Moving from ScholarPack to Arbor - Glossary of key terminology and reports

In ScholarPack, your System Administrator chooses who can access the MIS - access is manually given usually to Teachers and administrative staff by creating a ScholarPack login. At Arbor, anyone can log in automatically (as long as they have an email address and a Business Role). This allows:

• all staff to take action, such as your lunchtime monitor recording behaviour incidents as they see them
• senior leadership to do any data analysis themselves, without relying on other staff to print out reports to pass to them

You can see more information on how staff access works here: What are Business Roles and Permissions in Arbor?, and how staff can log in here: Log in and out of the School MIS as staff and troubleshooting login issues

In Arbor, staff are presumed to be present unless:

• it is outside of their working hours - this is managed using working periods
• they have an absence logged - staff absences tell the system and the Workforce Census that the staff member was off. You can see a list of those staff members who aren't in school due to absence from School > All Staff > Absences.

You must use one of our staff absence codes, you cannot create your own like in ScholarPack - you can see more details on this here: Can we add a new staff absence type or category?

There is also optional functionality that exists in ScholarPack that isn't possible in Arbor. In ScholarPack, it is possible to mark staff as present in Admin > Personnel. Whether staff are marked present here doesn't impact staff absence statistics, but does bring these staff into the Fire List.

In Arbor, the equivalent of the Fire List (the Emergency Evacuation Register) does not include staff. It is not possible to store staff attendance in the same way as for students, with an attendance mark for a time period. This is because there isn't the same legal requirement to report on specific attendance sessions as for students, such as for the School Census.

'Opening the register' is when the teacher manually clicks into the register (they can do this from their homepage) to input the attendance codes. This can be done up to an hour before the session is scheduled to begin.

In Arbor, you set 'Roll Call times' across your whole school to determine which registers' attendance codes (more information on the available codes here) contribute towards your roll call attendance.

In ScholarPack you would have ticked a box to say the student is out all day in the morning's register. In Arbor, if you know a student or a group of students is going to be absent, you can add planned absences to fill the register with the right attendance code. It's the same process whether the student is out for the rest of the day, or for a longer period of time!

In Arbor, Attendance Patterns refers to a way nursery students can be added to certain registers based on when they attend, but doesn't choose which attendance mark should be used. If you wanted to pre-fill certain attendance marks for certain registers in the same way Patterns work in ScholarPack, you'd use planned absences here as well.

For your Fire List, you can use Arbor's Emergency Evacuation Register. Please note that this will give you a list of students in their Form Groups, but not staff.

Check you have your registers for nursery students set up by following our guidance here: Setting up your nursery registers for the first time

In Arbor, Attendance Patterns refers to a way nursery students can be added to certain registers based on when they attend, but doesn't choose which attendance mark should be used. If you wanted to pre-fill certain attendance marks for certain registers in the same way Patterns work in ScholarPack, you'd use planned absences here as well.

Just like from Daily Check > Registers Taken in ScholarPack, you can make sure teachers are completing registers. You can go to Students > Attendance > Incomplete Registers to view unopened and incomplete registers for any date, and send teachers reminders: Completing incomplete or unopened attendance registers

Unlike ScholarPack, not everyone can take all attendance registers. They have to be assigned to the register by being an Administrator, the Academic Lead or by having the session added to their calendar. You can see how to manage who can take attendance here: Giving permission to take attendance registers

We have a similar auditing tool as in ScholarPack to see who changed an attendance mark and when, by going to the student's profile: The audit log.

You can complete the same processes for following up with absent students, they just have different names in Arbor:

• For Students Not in School, you can use the Absentees by Date page to see students with Absent codes (such as N)
• For Students not registered, you can find gaps in your register or blank marks using the Raw Attendance Marks page

For reporting attendance trends over time, instead of creating a report in a special Reporting area, you can just jump straight to the Students > Attendance > Absentees reporting pages for out-of-the-box pre-built tables, that you can filter using built-in demographic groupings like Pupil Premium vs Not: Attendance reporting and analysis

If you do decide that you want to build a bespoke report to share outside of Arbor, we have lots of pre-built reports you can just import into your site's Custom Report Writer: Creating common Attendance reports

In ScholarPack, there are a variety of different areas within Conduct that you can record behaviour, including Merits, Housepoints, Referrals, Incidents, Exclusions etc.

• Incidents
• Behaviour Points - you can set up multiple point award scales for tracking different behaviour points. For example, you could set up the equivalent of Merits, Minuses or Housepoints.
• Exclusions 
• Detentions
• Behaviour notes - like Referrals in ScholarPack.

