MATs: Introduction to Arbor Assessments

This article provides an introduction to Arbor Assessments for MAT Assessment Leads, detailing how to standardise assessment management across trusts. It covers the types of assessments available, the rolling process, and how to analyze the data collected. Key features include summative and formative assessments, analytics screens, and guidance for implementation and consultation.

With our assessment features in MAT MIS, MAT Assessment Leads can standardise the way you manage assessments across your trust.

By reading this article, you'll have an introduction to how assessments work in Arbor, as well as how to implement your trust-wide assessment policy. 

You can print a handy checklist you can use to support the roll-out here: MAT Assessment Pushdown Checklist

Introduction to how assessments work

What's included in Arbor Assessments?

There are a number of assessment types available to set up across your schools' Arbor sites depending on your needs. These include summative and formative approaches to assessment to ensure you are able to capture the data you need at the right times. You can then analyse and take action with your data with 4 built-in analytics screens on the MAT MIS, 7 built-in analytics screens on the School MIS, plus custom reporting.

The assessment types your schools can use depend on the Arbor Package you’ve purchased for them:

• Summative, Ad Hoc and DfE assessments are available in Core, Comms and Perform
• Formative Tracking is available only in Perform. All other Arbor packages won’t have this feature by default.

Want to upgrade or find out what package you’re on? Just get in contact with our Partnership Team by emailing customersales@arbor-education.com 

To see more information about our assessment types and the names for different areas, please see: Glossary of key terminology for Assessments

What assessments can we set up for our schools?

You can roll out Summative assessments (including Progress 8) right from your MAT MIS.

You cannot roll out Formative, Ad Hoc or DfE Assessments. For these assessment types or if you want to manage assessments for each site, you'll need to log into a school site. You can then set up assessments on each site by following the guidance below depending on the school type:

• Guidance for primaries
• Guidance for secondaries

Rolling out your assessments

The first step in setting up your trust-wide policies is to decide whether you'll be rolling out custom summative assessments (assessments with a custom grade set), or our pre-loaded Arbor assessments.

If you'll be rolling out custom assessments, they need to be set up on a school site first. You can either:

• do this yourself by logging into the school and setting up the assessment
• ask your school to set up the assessments

You can then roll them out to the rest of your schools following these instructions: Roll out assessment frameworks and policies from MAT MIS

Once the assessments are rolled out, you can also roll out: 

• School target rules to automatically set targets for groups of students within an assessment so that these don’t have to be set manually. Roll these out by following these instructions: Roll out assessment School target rules and judgements for schools from the MAT MIS
• School Assessment Measures to create bespoke rules for one or multiple assessments combined within an academic year. Roll these out by following these instructions: Roll out School Assessment Measures for schools from the MAT MIS
• Baselines, grades and targets to add marks. There's no need to log into individual schools, as you can download and import a spreadsheet by following these instructions:Adding assessment marks, baselines and targets from the MAT MIS

Using the assessments

Once you've rolled out all your assessments, your schools can also enter their data into the marksheets that have been created (if you've not already imported these via spreadsheet).

• Make sure baselines are set, as targets and progress measures are based on improvement from this baseline mark.
• For each assessment period, your staff will need to fill in the current marks. You can see how Admins can do this here, how Teachers can do this here, or how you can import data from the MAT site here.
• Schools can also create Data Collections to help manage the input of this data for each assessment period.

Analysis

Please note that on the analysis pages on the School MIS you can choose to exclude students who have left. This is not possible on the MAT MIS.

On the MAT MIS

Rolling out assessments from the MAT MIS allows you to use our 4 central analysis pages. You can see full guidance on these here: Analysing assessments on the MAT MIS

You can also report on your schools' DfE Statutory assessments: Viewing your schools' DfE Standardised assessment results on the MAT MIS

On the School MIS

Once marks have been put in, your schools can analyse their assessments in the Analysis sections. Your schools can use these resources as a starting point:

• Secondaries: Introduction to summative assessment analysis in Arbor
• Primaries: Introduction to summative assessment analysis in Arbor