enrolment page, as well as from Students > All Students > Bulk Update > Learning Hours.
• You can now change marks in bulk on the Bulk Edit Marks grid, allowing you to change all marks for all selected students, for example, changing ‘N’ to ‘O’.
• You can now add attachments when creating academic notes for students, not just when editing them. To add a note, go to Student profile > Academic notes.

 

Coming soon...

Email report cards to guardians in bulk

To help increase parental engagement, you’ll soon be able to share report cards (in bulk if necessary) to guardians using the Communications part of Arbor.

Data collections

Our new Data Collections page will allow you to define collection windows and schedule approvals for assessments. You will also be able to see which marks have not been entered and remind the staff members responsible via email.

New Ending Employment process

We’re going to be reducing the number of steps needed to end a staff member’s employment details in Arbor, so the contract, business role and user access will all be removed at once.

 

If you want to propose an improvement idea, contact the Customer Success Team.

An article like this is published every other Friday in the ‘Recent Updates’ section.