September troubleshooting top tips guide

This article covers the most common queries schools raise when returning to school in September, including links to key articles to help resolve any issues that may occur. 

Logging in and staff access

Make sure all your staff have access to the system:

• If you are experiencing login issues, work through these troubleshooting tips with your office team. Click the Forgot your password? link on your login page to change your password, or if your password has expired over the summer, ask your school’s Admin staff to reset this for you from your profile.
• If a staff member is being asked to input their date of birth, it means that their email address is also in use on a guardian profile. See this article to resolve: Check for duplicate email addresses
• If there are no classes on the Students > Attendance > Daily Attendance, follow the steps in this article to resolve.
• Make sure teachers can access their registers from their calendar so they can all take attendance. There are a couple of steps to check if they’re having trouble.
• Need to give more staff access to registers? There are a few different ways to manage access: Giving permission for other staff or teaching assistants to take attendance registers
  

I need to change our timetable

We recommend our intro article for those who are new to timetabling in Arbor: Glossary of key terminology for enrolment, timetabling and registers

If you need to make changes to your timetable after students return to school, see our recommended articles here:

• Staggered starts - If you have students who don't start right away, take a look at this article: Staggered Start Dates
• Editing your timetable - If you need to make changes to your timetable, we recommend making edits in Arbor from the Timetable Slots page as this is usually much quicker than importing a new timetable. To make edits to your timetables, such as editing rooms and staff, or deleting unneeded slots, take a look at this article: Editing timetable slots and lesson times
• Timetable periods can be used to help align your attendance marks into set groups. If you want to use this feature again you’ll need to set them up by following the instructions in this article.
• Adding new lessons - To add new timetable slots just go to School > Programmes > Courses and click the lesson, and follow these instructions: How to set up Course, Class, Registration and Lesson registers

Student enrolments and registers

For those who are new to enrolment, we recommend this introductory guide: Glossary of key terminology for enrolment, timetabling and registers

Add or remove new students

Here's how to add and manage new students:

• Add new students - If new students join you who weren't added as part of the Applicants process, you can see how to add them and then enrol them into registers: Adding a new student
• Enrolling in bulk - If you have lots of students you need to add to registers, see your options here: Enrol students into lesson registers in bulk
• Duplicate students or enrolled applicants who are no longer joining may need to be removed. See this article to find out what you’ll need to do.

Registers

Here's how to make sure all your students are in the right registers:

• Moving students to the right classes - Check your students are enrolled in the right registers and move them if needed: Moving students between classes or registration forms
• No registers! If you were expecting to have registers today but don't, you won't be able to take attendance! Follow these instructions: Why don't we have registers today?
• There is a register but no students in it? See these instructions: Students in Registration Forms are not in the class registers
• Students missing from your registers? You’ll need to check their enrolment using this article.
• Students in a register they shouldn't be in? Follow these instructions.
• Don’t have any meal registers or students in your meal registers? Check out this article to help resolve this.
• My Classroom - You can use layouts from past years as these are linked to the room, but you will need to set up seating plans each year as there will be different students in your classes. You can see how to do this here.

Post-16 and Sixth-form students and courses

Ending student enrolment into your school, or changing enrolment into courses won’t update Programmes of Study. Please follow these instructions to make sure your Programmes of Study are up to date.

Check you've set up your Shared Teaching courses for the next academic year - please follow our instructions here.

Behaviour

We recommend our intro article for those who are new to behaviour in Arbor: Introduction to Behaviour in Arbor

If you’ll be using Behaviour in Arbor from September, take a look here for how to:

• set up your behaviour policies for the first time if this is your first year using Arbor
• copy over your setup to next year if you used behaviour in Arbor last year - you don't need to set up everything, only schedule your detention and internal exclusion sessions

I can't add students to a detention or internal exclusion session

If you cannot select detention or internal exclusion sessions to add students to, this means they haven't been scheduled for next year - you'll need to set them up following these instructions:

• I can't add students to a detention session
• I can't add students to an internal exclusion session

Clubs, Trips and payments

There are a few things you'll need to check and action to manage payments:

