The Headlines

Bulk end timetable slots

You can now end timetable slots for any lessons in bulk. Before, you could only add an end date to slots in bulk if they had the same start date. Now you can end any timetables slots no matter their start date - just go to School > Timetable > Administration > Timetable Slots, select the slots and click the blue pencil icon to choose Bulk End Timetable Slot.

Merging or deleting students

If you have the School: General Admin: Administer permission, you can now merge or delete student profiles. You’ll get a notification in your to-do list when there’s a duplicate, so you can delete them from the Data Quality Dashboard or their profile. Selecting to merge students will send a request to another member of staff via email and notification for them to approve or reject. See the full process here.

Covid-19 testing

Guardians can now record testing results through the Parent Portal and Arbor App once you switch this feature on from your Parent Portal Settings page. Guardians can’t see previous records or edit the tests, and you won’t get an alert when a positive result is logged, so let guardians know they may still need to contact you in this case. See the full process here.

What else is new?

• We’ve added an option of Not Required/Not Applicable for each Check Type to give you extra flexibility to record staff data in a way that suits you. We’ve also added Check Clearance Levels for a range of existing checks and added a new Check Type of Trained in Health & Safety.
• To make it clearer where to go on the student profile to add and view SEN information, we’ve split Educational Needs and Interventions into their own sections, removed the SEN area on the main student page and renamed Notes to SEN Notes.
• We’ve updated our ParentMail reports to include a ParentMail identifier rather than a unique MIS ID, and you can choose whether to use Preferred or Legal names.
• In Exams > EDI Exports > Entries, clicking into a file will allow you to see if pupil details have changed since it was generated by highlighting this in red, so you’ll know if you need to send a new amendment file.
• You’ll now need to mark the last Amendment or Entry file generated as Approved or Rejected before you can generate a new Amendment file.
• We’ve made the Students > Attendance > Admin > Roll Call Setup page more intuitive to use by adding buttons. We’ve also made some improvements in the background to speed up any recalculations.
• To enable schools to answer the new questions in the DfE’s daily form, we added new rows for total absences due to Covid-19, and students absent due to a phased return, and removed the rows for vulnerable students and critical/key worker children in the Covid-19 Dashboard.
• We’ve made it possible to use single sign-on without two-factor authentication. See how to set this up here.
• We’ve moved the Intervention Setup Cost page from the left-hand menu to the Costs and Funding tab on the Overview.

Coming soon…

Communications

We’ll be switching SMS provider, so anyone who replies to an old SMS that was sent before 22nd March after 29th March will receive a message to get in touch another way. They will be able to reply to any SMS sent after 22nd March.

Assessments

We’re working on adding the ability to see attainment in My Classroom, plus you’ll be able to set targets and track student attainment against them on the Group MIS.

Staff HR

We’ll be adding a date field to allow you to record a staff member’s Continuous service date, plus we’ll be adding more features for Staff HR reporting for your Group MIS staff.

We publish a roundup of our releases every other Friday here. You can also see what else we’re working on using our Roadmap. Why not also join in the conversation in the Arbor Community?