Arbor Consultancy

Parent/Guardian Consultation Evening

If you are interested in using Arbor to organise your parent/guardian consultation evenings, we are here to help.  Schools ICT are pleased to offer a one-hour bespoke consultancy in which we will:

• Show you how the system Arbor Guardian Consultation works in conjunction with the Arbor Parent App
• Set up your next parents evening with you to meet your school’s needs
• Specify Classes, Year Groups or Key Stages involved
• Spread the consultation over multiple days
• Organise staff availability including breaks
• Allow parents to book individual meetings
• Book meetings from the school office
• Amend and cancel meetings
• Work around more complicated scenarios such as shared classes and custom meetings (e.g. with SENCO/SLT)
• Print timetables and schedules

Parent Portal/Parent App and Communications

Arbor can be used to share information and communicate with parents as well as allowing them to book and pay for clubs, trips and meals. We can offer a two-hour consultancy to get this facility set up for you. 

• Overview of communication permissions
• Preparing your data for communications and portal access
• Looking at communication logs
• Creating emails, SMS, letters and in-app messages
• Setting up templates and linking these with custom reports
• Overview of what can be done in the portal
• Deciding what information should be shared in the portal
• Inviting users and switching on
• Troubleshooting

School Meals

If you wish to use Arbor to organise your school meals and allow parents to book and pay for their children’s meals using Arbor, this consultancy will give you a good understanding of how the system works and get your school meal ordering system set up.

• Overview of how meals work in Arbor
• Create meal provisions, pricing and sittings
• Set up a one, two or three week menu
• Demo how to duplicate and modify menus using a spreadsheet to store, copy and paste data
• Demo teachers and parents making meal choices

Payments and School Shop

This consultancy will explore Arbor’s functionality for managing parental payments and purchases. We will work with you to get your accounts and card payments set up as well as creating a school shop to manage purchases of school equipment, tickets and more.

• Set up credit cards and bank account links
• Set up customer account types
• Look at accounts, invoices, reconciliation and reports in your site
• Set up school shop and add products

Wraparound Care

In this session we will look at how Wraparound care clubs work in Arbor and then go through the process of setting one up on your school’s site.  This can be a breakfast cub or an after-school club. Once set up we will look at making and amending bookings, managing registers and reporting.

• Set up Wraparound account type
• Set up sessions with session intervals
• Set up pricing and staffing
• Booking manually or via app
• Changing and refunding bookings

Behaviour Management

This consultancy is for schools looking to streamline behaviour management and improve student outcomes by leveraging the power of Arbor’s Behaviour Incident Reporting and/or Points Award systems. This consultancy can be extended at additional cost if schools would prefer the system to be fully set up by Schools ICT.

• Assess your specific requirements and discuss how the system’s capabilities effectively address your needs
• Identify preparation which is needed in system and outside of it (e.g. department setup, behaviour workflow planning)
• Set up point scales and basic severity workflows
• Set timescale and project plan for setting up system

Arbor for New Office Staff

This comprehensive 3-hour workshop provides new office staff with an in-depth overview of the Arbor system. The session focuses on the areas of Arbor most frequently used by office staff, allowing ample time for questions and discussions.

• Top tips for using Arbor efficiently
• Business roles and permissions
• The home page
• Attendance
• Student profiles
• Importing and exporting CTFs
• Creating and printing class lists
• Data quality dashboard
• Building and saving reusable reports within your Arbor system

Pay Scales (East Sussex schools only)

This applies to schools where pay scales have not been streamlined since the migration process. For example, each Single Status grade might be listed as a separate pay scale.

• Mark all old pay scales as no longer in use
• Create new pay scales. Teacher main, teacher upper (3pt), leadership, unqualified teacher and single status, as per the values listed on the East Sussex County Council website (https://www.eastsussex.gov.uk/jobs/working-here/pay)
• A 30-minute team meeting will be held with the school to cover annual maintenance of pay scales upon the announcement of new pay awards and the process of linking updated pay scales to staff contracts

Did you know we also offer MIS training?

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