• Need to settle or move debts? Guardians won't be able to access the Parent Portal or Parent App for students who have left your school, but you can settle their debt if needed.
• Moving money - You can refund students who have left, or move money into another area if the wrong account has been topped up: Transfer balances between accounts
• Trips from last year - If you set up a trip last year to take payments, where the trip is happening this year, you'll need to make sure you set it up again this year with the same participants, and sign up the students who have already paid: Copying over a trip into another year
• Wraparound care from last year - You'll need to create a new Breakfast/After School club for the new year. However, because these use a Customer Account Type, the balance from last year will automatically carry over: Setting up a breakfast club or after-school club
• Guardians can't sign their child up or pay - Be sure to check that the child is in an eligible student group, and that guardian sign-up is open by following these instructions for trips, clubs, wraparound care and School Shop.

Communications

We recommend our intro article for those who are new to communications in Arbor: Checking your settings before starting to use communications in Arbor

Make sure the right people can send email, SMS and in-app messages to the right recipients:

• Make sure you’ve completed the New School Year setup process, or you won't be able to choose the group in the To field for classes, registration forms, year groups, houses or custom groups.
• Sending communications - To send different communications, as themselves, the school or others, staff will need to be a Permitted Sender of the communication type they want to send. They will also need to have the right permissions. Check these settings here.
• Wrong signature at the bottom of emails sent - This is set from the staff contract, so check contract names on staff profiles to ensure the right job title appears in communication signatures: Wrong job title or role in search and email
• In-app messages - Have guardians download the Parent App and enable push notifications, or log in to Parent Portal to be able to receive in-app messages

Parent Portal and Parent App

If you use the Parent Portal and Parent App, guardians may have trouble logging in for the first time. Please advise parents not to contact Arbor directly, as we won’t be able to make changes to their data.

• Logging in - If you need to send login details to guardians you can follow these instructions.
  
• Why can’t parents log in? - Follow these steps to get guardians logged in if they're having trouble: Troubleshooting login issues for parents
  
• See what a guardian sees - troubleshoot issues and check your setup by Logging in as a guardian
• Guardians may have issues if they have a profile set up for multiple children. See how this works here: Child at more than one school using Arbor
• Can't access a child - Make sure the guardians are linked to all their children to be able to switch between them on the Parent Portal or Parent App: Linking siblings to each other and linking a guardian to a child

You can also share this resource with them: A quick introduction to Arbor for guardians and parents

API and 3rd party connections

Arbor can integrate with a large number of third-party applications, and our current integrations are listed here: Arbor's Third-Party API Integrations

If you'd like to integrate your Arbor site with a 3rd party, follow the instructions in this article: Setting up and managing third-party API integrations in Arbor

• If your data hasn't updated in your 3rd party application, follow our Top tips for managing your APIs
• If you are having issues, please follow the instructions here: How to troubleshoot or report API 3rd party integration issues

Assessments

Need a Reception Baseline Assessment Report? Just import our template into your Custom Report Writer, then download and send it to the standards and testing agency.

Copying over Assessments

If you used Arbor Assessments last year, you'll need to copy over your setup to next year. Take a look here for how to copy over your assessments.

Data Collection Policies are linked to the Assessment policy. Because you need to select the assessments to create or copy over each year, you also need to define your Data Collection Policies each year if you use them at your school. You can see how to add Data Collections here.

If you've copied over your assessments but teachers can't access them or the boxes are greyed out, follow these instructions: Why can't the teacher mark the assessment?

We're new to Arbor Assessments

If you didn’t use assessments last year, you can set them up for next year to start learning from your data with visual analysis screens.

• MATS - you can roll out assessments across your schools by following these instructions.
• Primaries - we’ve created two ready-to-go assessment approaches for reading, writing and maths assessments. Use our handy quiz to pick the approach that’s right for you, and save time on setup with our step-by-step guidance.
• Secondaries - take a look at our Introduction to Arbor Assessments for a feel of what we offer, then use our setup templates for English Literature and Language, and Double/Triple Science here, or more basic setups here.

If you’re looking to manage your assessments in a bespoke way, our expert consultants can work with you to help you tailor Arbor to suit your approach - contact your customersales@arbor-education.com for further details.