In Arbor, you can't rename most of these areas with your own terminology, but you can set up a link with a custom name on your homepage: Custom Favourites on My Homepage

You can set up 'automatic behaviour workflows' to record incidents and follow-up with them with detentions, exclusions or communications with guardians: Behaviour Workflows and Escalation

Depending on their level of access and permissions, staff can record behaviour points and behaviour incidents from a variety of places. You can see how this can be done here for points and here for incidents.

Teachers also have a special area just for them called the Lesson Dashboard, where they can manage everything about their current class. They can record behaviour for students from here in bulk, and see any students who are due to be out of lessons. Take a look at how the Lesson Dashboard works here: Managing my class from the Lesson Dashboard Overview

Be sure to take a look at our assessment glossary which will introduce you to the key assessment concepts in Arbor: Glossary of key terminology for Assessments. Here are some key differences:

• In ScholarPack, you would have used Classes to determine which groups of students will be used for assessments. In Arbor, you can set up marksheets for registration forms, class register groups, year groups etc.
• Checkpoints in ScholarPack are the equivalent of Assessment Periods in Arbor, to determine when data is input for assessments and how often.
• Linear or Standardised Schemes are referred to in Arbor as Rising or Flat grading scales.

We migrate only Statutory Key Stage data (Standardised Assessments and marks for students in these assessments). You can see where to find this information here: DfE statutory Primary Assessments

For other assessments that you previously set up in ScholarPack, you'll need to set these up. You can use Summative Assessments in Arbor to set up linear assessments using a pre-built template and grade set (like you would have used Steps or Simple Assessments for), or you can set up a custom assessment. Use our guidance to get started with Assessments and set them up, then import your assessment grades.

In Arbor, once you've set up and marked your assessments, any data entered into marksheets will immediately appear in your analysis pages. We've already created the tables and graphs you need, so click here to get started: Introduction to summative assessment analysis in Arbor

As meal setups and balances don't migrate, you will need to:

• Set up card payments in Arbor to take payments via card: Setting up Card Payments in Arbor
• Set up Meals, including meal options and dietary requirements: Setting Up Meals - A step by step guide
• Set the starting balances in Arbor for the meal accounts: Creating Initial Account Balances

Go to School > Meals > Dietary Requirements to see a list of all students with recorded dietary requirements, and add them where needed: Add and report on student's dietary requirements

Alternatively, if you need to create this as a custom report so the information is shareable, you can use the template available here: Dietary requirement report

In ScholarPack, the Admin > Year End section would be where you would archive attendance, create CTFs, off roll leavers and promote students into Form Groups for next year.

A similar process is done in Arbor - we also refer to it as 'promoting' your student groups. You can see how the whole process works here: New School Year Setup help and guidance

In Arbor, the academic year runs until the end of August, rather than the last good school day where attendance is taken. Because of this, you don't need to archive attendance in Arbor, and your site automatically moves over to the setup for next year on the 1st September. This means you can complete the New School Year Setup in Arbor at any point during the summer term.

If you want to Off Roll your leavers in bulk at the end of the academic year, you would have done this in Step 4 of your Year End process. In Arbor, this is done as step 2 of the New School Year Setup process - you also create CTFs in bulk from this same step.

You don't need to add a 7 year for students who have left, as you can just report on students who are no longer in your school, basing your reports on the time period they were in school. You can see how to report on the students who've left your school, and send communications to them here: See students who have left 

Part of New School Year Setup process in Arbor includes adding the students to your site who will be joining you next year. Called Admissions in ScholarPack, we refer to these students as Applicants.

If you need to collect data for your applicants, you can use Data Collection Sheets (similar to the Capture Sheet in ScholarPack), or have parents and guardians add this detail themselves: Collecting data and consents for applicants starting in September

In ScholarPack, these students will have been Rolled Up into their first year, but in Arbor you need to add them to the Registration Form they'll be in - you can manage this process in the Students > Applicants area. If you don't have N1 students in your school, you don't need to add a -1 year for your admissions. Arbor treats students who haven't joined your school yet as not being in a year.

