Introduction to Behaviour in Arbor

What can we do with the Behaviour in Arbor?

The Behaviour area enables you to see the bigger picture of your students’ behaviour by helping you identify the causes and implement a solution quickly. Keep track of positive and negative behavioural incidents, award or deduct behaviour points (such as merits or demerits) to students, assign follow up actions such as detentions or exclusions, and report on all the data you have entered. You can:

• See a complete overview of groups and of individual students, building a picture of why something may be happening in the school.
• Set up automatic behaviour workflows, to record incidents and follow-up with them automatically and consistently.
• Action all negative incidents e.g. by assigning detentions and exclusions.

Schools want to keep accurate records of student behaviour to enable staff to follow up and spot patterns so they can intervene and improve behaviour. In Arbor, this can be done through recording behaviour as ‘incidents’. You can see how to record behaviour here: Administering behaviour. On each behaviour incident you can record:

• Behaviour type
• Location and time
• Students and staff members involvement
• The follow up needed to resolve the incident
• Physical Interventions

Although small pieces of information, they add up to help you find the answers to key questions like: Is there a new behaviour trend? Is it a particular location or at a certain time? Is there always the same students involved? Take a look here for how you can analyse your Behaviour logs: Behaviour Analysis - Reporting on incidents, detentions and exclusions

Permissions

• Behaviour: Behaviour Policy or School: Action: Behaviour: Administer - Set up and edit behaviour setup
• Behaviour: Administer/View My Students - Log behaviour and see totals for students you teach
• Behaviour: View All Students - View statistics
• Behaviour: Log behaviour incident or Log point award - Give to any staff to record behaviour outside the classroom but not edit anything

If you don't have the permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

Behaviour Workflows and Escalation

Consistency is the bedrock to good behaviour management in a school, but good behaviour management takes a lot of time out of a teacher's day; contacting parents, notifying heads of year, assigning detentions, adding the right number of points. It all adds up!

With Arbor's automatic workflow feature, we take care of all this for you.

You can use these to ensure your behaviour policy is followed consistently by setting up key actions (or workflows) to happen automatically for each level of incident. For example, you may want to notify a student's head of year for a level 3 negative incident, and their form tutor for a level 2 negative incident.

With auto-escalation, if a child is involved in a certain number of incidents over a given time period a higher level incident is automatically created. All you need to do is set up your behaviour policy in Arbor and every time a teacher logs an incident the system will take care of the rest.

• You can use our built-in workflows based on levels: Setting up Behaviour workflows
• Or set up your own custom workflows for certain behaviour types: Custom Behaviour Incident Workflows
• Or use a combination of the two!

• Sending message template to primary guardian - this will send an email or SMS to the primary guardians of that student. A template will need to be set up, contact details for the guardian(s) for the method of contact chosen, guardian(s) marked down as a primary guardian for this student and the guardian should not be unsubscribed from communications.
• Notify member of staff - You can select multiple staff for each severity level that will be notified when an incident with this severity level is recorded.
• Assign to a member of staff - You can only select one member of staff or one role related to their student. For example, their Head of Year.
• Auto close - Close the incident once the workflow has happened. For example, with the workflow below, the incident will be resolved as soon as the message has been sent.
• Escalation - For example, any 2 incidents logged at level -1 in a term would be escalated to a level -3 incident. So if a student had a behaviour incident for running inside at level -1 already, then had another level -1 incident logged for not being ready to learn, Arbor would automatically log a -3 incident. 
• Add/ deduct points - If you have point awards setup, you can incorporate this with your Incident Workflows. For example, a -3 incident would deduct 3 points. If you add this at a later date, it will only take effect to incidents from that point onwards, not all past incidents.
• Email staff when incidents are assigned to them - Any staff you have set up in the Assign to member of staff section will be notified.

Top Tip: Check what actions and communications have already been done for an incident from the Actions Taken section in the incident overview.

Pros and Cons of using Behaviour Workflows

Taking a look at an example escalation workflow

In this example (using our built-in workflows rather than the custom ones), once a student has their second Level 3 Negative incident in a month, it will escalate to a -4 incident.

When the student then has a second Level 3 Negative incident logged, a Level 4 Negative incident will be logged.

If you have chosen to add or deduct points, points will be added/deducted accordingly for all levels.

If you have chosen to send an email follow-up to guardians for a level 4 incident but not a level 3, this email will then be triggered and sent.