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The Arbor Change Log provides updates on new features and improvements made to the Arbor platform, including enhancements for guardians to report absences, integration of cashless catering, improved navigation tools, and new reporting capabilities.

December 2024

• We have added the ability to edit trip details until the trip end date/time. Previously, a trip became a 'past trip' one minute before the trip began (according to the trip start date and time). Once a trip is a past trip, users could not edit any of the details about the trip. This caused issues for example if there were last-minute changes to a trip, so this can now be edited until the end of the trip rather than start.
• We have added a new Business Role Assignments BI Connector dataset.

November 2024

• We have added a 'Day' column to the slide-over window showing wraparound care club sessions so that sessions can be more easily found. When in a wraparound care club, go to Club Participants > Select a student > view date in Student Sessions table.
• We have added an 'Accounting Code' column to the Money Received and Payouts Overview payment reports in School > Payments > Reconciliation > Card Payments > Payouts Overview.
• We have updated the registration status shown on the Parent Portal for wraparound care clubs to refer to the name of the club, rather than the generic "wraparound care club" title that was previously displayed.
• We have launched a new data connector for SAM People data which includes data on employees, contracts, contract allowances, salary, and absences. 
• We have added new fields on Suspensions and Exclusions in the BI Connector datasets. We have added Exclusion Reason Label (this is what users see on screen) and the DfE export code that the reasons map to. This will allow schools and MATs to do more detailed reporting and analyse their behaviour aligned to DfE codes.
• We have added a new Consents Pushdown for the MAT MIS. MAT users can now create and distribute Consent Types for both Guardians and Students to their schools. This can be done in Administration > Pushdowns > Consent Types.
• Ofsted details for all schools can now be found in the MAT MIS. To se this information, go to Institutions > Ofsted Inspections.
• The Arbor Student App has now been released, and the app can be downloaded from the Android Store and the iOS Store. For more information on the student app, see our article for students here and our article for schools here.
• We have simplified the information displayed on the Club Overview page in the Parent Portal to improve usability. For clubs that the student is already registered in, we have removed the Number of Sessions information, and for clubs that the student can register for, we have removed the Membership Options details.
• We have released 24 new BI Connector datasets, including the following: Payments, Previous School Attendance, Extra fields on Permanent Exclusions and Suspensions, Point Awards, Exclusion Reviews, Applicants, Transportation Methods, and Gifts and Talents. 
• Our Behaviour Reporting and Detentions Dashboard pages have been updated to allow users to search, filter, and sort on these tables, and it will now find data from any page of the pagination.
• Ask Arbor can now generate PDFs when prompted.
• We have added a My Ask Arbor page so that users can easily retrieve previous conversations in My Items > My Ask Arbor.
• Ask Arbor can now remember information given to it, rather than 'resetting' after each use. For example, users can tell it to refer to them by name or remember a favourited class or session.

October 2024

• The new timetable API with Tes Timetable is now live. Tes Timetable can bulk import up to 1000 slots in a single batch, improving speed and efficiency. This new API also reduces system load by sending fewer total API requests and offers enhanced data validation to reduce sync errors between Arbor and Edval. Schools can also review and select which timetable changes to apply, and timetable imports will now automatically update calendars for staff, students, and rooms. For more information on this update, see our guidance here.
• The Attendance Summary dataset has been added to the BI Connector. This is a student-level summary of year-to-date roll call attendance and includes Percentage Present, Percentage Authorised/Unauthorised Absent, and Percentage Statutory Late Proportion. See this resource for more information.
  
• We have released a change to restrict DfE schools from using the old attendance codes (H - Family Holiday Agreed, J - Interview and Y - Unable to attend due to exceptional circumstances) for registers in the current year. Additionally, it will no longer be possible to use these three marks when creating planned absences. Schools can still select these three codes if they are:

1. Editing an attendance record from before the 19th August 2024
2. Viewing a date range that starts before 19th August in Bulk Edit Marks Advanced
3. Changing a mark on a lesson register from before the 19th August 2024
4. Viewing a period that starts AFTER the 19th August 2024 in Bulk Edit Marks Advanced and one of the three codes has been used (this is necessary to ensure the incorrect codes are visible for correction). 

