At Arbor, we know how important it is to get your assessments right. To ensure our schools/MATs get all the support they need to transition smoothly and effectively to Arbor Assessments, we have created a personalised approach to assessment training.
Assessment training at Arbor is carried out by our Customer Education Specialists or one of our team of External Consultants in order to give schools the best outcomes and utilise the wealth of experience we have across the teams.
Our Personalised Assessment approach is made up of a combination of different services, dependant on your school's or MAT's needs. To find out more, please take at look at the information about some of these services below.
To book your Personalised Assessment Session or to discuss how this would benefit your school/MAT, please contact us via customersales@arbor-education.com.
Nearly all Arbor Personalised Assessments start with an Assessment Consultation.
The aim of the Assessment Consultation is for the school/MAT and a Customer Education Specialist or Consultant to agree on the best approach to setting up and using Assessments on Arbor.
This session will consist of an online course that includes a demo of the system and a 2 hour (depending on the complexity of your requirements) live session with a Customer Education Specialist.
This will include:
- A questionnaire to complete with your Customer Education Specialist/Consultant;
- The creation of an Assessment Framework to be signed off by the school;
- A training plan (often completed without the school in attendance).
For more information about our Assessment Consultations, what to expect, and how to prepare, please read this article.
Assessment Consultations can be completed before schools go live on Arbor if required.
Once you have completed your Consultation, the next step is to have your setup training to learn how to create the agreed Assessment Framework and Policy on your Arbor Site.
The length of time for this training will vary depending on your school's or MAT's needs.
The aim of the setup training is to go through how to create your Assessment Marksheets for all agreed Assessments so they are ready for data entry.
For schools/MATs with simple requirements, you may find that, between yourself and the Customer Education Specialist, these will be setup and ready to use by the end of the session.
However, as a minimum, we will aim to finish the session with at least one example of every type of assessment setup (e.g all English Assessments ready for data entry), so you know the exact steps to replicate to complete your school's/MAT's setup.
Some of the things we often include in Setup training are:
- Adding and managing Grade Sets;
- Creating Assessment Frameworks;
- Adding Assessments to your Annual Policy;
- Setting up Target Judgements and Marksheet settings/templates.
Assessment Setup Training is best completed once you have your live Arbor site, at least two weeks before any data entry needs to take place.
Please note: For Secondary Schools/MATs, if you complete your training whilst on a dummy data site, anything set up in the session will be wiped as part of your final migration.
Once schools have completed their setup training, most will require further training on how to manage their assessments, enter data (including targets), and utilise more of the system. For this, we recommend Assessment User training.
Just like Setup training, the length of time this will take is dependant on your school's/MAT's requirements.
Some of the areas we may cover in User training include:
- Setting Baselines and/or Targets;
- Setting up Data Collections;
- Teacher Data Entry;
- Managing Assessments;
- General Exporting of Data;
- Report Cards for Parents.
We advise that schools/MATs complete User training about a week or two before their teachers start entering data. This is so the Data Leads have time to learn the processes and pass on the knowledge to staff across their school/MAT.
Some schools may choose to complete some Analysis Training on Arbor once they have started collecting data so they can start to spot trends and take action on their data from within Arbor.
Your school's/MAT's reporting needs, and whether a third party system is being used for more complex/specific analysis, will dictate how long is needed for this training.
In Analysis Training we can cover the follow areas:
- Setting up School Assessment Measures;
- Using the built in Arbor Assessment Analysis tools for summative and/or formative tracking;
- Using the Custom Report Writer to build key/bespoke assessment data reports;
- Reporting on individual pupils.
Analysis training should always take place after you have begun collecting data in Arbor. Most schools book this in their first term on Arbor, or a couple weeks after their first data collection.
For Primary Schools, Arbor has a few assessment ready to go. If you school is using this, we offer a few options without in depth consultations to get this up and running for your school/MAT.
- Use the Help Centre guides here to learn the setup and usage of these assessments by yourself.
- Book some training e.g. Setup and User, to be supported as you set these up.
- Book some Analysis training to help understand the data and manage your reporting effectively.
If your school or MAT plan to use our Ready to Go Primary Assessments, and are interested in option 2 or 3, please contact your Account Manager to find out more.
Some schools will have already completed their Personalised Assessment training but may need some additional support, e.g help with using new features, refresher training ahead of the new year, or new staff training.
In these situations, we recommend utilising our Bespoke training agendas to help build training for your school/MAT.
If you need some top-up training on assessment, please contact your account manager with your requirements; they can recommend the length of time needed and the agenda for your training.
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