You can still report on admissions who haven't joined you yet, based on the future dates they will attend the school. You can see how to report on the students who've joined your school, and send communications to them here: See students that have joined, or create a bespoke report following these instructions: Reporting on Applicants

If you do decide that you need a bespoke report, you can use our Custom Report Writer. Just like in the Reporting and Custom Report areas in ScholarPack, you can use pre-built reports or ones you've designed. You can import a whole host of common reports from our Help Centre: Creating common Custom Report Writer reports

There aren't the same rows under each column header to filter your report, bin icons or sorting options. But you can still filter your data! Take a look at how filters, groupings and collations work, and how to make the most out of reporting by hiding columns, or using custom columns and formatting. You can also schedule the report to be sent out and shared with other staff.

The Reporting > Data Digger area in ScholarPack enables you to create Venn diagrams of students based on their characteristics. Although you can't create visual Venn diagrams in Arbor, you can still use something similar to create Dynamic or Static groups - Custom Groups!

• Dynamic Groups - these groups are created based on student characteristics such as whether they are FSM. In Arbor, many of these groups (such as EAL, Pupil Premium, FSM etc) are automatically created for reporting so you don't need to set them up. If you wanted to set up your own group where students are automatically added and removed, you'd set up a Custom Group with Automatic Membership Criteria.
• Static Groups - In Arbor, you would manually add or remove students from the Custom Group.

Your Custom Group will show a list of all the students in the group, like the Data Digger in ScholarPack. You can then use these groups across Arbor to filter reports, or send communications (like you did in ScholarPack for Static Groups, or Dynamic Groups you turned into Static Groups).

On the Dashboard on your Homepage in ScholarPack, your Live Feed tracks important things you should be notified about, such as new Conduct merits and absences.

In Arbor, we have a similar feature on the Homepage, referred to as To Dos and Alerts. Take a look at how these work, and what else you can do on your homepage in Arbor here: Your personalised Arbor Homepage

A Live Feed in Arbor refers to a method of extracting data in real time, into an external spreadsheet such as Google Sheets or Excel, so you can make reports outside of Arbor. You can see how these work here: Using Live Feeds

In ScholarPack, students can be excluded from attendance reports using the Percentage Attendance Between report, making this one of the most commonly used reports.

In Arbor, your options are more wide-ranging to apply to any of your custom reports, not just reports on attendance. You can exclude individual students by applying a Filter - here's an example using demographics: Report on students or demographics

• You can also use the inverse by applying a filter for Is not one of to exclude students.
• You can create custom groups if you regularly have groups of students you want to include or exclude from reports.

You can easily create a staff list to pull through basic identity, contract and contact information into either an excel or PDF report: Finding staff members and generating a staff list

For staff data collection, you can see the different options for gathering and checking the information here: Creating and sending staff data collection sheets

We've also created a template for the Staff Details report in ScholarPack you can import into your Arbor MIS: Staff Details Report

There are two pages you can use to report on staff absence - All Absences and Statistics. You can see full details of how to use these reports here: See and report on Staff Absence Statistics

Arbor provides a detailed overview of the contract information for your staff members: Managing staff contracts

Alternatively, if you want to pull in more information you can create a custom report and choose that the report is about Staff Contract Post.

To get an overview of teacher status, head to the Teacher Status page: Adding Teacher Statuses

Once you have logged training, you can see a list of what training your staff members have attended: Seeing attendance for a particular course or subject

You can view or download recorded qualification information: Creating Checks and adding checks and qualifications to staff profiles

Alternatively, if you want to pull in more information you can create a custom report, choose that the report is about Staff, and search for 'qualification' when adding columns.

Go to School > Users & Security, then select the area. You can report on:

• User list: All staff, student and guardian usernames and most recent login date. You can filter via the search, and export via Download.
• Login History: The last 30 days login history.
• Business roles: Available business roles and assigned staff members
• Permissions: Permissions list, click into a specific permission to see which staff member has this assigned, by who and when.

You can create a custom report on:

• staff medical conditions by creating a custom report about Staff
• first aid log by creating a custom report about Medical Events. We've also created a template you can import into your Arbor MIS: Staff medical conditions report

You'll be able to do the majority of your basic and every day attendance reporting from this table, but you'll find it particularly useful if your school uses the following common reports in ScholarPack:

• Attendance by House
• Attendance by Year/Form
• All Codes by Student (Numbers)
• Code Count
• All Codes by Group
• Custom Attendance Report
• Whole School Stats

This page at first gives a basic view of your whole school attendance, but can be customised to show data in different ways and split by different student groups: Viewing statistics for attendance

• You can look at students in one group, a different group, or both by adding the groups to the Students who are field.
• If you enter a group in the 'and who also are' field, it looks for students who are in both groups.