• We have eased the restrictions on changing timetable cycles from 1 week to 2 weeks. Previously, this functionality was only available between 2pm and 5pm for non-Arbor Admin users. We have changed this so that the functionality is now only locked between 8am and 10am, and 12:30pm and 1:30pm. This change also applies to the times schools are able to change the week A/week B setup on their two-week timetable.
• Users can now display targets in Data Collection Marksheets. Users have two ways of displaying them, either via the marksheet filters or via the Marksheet Setting (this will mean that they are on by default).
• We have released the Student Dashboard (previously 'student on a page') in Arbor Labs. This is a data-led overview of a student supporting pastoral leads to easily have joined up conversations about a student. This can be found in Student Profile > Student Dashboard when the feature has been turned on in School > Arbor Labs.
• We have added a new Settlement Summary reconciliation report for easier reporting on payments in Arbor. For more information on this, see our Help Centre article here.
• We have added a 'Paid Amount' column to the Money Received Report in School > Payments > Reconciliation > Money Received in the All and Money Received tabs.
• When Ask Arbor is enabled, you will see a new button next to the Search bar called Ask Arbor. Tapping on this then opens the Ask Arbor slideover, allowing users to access this AI feature more easily.
• We have added an Email field on all card payment modals used for parent and staff payments, and added a Name field to SMS billing card payment flows. This will ensure a higher success rate when authenticating card payments and result in fewer disruptions for users making card payments.
• We have removed the need for users to confirm that they have read and understood Arbor's Data Protection Compliance Guide when they enable Ask Arbor for the first time as this is now covered under our terms and conditions that users agree to when they first sign into Arbor.
• Ask Arbor has been updated with the following features: find student information to quickly retrieve student information, access attendance information to check attendance statistics effortlessly, view behaviour information to get insights into student behaviour statistics, explore student demographics to access student demographic data, view timetables to get staff an student timetable information, locate free rooms to find and book available rooms for meetings or classes in real-time, draft an email to create and customise emails without leaving the chatbot, and record absences to log student absences seamlessly with natural language.
• The Ask Arbor assistant is now "in context" when using it on a specific page. For example, you can ask the assistant questions about the students in the lesson that you are teaching, your year group, course, and more. Using Ask Arbor from the homepage or any page without specific information will allow users to use the 'overall' Ask Arbor.
• Schools can now edit cover arrangements and change covering staff in School > All Staff > Cover > Staff Cover > Dashboard/Arrange Cover. Previously, schools needed to cancel cover arrangements and then set them up from scratch.
• The functionality to allow exam officers to dis-apply an Access Arrangement for external exams has now been extended to In-House Exams.
• You can now play absence voicemails directly from the View Voicemail Email slide over, from the Accept/Reject Pending Absence Note slide over, and from the Planned Absence slide over, rather than having to download the file for the voicemail and then play it.

