Arbour Assessment Data

[synaesthesia]

Hi all,

 

Is anyone on Arbour involved in assessment data at all please?

The assessment tracking (ATL) is extremely limited compared to SIMS and our data manager is worried about the impact this may have once we migrate over. Does anyone only use the basic assessment abilities that Arbour comes with, or do you use any 3rd party tools?

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

When I inquired before Christmas, Arbor couldn't handle age based assessments. there were various fudges and workarounds but it was all very faffy. Arbor said if there was demand for the feature then they would look in to developing something.

[gh5000]

We're secondary age, so if your post is related to primary I may be on the wrong page.

 

When you say ATL do you mean an attitude to learning grade on each assessment?

 

Or do you mean analysis of assessment, in which case we used SISRA with SIMS and continue to do so for Arbor.

 

We've been on Arbor since September and not found any major problems. Things that we know we want to change for next year in the setup stage, yes but not major barriers. Reporting to parents is one of the major downsides. We don't find the Report cards in Arbor flexible enough and have been doing merges in Google docs with the data and sharing PDFs.

[synaesthesia]

Cheers, that's good info. Yes we're secondary. We haven't gone live with Arbor yet but not long now! And yes, I think that is what I mean although I don't fully understand that side of it; it's just numbers to me, but I understand their importance

[TechSail]

Having to use additional software for report cards sounds a bit strange, can you not do everything you need built in? How does Arbor work with formative in a secondary environment, can they calculate summative outcomes from curriculum statements? Can you calculate progress against KS2 results? Does it not negate the need for SISRA? Sorry, so many questions and so little knowledge

[sefton]

Arbor can work with formative assessment in a secondary school and that can calculate a summative grade, although I've not implemented that link. It will do progress from KS2 with A8 and P8 although currently it is blank because there is no scaled score A8 estimates. Does it negate the need for Sisra, that's a judgement call for your SLT, our schools wanted to keep Sisra for the SPI although I was against it, I think they like to have a metric to hold on to like a safety blanket sometimes.

[gh5000]

Having to use additional software for report cards sounds a bit strange, can you not do everything you need built in? How does Arbor work with formative in a secondary environment, can they calculate summative outcomes from curriculum statements? Can you calculate progress against KS2 results? Does it not negate the need for SISRA? Sorry, so many questions and so little knowledge

 

Think someone that's a bit more knowledgeable has answered the last few questions. On report cards, it definitely seems like a feature that was built for the primary school customers and needs some catching up for the more complex needs Secondaries have. There are two built in reports. I haven't tried them since our first data drop with Arbor in October/November but we thought they were shit to put it nicely. There's basically not enough flexibility. We used to use SIMS individual reports and would have a front page with the logo, a second page with some explanation of some of the things in the report, a picture of flight paths. You can't do that with the inbuilt reports.

 

You also couldn't rely on the formatting to be correct. The short reports would show the teacher names as Headteacher: Mr J Bloggs, where as the long reports would show Headteacher: Joe Bloggs. Random blank pages. Formatting all over the place. 250 character limit on comments...

 

If you did like the report cards, at the time you couldn't share them to students via email or the portal. That's there now and they've have added the ability to upload any reports you create by merging back to Arbor - their external report cards. But we still don't use that as we've come up with a way of doing it on Google drive where we can see if a parent or student has looked at the report card. There's no view statistics on Arbor.

 

Just so you don't think I'm joking - https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408059347473-Why-is-there-a-250-character-limit-for-report-card-comments-

See the difference between long and short - https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408059149841-What-s-the-difference-between-the-Long-and-Standard-Report-Card-formats-

 

Looks like they are adding some stuff to fix the problems - https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409027709341-How-can-we-make-sure-the-font-size-is-the-same-across-all-report-cards-

[sefton]

I've been quite enthusiastic about our switch from Sims to Arbor but there are a couple of shockers in my opinion, report cards are one of them, letter templates are the other. But I'd never go back to Sims.

[TechSail]

Sounds like a shame that the outward facing bits of the product i.e report cards and letters are not up to scratch. Been looking at their website to understand what they can do in more detail, anyone got any comments on its behaviour functionality in relation to others?

