Setting up Nursery - 1. Introduction

This is the first article in the "Setting up Nursery" series. This introduction explains which approach to take when setting up nursery registers in Arbor, including required permissions, choosing attendance patterns or manual enrolment, and Arbor’s structure of one Nursery course containing 10 AM/PM modules with timetable slots.

In this series

1. Setting up Nursery - 1. Introduction
2. Setting up Nursery – 2. Registers and Sessions
3. Setting up Nursery – 3. Enrolling Students with Attendance Patterns
4. Setting up Nursery – 4. Enrolling Students Manually (Irregular Attendance)

Permissions

Permissions differ depending on which part of nursery setup you're doing; check the specific requirement for each task rather than assuming one permission covers the whole series:

• Setting up registers and courses (article 2): 
   
  • School: Academic Structure: Administer to set up courses/registers
  • School: Teaching: Administer for scheduling registration forms.
     
• Enrolling with Attendance Patterns (article 3)
   
  • School: Academic Structure: Administer or School: Teaching: Administer (for automatic enrolments
  • Student Profile: Attendance: Administer All Students (to set the pattern itself).
     
• Enrolling manually for irregular attendance (article 4): 
   
  • School: Academic Structure: View/Administer to access the bulk enrolments screen.
  • One of School: Academic Structure: Administer, School: General Admin: Administer, or Student Profile: Enrolment: Administer All Students to enrol students in registers.

If you don’t have these permissions, ask your admin team to grant them using these instructions. 

What to consider before you start

The main question to settle before starting is: How will your students attend- regularly or irregularly?

This is the single biggest decision in nursery setup, and it determines which article you need next:

• If your students attend the same sessions every day of the week (e.g. always mornings, or always all day), use Attendance Patterns. See article 3.

• If your students attend a mix of sessions across the week (e.g. only Tuesdays and Thursdays, or different days for different children), Attendance Patterns will not work for you so use manual enrolment instead. See article 4.

How Nursery Registers are set up in Arbor

Before you start, it helps to understand how Arbor structures nursery registers behind the scenes:

• Your nursery is set up as a single Nursery course. This is the top-level container everything else sits inside.
• Inside the course are 10 modules (sub-courses) – two for each day of the week, one for the morning (AM) and one for the afternoon (PM).
• Each module corresponds to one register. The module's name becomes the register's title – for example, a module named "Monday AM" produces a register titled "Nursery: Monday AM".
• Each module needs a timetable slot attached. This is what actually creates the register – a module with no timetable slot won't produce one. The timetable slot is where you set the weekday and time range for that session.
• Students are enrolled into specific modules, not into the whole course. This is what determines which registers a student appears on – enrol a student into "Monday AM" and "Wednesday PM", for instance, and they'll appear only on those two registers, not on any of the others.

This module-per-session structure is why the setup works the way it does: article 2 walks you through creating the course and its modules and timetable slots, and articles 3 and 4 cover the two ways to enrol students into the right modules for the sessions they attend.