September 2024

• We have added the English Deprivation Indices Dataset to the National Data Connector. This dataset allows users to get a more holistic understanding of the backgrounds of their students and inform decisions based on this context.
• K marks (Education Provision Arranged by LA) were originally set up to not count as statistically present, meaning that a student with all K marks would have shown as 0% present. This has been corrected to line up with DfE expectations and the mark now counts as statistically present, so a student with all K marks will now have 100% present attendance.
• Q marks (Lack of Access Arrangements) were originally set up to count as an authorised absence. This has been corrected and the mark is now treated as not statistically possible (in line with X codes), so a student with all Q marks will now show N/A for present, authorised and unauthorised absence.
• Venn diagrams have been released in Arbor Labs. This feature can be accessed in Students > All Students > Venn Diagram Analysis. Users can also decide not to use a fixed layout which will change the Venn diagram into a Euler diagram which also uses circles to represent data sets but only shows actual, meaningful relationships without requiring all possible intersections.
• MAT staff profiles are now in a list view by default. If you go to Group Staff > Browse Staff > MAT Staff, the page now loads by default as a table. Users can still get to the Profile View by clicking the button at the top of the page.
• The Arbor Student App has been released as part of Arbor Labs with a limited number of schools available to participate as the app is rolled out. The number of schools available is steadily increasing as we continue to refine the Student App, and you can see is this Arbor Lab is available for your school to join by going to School > Arbor Labs.
• We have improved the search function for sent mail merge communications, allowing schools to search all Mail Merge Outbound communications rather than only the first page. We have also added additional search settings including searching for 'Exact word' matches (e.g. search for 'Summer Term Attendance' will only show communications that contain all of those words in the Subject/Summary) or 'Include any words' which will return results with a Subject/Summary that contains the words 'Summer' or 'Term'.
• We have changed the Ask Arbor 'Student Report' button to 'Student Summary'; the function remains identical. 
• We have updated some of the bulk actions across the system to allow users to send in-app messages to students. There may be some low-traffic pages where this function is not yet live, but these will be updated in the coming weeks.
• We have added a banner to the Bulk Edit Marks Standard/Advanced, Roll Call Marks, Absentees by Date, and Raw Attendance Marks pages to advise schools that the H, J, and Y codes should not be used to record attendance moving forward.
• We have added a new Leavers report to the Capital One exports. This report contains any student who has left in the past twelve months. Schools can create this report ad-hoc or, if they have automated exports, scheduled it for a set time or set up a repeating schedule. For this, we have also included a new scheduling option: 'Last day of the academic year' for automated leavers exports. Additionally, attendance strings in Capita One will now be exported in CSV format to be in line with CTFs.
• AI Cover Suggestions have been released on Arbor Labs for selected schools. This AI-powered feature creates cover suggestions for cover requirements based on default and custom rules. It provides explanations for each suggestion and allows cover managers to accept or decline each suggestion, or all suggestions. Go to School > Arbor Labs for more information on this feature.
• We have made changes to Staff Development permissions relating to Appraisals and Objectives across the School and MAT MIS. These changes are reflected in this guidance.
• We have updated the School Phase in the MAT Custom Report Writer. There is now an option called Census School Phase which lines up with what schools set themselves in their details page (in School > School Details). We have updated all existing custom reports that were using this as a field and they will now show the new field instead. However, any report that had this as a filter will need to re-select it so that they can choose the relevant option. 
• The new DfE attendance codes (seen in this article) are now reflected in the census.
• In the census, National Tutoring Programme has been renamed to Tutoring (Formerly NTP), and T Level Transition Programme has now been renamed to T Level Foundation Year.
• The E attendance code has now been changed from Excluded in the census to Excluded with no Alternative Provision.
• The functionality to record tutoring hours remains in place, but this information is no longer included in the census XML file as it is no longer collected in the census.
• We have implemented functionality to convert English attendance codes to Welsh attendance codes when generating CTFs for Welsh schools. 

August 2024

• We've added a new base report - Point Awards - to the Custom Report Writer. You can find this in School > Custom Report Writer > Create New Report > Who or what is this report about? With this new report, schools can now:

1. Have more grouping functionality to group by student, points, scale, narrative, awarded on, and more.
2. See a breakdown of points per scale per student.
3. Group by event or location to get a better analysis of where most points get awarded or deducted.
4. Schedule point reports for specific timeframes
5. Include behaviour incidents fields in the Points report to have a combined view of behaviour in one report.

• We've made a change to the Standardised Assessment Mark field slide-over in the MAT Custom Report Writer - previously, you had the choice to select an Academic Year to give a drop-down of assessments that were in use. We have removed the drop-down and now just have a list of all Standardised Assessments to choose from - you can use then type in the field to reduce the number of options shown.
• We have implemented the existing Staff Development module to MAT sites; this covers Training Courses, Appraisals, and Objectives. See our article on Appraisals and Objectives in the MAT MIS here, and our article on Training Courses here.
• We have added Houses Datasets in the BI Connecter, so data on student Houses and House Tutors can be found in the BI Connector.
• We have updated the UI for Ask Arbor messages (School > Ask Arbor). This means that new messages will be added to the list of messages, you can rate individual messages, load historic conversations and links can also be added.
• In Students > Examinations > Results Administration > Results Import, you can now see the series identifier on the Results Import Page.
• You can now favourite specific actions. For example, you can favourite the Create Suspension pop-up window in Students > Behaviour > Suspensions > Add Suspension by clicking star icon next to the Add Suspension title of the pop-up window - along with many more pages.
• We have implemented the same Password Rules UI that exists in the School MIS to the MAT MIS. This allows MATs to set password rules for staff. Staff will need the User Details: View All Users permission to see the rules and User Details: Manage All Users to manage rules.
• We have expanded the navigation for DfE assessments to bring them in line with the branching navigation menus seen throughout the MIS. 