[sefton]

I like the behaviour, there are some things they need to work on. The workflows are based on severity of behaviour (5 positive, 5 negative and neutral) which has been fine for primaries but there's not enough options there for a secondary, the workflows need to be based on the behaviour.

 

Get your departments set up correctly and then the behaviour dashboards can be very powerful and allow a HOD to identify problem areas quite quickly. I've started using live feed to build more bespoke dashboards in excel.

[ee31ag]

but there are a couple of shockers in my opinion, report cards are one of them

 

This was the impression I got when evaluating Arbor and was the one thing that stopped me from recommending it to our SLT. Their new "external report card" feature (where you can upload a PDF per student e.g. one that you have mailmerged) seems like a reasonable workaround for now.

 

I got an extended demo from both Arbor and Bromcom at BETT and Bromcom seems far ahead in this respect - it seems that it can replicate all of the functionality of SIMS' Individual Reports and that setting up marksheets is easier than on SIMS (i.e. you don't need to clone a template for each subject).

[sefton]

This was the impression I got when evaluating Arbor and was the one thing that stopped me from recommending it to our SLT. Their new "external report card" feature (where you can upload a PDF per student e.g. one that you have mailmerged) seems like a reasonable workaround for now.

 

I got an extended demo from both Arbor and Bromcom at BETT and Bromcom seems far ahead in this respect - it seems that it can replicate all of the functionality of SIMS' Individual Reports and that setting up marksheets is easier than on SIMS (i.e. you don't need to clone a template for each subject).

Bromcom is just like Sims in the cloud, it felt very familiar and very modular, which is what stopped me recommending it. Arbor does have some issues but having seen it a few years ago when I wouldn’t even give it a second look to where it was last year when we went through procurement means I’m confident in the progress it is showing. It has a unified UI whereas Bromcom is quite clunky and disparate.

[gh5000]

The other shocker for me is the student portal.

 

We came from using Edulink on top of SIMS so even the Arbor parent portal is limited compared to Edulink. But the student portal is just stuck on as a feature they can say they have to secondaries.

 

Parents can see all attendance marks, download a PDF attendance certificate. Great. But we want students to take ownership of their attendance and what can they see... Just a percentage.

 

Parents can see behaviour incidents and points. Which teacher gave them and the reason. Students can see..

Just their total points. No way for a student to see that Mrs Jones gave them a achievement point for their excellent work in class and spur them on.

 

Same for students being able to see their basic assessment data like baselines and targets. Just isn't anywhere to be seen from there end.

 

All of which has let me to build something that goes on their student Google site that allows them to see all of that info.

[sefton]

We're coming from a situation of having no portal or app for students or guardians so everything is an improvement.

[paulkerton]

Bromcom is just like Sims in the cloud, it felt very familiar and very modular, which is what stopped me recommending it. Arbor does have some issues but having seen it a few years ago when I wouldn’t even give it a second look to where it was last year when we went through procurement means I’m confident in the progress it is showing. It has a unified UI whereas Bromcom is quite clunky and disparate.

 

The strongest part of SIMS is the assessment features, and Bromcom's assessment features are at least on par, if not exceeding SIMS. It's assessment features are really simple to use, and that's part of it's power. In fact, it has a built in primary tracker which absolutely negates the need to be bringing in third party tools.

 

Don't get me wrong, I like Arbor (though I could do without its brown UI) but it's definitely behind SIMS and Bromcom when it comes to assessment.

[synaesthesia]

Damned if you do, damned if you don't for any solution it appears. SIMS is... well, SIMS. Bromcom seem to be doing the best they possibly can to upset everyone to the point that their product could be the best bar none, but many people aren't going to touch it in case they get sued for posting something on their support forum.

[gh5000]

So just going back to the question on calculating targets from KS2 data. It can definitely set targets throughout the year based on baselines and end of year targets. Data manager says that normally Arbor will carry over last years final grade as baseline for next year. That may suit your school....For some reason this school likes to set their baseline based on their KS2 data and GCSE target flightpath - e.g. where they should be at the start of Year 9 based on where their flightpath says they should be at the start of Y9, rather than where they were at the end of Y8.