Begin - Introduction to Behaviour in Arbor

This article introduces the Behaviour module in Arbor, outlining the steps schools can take to effectively manage student behaviour through recording, reporting, and workflows. It details features available in different packages, the importance of consistency in behaviour management, and how to set up automatic workflows for incident handling. Additionally, it highlights the support available for schools to get started with these features.

What can we do with the Behaviour in Arbor?

To see more information about the names for different areas, please see: Glossary of key terminology for Behaviour

Recording

Depending on their level of access and permissions, staff can record behaviour points and behaviour incidents from a variety of places. You can see how this can be done here for points and here for incidents.

Teachers also have a special area just for them called the Lesson Dashboard, where they can manage everything about their current class. They can record behaviour for students from here in bulk, and see any students who are due to be out of lessons. Take a look at how the Lesson Dashboard works here: Managing my class from the Lesson Dashboard Overview

Reporting

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.

Each piece of behaviour information recorded adds 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

What features are included in my package?

We have loads of different features that you can use to improve parental engagement as part of your MIS. Take a look at the table to see the main features that are included in each basic package.

The Parent App and Parent Portal are available as part of the Comms and Perform MIS packages. To find out how to upgrade your package, contact customersales@arbor-education.com 

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.
• Or set up your own custom workflows for certain behaviour types.
• Or use a combination of the two!

We'll show you how to set up both in the next part of our series - Build.

• 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.

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.