July 2024

• Guardians can now report same-day absences for their students via the Parent App. See our guidance to find out how to turn this feature on and use it, along with seeing how guardians can use this feature here.
• Admin staff are now able to see the reasons why a staff member, guardian, or student cannot log into Arbor. Clicking on the User Details section of any profile in your school site will show a message explaining why that profile may not be able to log in. For more details on this, see our Help Centre article here.
• Arbor Payments and Pebble cashless catering integration. Previously, schools using Pebble Till for cashless catering needed to use a separate third party payments system for meal top-ups. Now, Pebble integrates seamlessly with Arbor. See our article here for all the details.
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• The Sidebar has been released on MAT and school sites. The sidebar provides faster navigation on any page to key areas including calendars, favourites, and more. See our Help Centre article here for a full breakdown of its feature.
• The Arrange Cover page has been released on school sites. This new page provides a more streamlined experience when viewing absent staff members and assigning cover to their lessons. Features include viewing a staff member's entire working day for better visibility, filtering results so that you can find the information you need, and seeing how much cover your staff have provided all on one page. Our Help Centre article here provides all the details on this latest update.
• Live National Benchmarks in the BI Connector - Arbor National Benchmarks for six metrics (Present, Persistent Absence, Suspensions rate, Permanent Exclusion Rate, % Students with 1 or more suspension, and Trip Rate). This includes both the school average, the national average, and the school percentile (so that schools can see where they sit in the distribution nationally). Compared to DfE benchmarks these are live and easy to access. For more information, see our article here.
• The Arbor parent app has had its name changed from "Arbor" to "Arbor Parent App" on Google Play Store to match its name in the Apple App Store.
• The colouring on the Arbor dropdown menus has been changed from a gradient to a solid colour.
• We have added a new and easily-accessible page into where users can see all permissions and what permissions are assigned to them. Users can go to My Items > My Permissions to see a list of all permissions, and they can search either for the exact name of permissions or for key words in the permission descriptions. Our new Roles & Permissions FAQ article here details this.
• The Access Control pages have been reworked into tables to make it easier for users to search and understand the access for each role. Users can go to School > Users & Security > Access Control and click either Business Roles or Roles & Permissions to see this change. 
• We've made the 'Display' options on the Behavioural Incidents Reporting > Settings popup, so they now change based on whether the "Separate behaviour incidents by students" checkbox is ticked. When the box is unticked, only display options which apply to overall behavioural incidents will be visible (e.g. Reporter, actions taken). When the box is ticked, additional options which apply to individual students will be visible (e.g. Sex, Pupil Premium, Year Group).
• We have increased the "hit area" of links in the Custom Favourites panel, and increased the font size of the Placeholder text in the Search panel (which also fixed styling of the keyboard shortcut tip when hovering over it). 
• We have added a new column to the suspensions reporting page - Days Suspended. This column counts all term-time school days that a student is suspended for. 

June 2024

• Arbor Labs has been released, allowing eligible schools to test out new functions before wide release. To see if you are eligible to try out any new features, head to School > Arbor Labs.
• Club sessions now have more Bulk Action options allowing staff to record Behaviour Points, log Incidents, assign students to Interventions and assign students to detentions.
• Some schools have been selected to take part in beta testing for the Arbor Student App. The student app will allow students to view their timetable, in-app messages, and ask our Ask Arbor AI questions relating to events in their timetables (e.g. Will I need my P.E. kit this week?).
• Filters and synonyms have been added to the global search bar at the top-right of your Arbor page. The filter can be applied before or after you search, and helps you navigate Arbor more quickly. Synonyms allow you to search for an area in Arbor without needing to type in its exact name, such as 'End of Year Procedures' to find the New School Year Setup page.
• Timetable slots have been converted into tables. When you are in a Course or Classes & Lessons page, clicking on Timetable Slots on the left side of the page now displays this information in a more user-friendly. 
• Updated all dropdown boxes in Arbor (such as the To dropdown box when sending communications) to improve performance.
• Neutral behaviour incidents are now visible on the Parent Portal. Previously, only behaviour incidents with a positive or negative value would display on the Parent Portal.

May 2024

• Enhanced reporting for observations: expanded data fields added to the analysis page which now allows users to view additional details, including lesson name, date/time of observation, and observer name. We've also added a new base report for observations into the Custom Report Writer module, allowing you to pull your observation data out of Arbor for further analysis. 
• Set staff ID to be added to downloadable table live feeds, this means you no longer need to use Custom Report Writer for everything. 
• New setting added to prevent students and guardians from seeing next year's calendar. A new setting named "Show next academic year calendar" has been added under Parent Portal settings. 
• Users can now enable the Student Portal themselves, previously this could only be done by Arbor, you now can manage this at your school. Go to Students > Student Portal > Student Portal Settings.