If you use the Minutes Late report in ScholarPack often, the Latecomers area is going to be particularly useful, but would also be useful if you used these reports in ScholarPack:

• Minutes Late
• All Codes by Group
• Code Count
• All Codes by Student (Numbers)

You can see full details on using this page here: Report on Lates - Analysing latecomers

The Absentees area is going to be useful if you used these reports in ScholarPack:

• Unauthorised Absences
• Percentage Attendance Between
• Periodic Persistent Absences
• Persistent Absences
• Not in School

There are a variety of useful pages, including Absentees by Date and Continuous Absence options, both of which will be particularly useful for schools coming from ScholarPack.

A key part of attendance reporting for schools is to quickly and accurately pull information about their persistently absent students. Using the Persistent Absentees report, you can:

• look at statutory attendance or lesson attendance.
• consider all absence, or just unauthorised or authorised.
• automatically see students with absence of at least 10%. You can change the Minimum percentage field to whatever you'd like - if set to 0, it will pull through all students. Using these two fields, you can look at students whose attendance % falls between two specific markers.

The Reports area in Attendance is used to produce registers or certificates your school needs to export and print, for example for Ofsted. This area is useful if you used these reports in ScholarPack:

• Individual Attend. Summary
• Individual Session Summary
• Student Attendance Reports (Bulk)
• Official Register
• Custom Grids
• Blank Student Register

From the Reports area you can create:

• Attendance Certificates - Individual attendance certificates for selected students.
• Export Statutory Marks - An excel file of all students, with basic statutory statistics and attendance marks.
• Weekly Printable Register - A PDF with the register marks for specific weeks and registration forms. This can be done for historic registers, as well as printing blank ones for future use.
• Printable lesson registers - A PDF of all lesson registers within the specified timeframe.
• Week by Week Marks report - An excel file of all statutory attendance by week covering the specified date range.

You can see full details in our guidance here: Print weekly registers, attendance reports and certificates

In Arbor, attendance marks can be changed from a range of places, but most often will be changed via one of the Bulk Edit Marks pages: Bulk editing attendance marks

To see a record of the mark changes, you can click into the mark itself, and a record of changes will display on the slide over. Alternatively, to see changes in bulk, head to the attendance audit on the student profile: Check who changed student attendance marks using the audit log

In Arbor, registers with gaps will show on the Incomplete Registers page. They'll also show in the 'To Do list' for the relevant teachers.

If you used the Gaps in Register reports in ScholarPack to quickly find N codes, you can use the Absentees By Date area as detailed above, this guidance: Report to find Unexplained Absences. Change the date range, and filter for the N code in the Specific Marks field. 

For a quick list of students on roll, you can use the Download Student List function either:

• School > School Structure > Academic Years
• Students > Enrolment

Add a collation of Year Groups, Form groups, or courses or classes, depending on how you're looking to organise the data. We have more information in this article: Class Lists

You can also create these lists with student photos if you need a profile photo report.

For a quick rundown of student numbers, head to Students > Enrolment > Statistics: Reporting on the number of students enrolled in your school

In the filter box, set the display settings to view data by Registration Form or Year Group.

To replicate the Class Numbers report in ScholarPack, you can also choose to display by Sex.

To gather basic percentage and count data about the demographic make up of your school, you can use these pages:

• Students > Enrolment > Statistics
• Demographics and Educational Needs options under the Students menu
• Create a report in the Custom Report Writer. Here is a template you can import into your MIS: Individual student demographics report

Here you'll be able to report on all kinds of data, such as Pupil Premium, FSM, EAL, Ethnicity and SEN. Top tip: To change how these tables display the data, check whether there is a 'show data by' option in the grey filter box above the table.

These areas cover a huge amount of data and will enable you to do the vast majority of reporting needed for your enrolment analysis. These are the most commonly used ScholarPack reports you'll find these areas useful for:

• Ethnicity
• Ever 6 / Pupil Premium
• Free School Meals
• Gifted and Talented
• Languages / EAL
• School Summary
• Special Cohorts
• Universal FSM
• Protection Plan

This can be reported on quickly from Students > All Students > Browse Students > Joiners: Reporting on joiners

Alternatively, if you want to include the student's leaving date from their previous school, you can create a report in the Custom Report Writer.

