The first big milestone of your move to Arbor is the migration of data from your existing MIS. Your Customer Onboarding Manager will give you details of our migration process during your Kick-Off meeting.
To make sure the migration is accurate, we give secondary schools one dummy data run on week 3 of the onboarding journey - we’ll take a backup of your data, migrate it to Arbor, and you can log in to your Arbor system to see how it looks. You can see more information about what to do during each here: How to use your Arbor dummy sites
Once you’re into your Arbor dummy site, you’ll need to thoroughly check the data that has migrated and cleanse the data in your existing system ahead of the final migration. This guide will show you how to check data in Arbor, and highlight a few common migration problems.
Top Tip: You should record your data checks in your Onboarding Workbook, so you can keep track of the work still to be done. The Current MIS Counts should be completed in week 3 just ahead of sending your data to Arbor.
Please note the following can vary for a GroupCall API migrator, we are working on adding the GroupCall Migrator specifications to this guide. If you need to raise any data discrepancies post migration please contact Arbor support or your dedicated partner and we will be advised of the next steps.
Using the Data Migration Report
After each migration, you can view a summary of the migrated data by downloading your Data Migration Report. This interactive report can help you quickly identify discrepancies in the migrated data.
Permissions
To access the Data Migration Report, you will need the Student Profile: Admin: Administer All Students permission. If you don't have the permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.
A lot of information in the report is linked to your Arbor system. For example, there is a section that shows you how many students you have that are Pupil Premium students.
- If you click on this part of the report, it will take you to your Arbor MIS, and a list of your pupil premium students in the system so you can see who those students are.
- There are some figures which you cannot click, but you can report on these here: Additional custom reports for your Data Migration QA Report
You can use the pre-migration data counts in your Onboarding Workbook to quickly compare the data in Arbor with your old system.
Migration Data Counts
Your Onboarding Workbook has a list of recommended data counts to perform in Arbor. This is a great way to identify discrepancies between the two datasets. You should make any changes in your existing system ahead of your final migration.
In these videos, we'll show you how to find the data needed for these counts in Arbor.
Migration Data Checks
After each migration, it is important to thoroughly check your student and staff data to make sure it has migrated correctly. As well as checking student and staff profiles, we recommend undertaking detailed checks of migrated attendance, behaviour, exams, timetable, and enrolment data.
We recommend checking a sample of students from different year groups, with a range of demographic indicators (e.g. FSM, EAL, SEN Status, Dual Registered). You should check a minimum of 10 students.
We recommend checking a sample of staff, with a range of job roles and start dates. You should check a minimum of 10 staff.
We recommend checking a sample of attendance certificates to ensure that all attendance marks and absence notes have migrated correctly. You should also use the Attendance Statistics screen to check that the number and percentage of present, absent, and late marks match your previous MIS.
You should carefully check that statutory behaviour data - fixed-term and permanent exclusions - have migrated. Depending on your previous system, we may be able to migrate historic behaviour incidents - in this case, you should check a range of students to confirm that these have all migrated.
Your exams officer should carefully check candidates, entries, and results. Check out our Top Tips for Exams Officers for more information about getting started with Exams.
You should check a sample of student and staff timetables, and review any timetable clashes.
Carefully check the enrolment figures for the whole school, year groups, registration forms and courses.
If you have a Sixth Form, check that your Programmes of Study (e.g.A Level English Literature 2yr) and Programme Instances (e.g. A Level English Literature 2yr, 2019 - 2021) have migrated. Check that students are enrolled into the correct programme instances.
Because of the flexibility with these fields in other MIS systems, you'll need to check how they have been migrated. You may wish to update them in your previous system. You can see more information here: Migrated Dietary requirements, Medical Conditions, Events and Notes
What if data has migrated incorrectly or not at all?
If when doing your checks, you see that certain data has migrated incorrectly, or data you were informed would migrate does not, please report this.
You can see how to do this here: How can I report migration issues?
Comments
Article is closed for comments.