April 2024

• Search for your favourite in the global search area, make finding your favourite pages quicker. 
• Create a custom assessable within the learning units of an exam, and this can be used within the scheduling section of exams.
• Mark assessable as do not show in the scheduling sections of Arbor, this can be done via the qualification assessable instance. When marked as do not show it will not be displayed in, exam clashes, school timetable, candidate timetable, and allocate exam room.
• Exclude staff from cover, you can now exclude certain staff from showing as cover options. This means finding staff to cover is now quicker. 
• Bulk enrol students into linked courses from a programme. School > Programmes > Programmes of Study > [Select a programme and a programme instance] > Enrolled Students > Bulk Enrol Students in {academic year} Courses.
• Users with Finance: Administer, will be able to disable bank accounts set up for recording cash/cheques payments. Once the bank account is disabled, they will no longer show in Arbor 
• Extra level of confirmation when logging a planned absence for more than 50 students in one go, a planned absence over 2 weeks long or both. 
• The Global Search is getting an upgrade to show pages when you search for similar terms or synonyms. For example, search for 'parent app' and you'll see the Parent Portal Settings and Usage pages. We'll be adding more search terms over time.
• New Trips and Guardians datasets for our BI Connector Version 2. See how the Guardians view links to Consents and User Defined Fields Values in the Entity Relationship Diagram.
• In tables, we've added a light background to drop-down icons to show they can be clicked. When the tables don't have any data, they'll display some handy placeholder text.

• The School > All Staff > Browse Staff > Staff Profile page is searchable and the page title shows in your browser tab.

• Our Full video list now sits within Customer Education, Training and Videos, instead of in its own area on your Help Centre homepage. Updated videos for Begin Build Boost are in their topic sections - for example, for behaviour videos go to Behaviour > Getting Started with Behaviour.

March 2024

29th March

Favourites: Personalise your Arbor Homepage

With the new Favourites menu you can bookmark the pages you use most often to get to them quickly and easily every day. Plus, rename your favourited pages to make them more relevant: Custom Favourites on My Homepage

Navigating around Arbor

We've improved our navigation menus for these areas. These pages are now searchable, and the page title shows in your browser tab. 

• School > School Structure > Faculties and Departments
• School > Timetable
• School > Emergency Alerts
• Students > All Students > Browse Students > Student Profile

We've also made improvements to the whole top menu navigation on the Group MIS to sort them alphabetically. 

Programmes of study

• When transferring individual students from programmes, you can also select a course to transfer them into: Ending a programme by transferring
• We have removed the ability to transfer students from/to teaching groups from Programmes.
• The Bulk Update Core Learning Aims page is now Bulk Update Programmes of Study. Take all the same bulk actions as within a programme in the Students tab, plus there's the Courses and Programme Instances tabs for an overview.

What else is new?

• View a full year of Cohort or Mark Level data in MAT MIS Assessment Analysis.
• In the event a student needs to be marked as deceased, you can unsubscribe their guardians from communications in the same step.
• The Global Search box has a fixed width of 600px.
• On MAT MIS staff profiles you can record a School ID Card.
• Ofsted and IDACI Data Connectors are now available with the BI Connector.
• We’ve added a new output format for Live Feeds, HTML v2.
• The Burger Menu on small screens focusses correctly for greater accessibility when using a screen reader.
• Select a dynamic date range when filtering for required cover.
• Use the new setting if you need to change your date range for the ILR.
• No need to create a custom report to find users who have never logged in - just use the improved User List.

15th March

This week our teams have been at ArborFest 2024, our in-person customer conference. We met school and trust leaders from across the Arbor Community for a day of inspiring talks and workshops. But we've also released these new updates: 

• The School > All Staff > Staff Development menu in the top navigation matches the left-hand menu. This includes now being searchable, with the page title showing in your browser tab.
• When you click the Help Centre button you'll be taken to content relevant to the page you're on. We've updated these links to include our recent documentation release, Begin Build Boost.
• Don't lose what you're working on - hover over a result in the global search, then click the icon to open the profile or page in a new tab.

1st March

BI connector and Data Warehouse

Centralise your data in Arbor’s Custom Data Warehouse.

You can also connect your Arbor data into your BI tool with our BI Connector Version 2, with brand new datasets and templates: Arbor’s BI Connector

We've just added 13 new datasets for our BI Connector Version 2, including Custom Groups, Emergency Alerts, Student Educational History, SEN Needs and Event Outcomes, Consents, Assessment Completion and School Events.

What else is new?

