Manual Migrations - Everything You Need to Know

Before starting site setup, ensure you and your team can access these essential tools:

• Onboarding Spaces Portal: Log into your Spaces portal to track weekly tasks and view guided resources for each stage of your setup.

• Arbor Foundations Training: Log into The Arbor Training Hub to complete your 6 pre-go-live courses. Complete the nomination survey sent during your first week to ensure all key staff receive Training Hub accounts.

• Data Entry Checklist: Download and use the Manual Migration Data Entry Checklist (available in Spaces) to manage and track your data entry throughout your onboarding journey.

• Watch Onboarding Kick-Off Video: Log into Spaces and watch your Kick-Off video covering project roles, process overviews, and support channels.

• Staff Nomination & Training: Log into the Arbor Training Hub to activate your account. Complete the survey sent via email to nominate additional staff for Training Hub and Spaces access.

• Access Your Arbor Site: Log into your new Arbor MIS (access details sent via email).

• Start Arbor Setup: Configure School Details, Academic Years (working chronologically from oldest to newest, e.g., 2023/24 before 2024/25), Terms, Holidays, Pastoral Structure (Year Groups & Registration Forms), and Morning/Afternoon Registration sessions.

• Initial Staff: Optionally create 1–2 staff profiles manually for colleagues assisting with initial site setup.

Key Deliverable / Action: Access Spaces portal; configure School Details, Academic Years, and Reg Sessions; nominate staff for Training Hub access.

• Understand Entity Importers: Watch the Entity Importers Run-through and Validation training videos in Spaces or The Arbor Training Hub.

• Download Templates: Extract relevant Entity Importer spreadsheets from Arbor (School > Data > Import > Entity Importers) and begin gathering bulk data from your current MIS.

• Test & Bulk Import Staff: Import 2 staff members first to test the process. Once confirmed, populate the remaining staff into the template and upload. Ensure all profiles include work emails and business roles.

• Assign Teachers to Reg Forms: Go to Students > Enrolment > Registration Forms and assign your imported teachers to their respective registration forms.

• Notify Third Parties: Contact external software providers to inform them that you’re moving to Arbor and share your Go-Live date so they can prepare to switch integrations.

Key Deliverable / Action: Test and upload bulk Staff Entity Importers; assign teachers to reg forms; notify third parties.

• Staff Management Training: Complete training on the staff profile, covering profile navigation, permissions, working periods, and logging/analysing staff absences.

• Staff Training Check-In: Confirm that administrative and key staff are actively progressing through their assigned Arbor Foundations pre-go-live courses.

• Finalise Staff Imports: Complete any remaining staff template uploads so all staff accounts are active.

• Continue Data Entry: Keep downloading data from your current MIS and populating your remaining Entity Importer templates (e.g., student/guardian details), tracking progress on your checklist.

Key Deliverable / Action: Complete staff profile training; verify staff Training Hub progress; populate remaining templates that you need (you don't need to use all of them that are available).

• Student Profile Training: Complete student profile training covering student records, overview tabs, and SEN status.

• Create Intake Season: Set up an Intake Season in Arbor to enable bulk enrolment.

• Import CTFs & Enrol Students: Import student CTFs linked to your Intake Season. Enrol them into year groups and registration forms.

• Fix Enrolment Start Dates: Please email myonboarding@arbor-education.com so the Onboarding Team can run the Enrolment Dates Script to correct start dates for students that joined prior to your created intake season. Once confirmed, manually off-roll left students and adjust mid-year joiners.

Key Deliverable / Action: Create Intake Season, bulk-import student CTFs, and email Onboarding for the start-date script.

• Plan Priority Operations: Decide on "Day 1 Modules" (e.g., Meals, Payments, Parent App) and review the Priority Operations Guide to configure them.

• Prepare Attendance Importer: Download the Attendance Template Entity Importer. Request historical attendance exports from your current MIS provider, to be extracted after your final register on your last day of term.

• Format & Upload Data: Upload completed Entity Importer sheets and spot-check imported student profiles.

Key Deliverable / Action: Request attendance export from current MIS; upload entity importers; configure Day 1 priority modules.

• Go-Live Audit: Review the Readiness for Go Live article to confirm site readiness.

• Finalise Imports: Upload any remaining Entity Importers and confirm 100% completion of student, guardian, staff, and attendance data.

• Verify Staff Training Completion: Ensure all staff (especially teachers taking registers) have completed their Arbor training and know how to take a register.

• Onboard Staff: Send out your unique Arbor URL along with welcome emails, teacher/admin quick-start guides, and login troubleshooting resources.

Key Deliverable / Action: Run readiness audit, confirm staff training completion, verify registers, and send login URLs to staff.

• Verify Staff Logins: Ensure all staff can access the live site and resolve any login queries using the troubleshooting guide.

• Take Live Registers: Record morning and afternoon class attendance live in your new Arbor MIS!

• Connect Third Parties: Follow the Connecting Third-Party Applications Guide to activate integrations with 3rd-party systems.