You can see further details here: Reporting on students' previous schools

You can create a report in the Custom Report Writer. Here is a template you can import into your MIS: Year started in report

These reports can be used in a similar way to these reports in ScholarPack:

• Info Check
• Export Info Check
• Download Capture Sheet

You can generate these for individual students, groups, or the whole school. This guidance will take you through the full process, as well as the different options that can be included: Downloading Student Profiles and Data Collection Sheets

These areas can be used in a similar way to these reports in ScholarPack:

• Admissions & Leavers
• Admissions Log

We have a handy guide available about reporting on applicants, but to see a basic list of students that have joined and left your school, check these areas:

• Joiners
• Leavers

We have a range of pages in Arbor which will be useful if you used these reports in ScholarPack:

• Date of Birth
• Student Ages
• Birthdays
• Started in Year

The Students > All Students > Birthdays page gives a quick list of upcoming birthdays, and what age they'll be. For dates of birth, head to Students > All Students > Browse Students and click List View.

If you need this information combined with other statistics, such as Year group on joining, or age on a specific date, you can build a custom report. We have also made a few templates you can import into your Arbor site: 

• Student details including UPN and date of birth report
• Date of Birth, age and student details report
• Student Ages now and on specific date report

Student Custom Fields are referred to as User Defined Fields in Arbor. You can report on these as standalone UDF report in the Custom Report Writer, or alternatively, you can add a UDF as a field to any other custom report.

Top tip: In Arbor, UDFs can be added for staff, guardians or students, and reported on the same way.

After recording your National Tutoring Programme hours (previously referred to as 'School-Led Tutoring), you can see this information in one of two ways:

• Create a custom report
• Head to Students > All Students > Bulk Update > Bulk Update National Tutoring Programme Hours. You can download this table for a list of students and no. of hours received within a specific date range.

Notes are viewable from the student profile, and some types from the lesson dashboard, depending on what permissions you have. If you want to report on these in bulk, you can do this via the Custom Report Writer: What notes can we report on in bulk?

For attendance notes, you can use Students > Attendance > Admin > Raw Attendance Marks: Report on Attendance Notes

We have a range of reports in the Students with SEN area you can use to find a list of students, as well as their basic information like SEN status, Need and Start Date: Seeing students with Special Educational Needs

We've also created a template that mimics the ScholarPack SEN report that you can import into your Arbor MIS: SEN Report

Go to Students > Medical, then select the area. You can report on:

• Medical Conditions: A table of current students' medical conditions, as well as details on symptoms and treatments.
• Medical Institutions: Doctor and medical practice contact details. To see which students are associated with them, click into the medical institution.
• Medical Events: A list of medical events within the date range.

In the Students > Demographics area you can report on:

• Young carers
• Students currently in care or students with Post-Looked after arrangements: Looked After (In Care) Students

Alternatively, you can create a custom report  if you want to bring this information together with other items.

An important distinction between ScholarPack and Arbor, is that Arbor differentiates between Legal Guardians and Primary Guardians.

This definition is primarily used to determine whether a guardian will have access to the Parent Portal or not. You can get more information about these definitions here: Assigning family as Primary or Legal Guardians

In ScholarPack there are contact permissions for things like SMS, 3rd party, and emails. In Arbor, this is referred to as unsubscribing a parent from comms. You can include this in reports.

• We have an equivalent page in Arbor which will give you a list of all students and their 1st and 2nd priority contact numbers: Emergency contact numbers
• For all guardian contact details, use the Guardian Contact Details page.
• You can also create a report in the Custom Report Writer about Parents, Guardians and Contacts, and choose which contact information you want to pull via the column selector.

We've also created templates you can import into your Arbor MIS: Guardian Contact Numbers reports

The All Contacts By Student report in particular will mirror closely the report you had in ScholarPack.

Top Tip: This template doesn't include a comparable column for 'App Visibility'. This is because what information guardians can see is determined either by your parent portal settings for the school as a whole, or by whether guardians live with the student.

An important vocabulary difference between Arbor and ScholarPack is Permissions.

• In ScholarPack, this refers to a list of requirements that a parent either agrees or disagrees to on behalf of their child.
• In Arbor, these are referred to as Consents - as permissions in Arbor relate to the actions assigned to a staff member's user account on the school.

You can download a list of responses for an individual consent via Students > Parents & Guardians > Parental consents > (select consent). Alternatively, you can create a custom report if you want to report on more than one consent: Download a consent report

You can build a sibling report in the custom report writer. There are also some templates available here for you to import: Siblings report

Once imported, you can customise and add further information to the reports if needed.

Alternatively, if you want to include extra family information rather than just siblings, we have some templates here: Family reports