• The 250k and 100k SMS bundles are no longer available to purchase.
• When ending the enrolment for a student mid-year, programme enrolments are now ended too.
• The Students > Interventions menu in the top navigation matches the left-hand menu. The Intervention Group > Attendance and Intervention Session > Register pages are now always visible, where they were previously hidden if there wasn't at least one session register.
• When a Custom Report Writer report is scheduled via email, we show No Access in the Excel fields that the sender does not have permission to view. This prevents users without permission being able to share data with themselves.

February 2024

16th February

Entity Importers for MAT MIS

We’ve added our Entity Importer feature to the MAT MIS so you can import staff details in bulk via spreadsheet: Entity Importer to import a spreadsheet of data into MAT MIS

Programmes of Study and Courses

• Use the Enrol students from courses option to automatically enrol students enrolled in a course today into a Programme: Setting up Programmes
• When withdrawing individual students from programmes, you now have the option to withdraw them from courses linked to the programme instance: Withdrawing students

What else is new?

• The Students > Behaviour and Students > Attendance menus in the top navigation now match the left-hand menu. Top Tip: If you see a page name in orange and underlined, this means you can click it to get to the landing page.
• When you delete all the text in an HTML editor (such as for emails or Custom Report Card), we will strip all formatting except for structural elements such as tables and lists. You can then paste and match style.
• Delete incorrect pay scales from the pushdown on MAT MIS: Delete pushdowns
• Open the search with your keyboard - ⌘ + K for MAC, or Ctrl + K for PC.
• We've made a change to the Arbor Standard Report Card layout to better format Ad Hoc assessments: Ad-Hoc Assessments

2nd February

SAMpeople and Arbor Integration

SAMpeople includes everything you need to manage your staff effectively. With our joint integration, your staff data will flow instantly from SAMpeople to Arbor! Take a look here on how to get the integration set up: SAMpeople and Arbor integration

Exams

• We now surface exams costing from the basedata, so you can report on fees and more easily manage your budgets: Exam fees and costs reporting
• Exam seating plan printouts have the Exam Seating Plan to the top left and we've removed the exam room name from the middle of the printout.

Statutory returns

• Independent schools can now access and complete CES census where required.
• If the previous census started generating over an hour ago but hasn’t yet completed, you can regenerate.
• For certain institutions completing the ILR, you may need to add a Learner number prefix.
• For the ILR, if any of your learners receive Adult Skills Funding, record DAM (Devolved Area Monitoring) codes 1-4.
• For the ILR, you can add Prior learning funding adjustment and Other funding adjustment.
• For the ILR, Learning Support Funding can be set on programme enrolments.

What else is new?

• Improved search for Pages: Using the search
• There's new Print Preview button in the text editor in Comms and Custom Report Cards. This means you don't have to add student groups to Report cards and have them show on the Portals to be able to see a preview! Top Tip: This isn't available in tables, such as for Assessment comments.
• When reporting on Gender Identity in the Custom Report Writer, the actual preferred terms are shown rather than just text saying ‘I prefer to use my own term’.
• Numeric columns when drilling down on your homepage show helpful tool tips when you hover over them.
• The Students > Bursaries and School > Users & Security menus in the top navigation now match the left-hand menu. Top Tip: If you see a page name in orange and underlined, this means you can click it to get to the landing page.
• We’ve made requirements on the password reset page clearer for users.
• Due to the introduction of SUM assessment, we no longer support custom assessment periods for stranded assessments so have removed this functionality.

January 2024

19th January

MAT MIS

• Add Allowances for your MAT staff in the Contracts area of their profile on MAT MIS.
• The National Average benchmarking measure is now split by phase when drilling into Attendance KPIs on the homepage and in Analytics > Attendance.
• We've added more explanation to the tool tips when hovering over your Attendance KPIs.

What else is new?

• The T level planned learning hours field is hidden for ILR colleges, as they should record this information on the T-Level Programme instead (alongside the contributing learning aims).
• The Students > Medical and School > Data > Export menu in top navigation now matches the left-hand menu. Top Tip: If you see a page name in orange and underlined, this means you can click it to get to the landing page.
• When filling in the GCSE Attainment for Funding page, use the new Leavers tab to more easily fill out prior attainment for last year's students: Prior attainment
• When enrolling students from the Table View page, you can select in a combo box to add them to other courses. You can also see how many students are already in these courses.
• We've improved the layout of Interventions on the student profile, and added a year drop-down.

5th January

Share information with parents

• Parents can now download and share Report Cards and Attendance Certificates on the Parent App! Top Tip: They will need to download the latest version of the app.
• Send SMS or In-app messages to guardians from within a trip: Communications for a Trip

What else is new?

