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 and statutory roll call attendance for secondaries/all-throughs, statutory roll call attendance for other school types and absences from SIMS, Integris and Progresso.
• 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 attendance register notes for SIMS and ScholarPack. You can view these in Planned Absences.

Because we can only migrate attendance register notes attached to lessons (not statutory roll call marks), we cannot migrate attendance notes for primary schools.

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.