• Module Support: Attend any final or specialised training sessions to fine-tune your Arbor MIS.

Key Deliverable / Action: Take live AM/PM registers in Arbor; connect and test third-party integrations.

• Onboarding Complete: Your onboarding comes to an end! Transition to Customer Success/Support.

• Finalise Training: Complete any remaining courses on the Arbor Training Hub (training access remains valid for 1 year from onboarding start).

• Expand Arbor Usage: Review the Preparing to Set Up and Launch Your Modules guide to plan the future rollout of additional features (e.g., Interventions, Clubs, or Trips).

Key Deliverable / Action: Transition to Customer Success/Support; finish Hub training; plan future module rollouts.

A key part of the training you need to complete during your onboarding is your Manual Migration training, this course is split into 8 different modules which each contain a series of pre-recorded videos and key information, detailing exactly how to set up your Arbor site from scratch:

The sessions should be watched in chronological order.

You do not need to book these sessions as you will already be enrolled in them on the Arbor Training Hub. The sessions are pre-recorded so you can watch them whenever is most convenient for you.

Start watching your training videos as soon as possible after you have kicked off to give yourself plenty of time to input your data.

Your school will have also purchased Arbor Foundations training which can be found and booked on the Arbor Training Hub. 

These courses will start with the word "Foundations" and cover all the basics of Arbor you'll need to hit the ground running and use Arbor on your Go Live day. 

These sessions will teach beginners how to navigate and use the Arbor system, please see this article for our recommendations regarding when to take each session.

Your school may have purchased further training, for example, Behaviour Training to help you set up the behaviour area. 

If you have purchased any further training your Project Lead will have already been enrolled in these sessions on the Arbor Training Hub and should book training in line with when you would like to use this area in Arbor.

If you have any questions about your training don't hesitate to reach out to myonboarding@arbor-education.com 

If you would to purchase additional training you can see our training catalogue here. 

Entity Importers are templates that can be downloaded from your own Arbor site so you can input data and import it into your site in bulk. Please take a look at our guide here on how to access them and a step-by-step of how to do this.

You don't need to use every entity importer available, please think of them as useful templates on how to easily input additional data. 

You only need to input the historical attendance data required for the census.

There is an Entity Importer named 'Roll Call Attendance' available in your Arbor MIS, which you can download, populate with historic attendance data and re-import into Arbor. 

Click here to read more about the Entity Importers. 

You'll need to request this attendance data from your old MIS provider to import into Arbor after your last day of term on your old MIS.

If you are migrating your data mid-year, we recommend you don’t upload the entity importer templates until just before your Go Live; however, if you have done this before last-minute changes are made to the data you can always edit directly in Arbor. 

Please don’t attempt to re-upload the templates with edits as this will lead to duplicate information.

Entity Importers add data to Arbor. They do not delete or merge. Any data that you add using the entity importer that already exists on Arbor will be a duplicate. You can tidy this up using the data quality dashboard. 

Please see this article for exact instructions on how to import a CTF. To understand what a CTF is and what information will transfer to Arbor on a CTF please see the DFE' guidance here. 

The information transferred will depend on how it has been stored at individual schools.

A third party application is another piece of software that Arbor can connect with to allow data to transfer between the two systems, please see this list from the Help Centre: Arbor's Third-Party API Integrations to check out the companies we can integrate with and how the connection works.

You can access a full list of Business roles and the permissions they hold by going to School > Users & Security select Business Roles on the left-hand side and then select the download button. This will then generate a spreadsheet of all of the business roles and permissions that are assigned to them.

We have a helpful guide on our Help Center to help with the process of getting these uploaded onto your site - Uploading and downloading photos.

Firstly, you will need to ensure that every staff member has a school email address and Business role to allow them to access the site. When ready, you can share the URL with your team who will then select the ‘First Time Logging In’ button and can set their own password.

For those schools moving to Arbor over the Christmas break Census will occur pretty soon after go live. To make sure you have all the information you need, please see this guide.

Once CTF's are imported you can request a script to be run by the Arbor Team, this will update pupils' enrolment dates that are required for this year's census, but it won't update any previous year groups.

 If your school would like to update previous years you will need to do this manually on the student profile. 

Once you have uploaded CTFs and need enrolment dates amending, please contact myonboarding@arbor-education.com. 

If your enrolment entry dates are not available in your CTF files you will need to manually update when your pupils joined the school via student profiles. 

After you have scheduled registration sessions you should then go into 'timetable slots' and change the effective dates so that the start date is your Go Live date and the end date is the last day of the school year.

School > Timetable > Timetable Administration > Timetable Slots

The purpose of the Manual Migration journey is to ensure that you are census compliant, meaning you are only expected to input information which will enable you to run your next census in Arbor. 

We acknowledge that GDPR guidelines encourage you to have access to a data from various historical years, however this data does not need to stored within your MIS and is not apart of the standard Manual Migration journey. 

You can store any historical data in the form of files, documents, downloads etc. on an internal school server.