• When pushing out Pay Scales from MAT MIS, it's no longer possible to push out the same pay scale twice, preventing errors.
• The My Items menu in top navigation now matches the left-hand menu.
• We have added three new columns to the Bulk Update Learning & EEP Hours table: T Level Planned Learning Hours, T Level Planned EEP Hours and Total Hours. You can also update these fields using new bulk actions: T-levels
• When selecting students for Emergency Alerts, it now shows what registration form they are in.
• A new field has been added to the Funded Hours and Hours At Setting. Expanded hours will be collected from the Summer Census onwards: What are expanded hours?

December 2023

15th December

Audit your schools' Parental Engagement

See an overview of where each of your schools is in the process of rolling out the Parent Portal and sending communications: Track your schools' Parental Engagement from the MAT MIS

Breadcrumbs

On every page in Arbor, you can now collapse the left-hand menu, and see breadcrumbs showing the navigation pathway: How to get around Arbor

Parent App

Enable parents to download a printable PDF of their children's timetable from your Parent Portal settings.

The Parent App now mirrors the Parent Portal so you can view past and future days: The Calendar and timetable on the Parent Portal and Parent App

What else is new?

• Add transportation details to staff profiles on the MAT MIS.
• There is now a 75 student limit when logging incidents from custom groups. Top Tip: Logging incidents from everywhere else hasn't changed.
• Delete unused Grades from Pay Scales.
• Improved validation on reporting pages so you can't choose an end date that's before the start date.
• Select the new Legal First Name, Last Name or Full Name merge fields in communication templates.

1st December

• We now filter incomplete Assessment Data Collections on your To Do list and the My Items > My Classes page to only display for the current academic year: Data Collections
• We've renamed the Arbor App to the Parent App. All the functionality is the same, but it's now clearer that it can't be used by students or staff. You can still find all our resources on the Help Centre using the term 'Parent App'.
• You can now add an abbreviation to the Identity section on MAT MIS staff profiles.
• The Output Format is now required when creating or editing a Live Feed.
• The Planned Hours field for Work Experience Placements is now an integer value rather than hours and minutes, in line with statutory guidance to be a whole number between 0 and 9999.
• We've changed our tables from Alpha sorting (by ordering the first digit based on the alphabet), to Natural sorting (that takes into account the whole number).
• We've tidied up the left-hand menu in the Linked Organisations area.

November 2023

17th November

Tables to Charts

Create charts straight from any table with numeric values in Arbor, including in custom reports. Create graphs in your chosen colour and style and export them to add to presentations or share with others. See full details here: Charts and graphs of Arbor data

NFER Assessments in Arbor

Our integration with the National Foundation for Educational Research’s free online analysis tool means you can now see assessment data in Arbor MIS and MAT MIS, giving you the full picture of student progress across your trust: NFER and Arbor Integration

Parent Portal and Arbor App

• The Total Outstanding figure on the homepage lets parents know how much they owe the school across all top up accounts, Trips and Clubs. They can click on the figure to view a breakdown, and to see accounts that are running low. See how this looks or share this article with parents: Payment accounts and topping up on the Parent Portal or Arbor App. Top Tip: Schools can switch this off if needed.
• We've added helpful tips to the login page on the Arbor App if parents are struggling.

What else is new?

• Report on your trip participation, including uptake by demographics such as Pupil Premium: Report on trips
• In tables, Column Border and Cell Colour styling controls are now an icon with a text label, rather than just text.
• There are three new bulk actions for the Enrolled Students table in Programmes of Study. You can now easily change the Planned Start Date, Planned End Date and Actual End Date for multiple students at once.

3rd November

Updates to our tables

• On all our tables, there's now better formatting for stacked column headers, plus you can cut and paste, and delete several cells at once by selecting a range of cells and pressing the backspace or delete keys.
• We've added extra columns to a few pages: a Registration Form column to the Students table in an Internal Exclusion session, a Type column to the Internal Exclusion statistics table, and an Event column to the Emergency Alert Report table to see where the alert was triggered.
• In the Census Summary Inspection, the table header and cell text is wrapped rather than cut off, the column size now adapts to the content, and you can scroll to the right if there's not enough space to fit everything on-screen.
• We've added the option to Create Ad-Hoc Intervention on all tables where you can already add an intervention using the Bulk action button.

What else is new?

