How we Migrate Student Attendance

This article explains the process of migrating student attendance data from various management information systems (MIS) to Arbor, detailing what types of attendance are migrated, including lesson attendance, statutory roll call attendance, and absences. It also covers the limitations regarding attendance notes and sub-codes, as well as how to edit migrated marks and use Arbor's analysis features.

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.

Attendance

We don't restrict the dates for migrated attendance, we'll migrate attendance from the current academic year and previous years.

• We migrate lesson attendance, statutory roll call attendance and absences for secondaries and all-throughs from SIMS (.bak only), Bromcom, Integris and Progresso.
• We migrate statutory roll-call attendance and absences for primary schools from SIMS (.bak only), Bromcom, Integris and Progresso.
• Please note: Will will only migrate roll-call attendance and absence for schools migrating from SIMS via GroupCall. We are working to deliver the ability to migrate lesson attendance via GroupCall and we will update this guidance when it becomes available. 
• We migrate statutory roll call attendance and absences from Bromcom, CMIS and ScholarPack.
• We only migrate nursery/early years attendance patterns for SIMS and Bromcom. This is because for example, in ScholarPack, these are stored as future attendance marks instead.

Please note: If you used Go4Schools or ClassCharts alongside SIMS to take attendance, we will only have migrated your statutory roll call attendance to Arbor.

Attendance notes

We only migrate past roll-call attendance register notes for SIMS migrations via GroupCall. We do not migrate future register notes via GroupCall. 

We only migrate roll-call attendance register notes for SIMS (.bak only) and ScholarPack. You can view these in Planned Absences. This means we cannot migrate attendance notes for primary schools migrating from SIMS via .bak or ScholarPack.

For attendance notes that have not migrated, you may wish to get the information from your previous MIS and add them manually. You can log these as Planned Absences, even for past absences!

Attendance sub-codes

Some MIS systems such as SIMS allow you to define your own attendance sub-codes that map to one of the DfE's agreed codes.

It isn't possible to create your own attendance codes in Arbor, so we migrate your sub-codes as the code they map to instead. Please note that we do migrate Covid-related attendance sub-codes as these have come from the DfE.

You can see the full list of our codes here: Attendance codes and how they count towards statutory attendance

Migrated marks

You cannot edit lesson marks marks recorded in your previous system from the same pages as you edit marks taken in Arbor.

• If you need to edit any of the attendance marks that have been migrated, you can see how to do this here: Editing attendance marks migrated from your old MIS and adding missing marks
• Should you need to fix any incomplete registers, you can see how to do this here: Migrated registers showing in Incomplete Registers

Using the Arbor analysis pages

Only schools that have had their lesson attendance migrated (secondaries/all-throughs from SIMS, Integris or Progresso) can use the Attendance Over Time page to look at migrated attendance.