• Filter the columns in our bulk enrolment spreadsheet.
• You'll get an alert if your behaviour workflows use outdated detentions: To Do for expired detentions
• Improved formatting for date fields in the Custom Report Writer, so you can output them as dd Mmm yyyy (25 Oct 2023), dd/mm/yyyy (25/10/2023) or dd/mm/yy (25/10/23).
• Create a report about Suspensions in the MAT MIS Custom Report Writer.
• We've switched the old grey buttons in the Arbor App to white with a green outline, so it's clear they are clickable.
• Number fields aren't limited to 2 decimal places. You can now have up to 5, and longer numbers typed in will be rounded.
• You can now swap the staff who verified an Account Type, so this won't prevent you from deleting a staff member if needed.
• Removed the Meals section from the Data Migration report as they do not migrate.

October 2023

20th October

Update pay scales across your MAT

In time for the Workforce Census, manage your schools’ pay scales without needing to log in to each individual school site. Update your pay scales in MAT MIS, then push them down to your schools with the click of a button: Pay scale pushdown from the MAT MIS

What else is new?

• We've added the Documents: Administer permission to the MAT MIS. Assign this to staff for them to be able to see migrated documents.
• When reporting on UDFs on the MAT MIS, they will now show N/A if the UDF hasn't been pushed down to a particular school.
• More easily edit meal prices during the year: Changing the price of a meal
• Tables on the MAT MIS are now paginated.
• We've replaced the way we generate PDFs in the background. You shouldn't notice any changes, but there's a small chance that there may be a slightly different font if we've been unable to use an exact match.

6th October

Reporting on Assessments

Quickly change your Custom Report Writer report to look at your next assessment period using the Bulk Edit Assessment Periods button: Report on summative assessments in the Custom Report Writer

Post-16 School Census

• We’ve introduced new Arbor census validation errors, designed to alert schools to issues with GCSE Prior Attainment records for students who left in the previous year: English/Maths grade at last census is lower than the current grade, not set, or set to 'Not Recorded'
• No more double-counting of planned learning hours when a student transfers - Arbor now only includes programme enrolments between the start of the last year and the autumn census date.
• For students who joined after the previous year’s autumn census, you'll need to set their total planned learning hours manually.
• We have added two new columns to the Bulk Update Learning & EEP Hours page to show the Planned Learning Hours/Planned T-level Learning Hours as of the census day.
• Transfer students into Programmes of Study that take place the following year.

What else is new?

• Does your school use Meal Menus? Parents can see which meal they chose after the deadline has passed!
• The top navigation bar is reduced from 103 pixels to 85 and is now keyboard accessible using your tab, arrow and enter keys. The drop-downs are also responsive to page size.
• The Suspension Reasons field when running a Custom Report Writer report on Suspensions base report can be formatted as DfE Label or DfE Code.
• We've added a reminder to the login page to say MAT users must log in through the MAT MIS, not into school sites directly. Reset password emails won't be sent if you're a MAT user trying to log into a school's login page.

September 2023

22nd September

Assessments

• Previously when setting up Summative assessments, you could select from a list of pre-named assessments. Now we'll take you right to the step to set up a new assessment. Please note this means you are no longer able to set up FSP and ELG summative assessments in bulk.
• Assessments added to the Annual Policy on school sites or pushed down from the MAT MIS will no longer be added to any existing report cards.

What else is new?

• Include unique identifiers when downloading student data from any table! Just go to School > Data > Export > Export Options to add in Arbor Student ID, Year Group, Registration Form, UPN, ULN or UCI.
• The EDI export jobs table shows all candidates, and any differences between Arbor data and the EDI file will be highlighted in red. We'll also show if the UCI is different.
• Already available for Android, parents and guardians using the Arbor App on iOS can now click the back button.
• Improved the TimeTabler import process for staff and NTAs and made it impossible to import more than one file at once.
• The Separate invigilation Access Arrangement is now called Alternative rooming arrangements.

8th September

• Offering the same Exam qualifications next year? You can now quickly copy over your Qualification Offering, ready to make entries - no need to manually add again using QAN codes. 
• Report on Summative Mark Comments in the Custom Report Writer - perfect for pulling these comments into our recently-released Custom Report Cards! 
• For the Workforce Census this year, you can record users with the Position Category (also referred to as Post) of School Business Professional (SBP). Anyone with this Post will need their Professional Qualifications recording, and a Destination and Leaving reasons when their contracts end.
• There's also a new flag to identify members of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).

2022 - 2023 updates