Is anyone else struggling with Arbor as much as we are?

[DavidYoung]

I have been hesitating over whether to post this for quite some time now but I have searched the forum and can't find much discussion on Arbor. The consensus seems to be a positive one with survey results such as this: https://thekeysupport.com/blog/what-do-schools-feel-about-their-mis seeming the norm (I'm sure there's no potential for bias in that article...)

 

We are a MAT of 5 schools, 3 primary and 2 secondary and moved to Arbor at April, partly due to the SIMS contract changes, though it was something we were planning to do anyway, that simply changed the timescales slightly.

 

Arbor's primary customer base seems to be primary schools and to be fair to them, for our primaries, the reception has been fairly positive.

 

The problem comes with our two secondary schools. SIMS may have been an outdated beast but one thing it has going is that it is a mature product, tested and used by thousands of secondary schools. Arbor, on the other hand, seems incredibly new to the secondary market and feels poorly designed for the complex needs of secondary schools (we also have an additional complexity with our shared sixth-form).

 

The main areas we have found the platform to be lacking is:

 

Timetabling, Course Enrolment and New Year Setup - We moved from Nova T6 to Edval, partly with the recommendation from Arbor (Edval has been a nightmare too but different story) but the integration is incredibly poor and requires a huge amount of work in both systems to get the classes and courses linked up so the timetable can be applied (which in itself takes around 2.5 hours assuming it doesn't fail halfway through). Once the timetable is in, however, assigning students to courses and running the academic year promotion is very manual and very prone to human error. SIMS understood the underlying timetable model and generally only allowed students to be enrolled into courses that fit. Arbor will let you enrol anyone into anything (you can enrol a Y7 student into Y13 classes, for example) and then you have to work very hard to fix it.

 

Parent App & Communications - This was an area we had high hopes for as we wanted a single portal for parents to access all their school data rather than several third-party systems. Unfortunately, the Arbor app/portal is incredibly poorly designed with little thought into usability. An example of this is that, in the app, parents can see the current lesson and the next lesson but not the whole timetable. Anyone stopping to think for a few minutes would realise this information is useless to parents as generally, they want to see what lessons their child has tomorrow, not what they currently have. There are many other failings that have made our parents feel it is a big step backwards. We were on Edulink One before with SIMS which wasn't perfect but was very intuitive and widely used. Communications is also not great as the method of selecting recipients is cumbersome and easy to pick the wrong person, has already led to minor data breaches. Also, internal communications is not great, for example when communication records are added, there's no email notifications and behaviour notifications can only go to a single member of staff.

 

Payments - We also moved away from ParentPay shortly after moving to Arbor and have faced a lot of problems here such as no low-balance notifications, no auto top-up, not easy to see previous payments, it doesn't remember card details, staff can't use payments (except for lunches), various problems from finance around reconciliation.

 

All-in-all, I have a list of around 70 items that I have sent to our account manager at Arbor which they are going to respond to.

 

I think the team at Arbor are trying their best and we have had several discussions with account managers, product managers and the support team around our struggles and needs and they are receptive to feedback. I appreciate the extra pressure they are all under as their customer-base has grown by over 50% in the last few months.

 

I have high hopes for what Arbor will hopefully one day become. I think the platform has a lot of promise, it just needs a lot of work as things stand.

 

I often wonder if we made the right choice as we were also evaluating Bromcom at the same time, though I can see they have had their share of issues. I think the move away from SIMS was the correct one (though it would certainly have been easier to stay with it) and fits into our cloud-first strategy, I think I was just hoping that there would be significant usability benefits for our end-users, they just are yet to be seen.

 

We are getting some further training for some of the advanced functionality (not related to the above negative points) and these have been good so far.

 

I think my point here is the question posed in the title is anyone else struggling with Arbor?, as it feels quite lonely here when everyone else seems to be saying it's the best thing since sliced bread while our staff for the most part hate it! But also, a cautionary tale that the grass is not always greener on the other side and, while we expected a certain amount of pain, the benefits we were hoping were going to offset this are yet to be realised.

Edited October 31, 2022 by DavidYoung

[Ditto]

Many thanks for this - the Key article was a really interesting read, but given the business relationship with RM Integris and Arbor, it would be useful to have some reassurance of the level of independence of the report. Unfortunately I don't have any direct experience with Arbor in a live environment, but I know Arbor and CEO and founder @JamesWeatherill posts here on occasions and I'm sure he would be able to address your feedback.

 

I also wonder if feedback is generally higher from primaries, perhaps in part as it is a less complex environment. If yes, the feedback for ScholarPack as a primary only system may need taking in to account.

[ful56_uk]

I have been hesitating over whether to post this for quite some time now but I have searched the forum and can't find much discussion on Arbor. The consensus seems to be a positive one with survey results such as this: https://thekeysupport.com/blog/what-do-schools-feel-about-their-mis seeming the norm (I'm sure there's no potential for bias in that article...)

 

We are a MAT of 5 schools, 3 primary and 2 secondary and moved to Arbor at April, partly due to the SIMS contract changes, though it was something we were planning to do anyway, that simply changed the timescales slightly.

 

Arbor's primary customer base seems to be primary schools and to be fair to them, for our primaries, the reception has been fairly positive.

 

The problem comes with our two secondary schools. SIMS may have been an outdated beast but one thing it has going is that it is a mature product, tested and used by thousands of secondary schools. Arbor, on the other hand, seems incredibly new to the secondary market and feels poorly designed for the complex needs of secondary schools (we also have an additional complexity with our shared sixth-form).

 

The main areas we have found the platform to be lacking is:

 

Timetabling, Course Enrolment and New Year Setup - We moved from Nova T6 to Edval, partly with the recommendation from Arbor (Edval has been a nightmare too but different story) but the integration is incredibly poor and requires a huge amount of work in both systems to get the classes and courses linked up so the timetable can be applied (which in itself takes around 2.5 hours assuming it doesn't fail halfway through). Once the timetable is in, however, assigning students to courses and running the academic year promotion is very manual and very prone to human error. SIMS understood the underlying timetable model and generally only allowed students to be enrolled into courses that fit. Arbor will let you enrol anyone into anything (you can enrol a Y7 student into Y13 classes, for example) and then you have to work very hard to fix it.

 

Parent App & Communications - This was an area we had high hopes for as we wanted a single portal for parents to access all their school data rather than several third-party systems. Unfortunately, the Arbor app/portal is incredibly poorly designed with little thought into usability. An example of this is that, in the app, parents can see the current lesson and the next lesson but not the whole timetable. Anyone stopping to think for a few minutes would realise this information is useless to parents as generally, they want to see what lessons their child has tomorrow, not what they currently have. There are many other failings that have made our parents feel it is a big step backwards. We were on Edulink One before with SIMS which wasn't perfect but was very intuitive and widely used. Communications is also not great as the method of selecting recipients is cumbersome and easy to pick the wrong person, has already led to minor data breaches. Also, internal communications is not great, for example when communication records are added, there's no email notifications and behaviour notifications can only go to a single member of staff.

 

Payments - We also moved away from ParentPay shortly after moving to Arbor and have faced a lot of problems here such as no low-balance notifications, no auto top-up, not easy to see previous payments, it doesn't remember card details, staff can't use payments (except for lunches), various problems from finance around reconciliation.

 

All-in-all, I have a list of around 70 items that I have sent to our account manager at Arbor which they are going to respond to.

 

I think the team at Arbor are trying their best and we have had several discussions with account managers, product managers and the support team around our struggles and needs and they are receptive to feedback. I appreciate the extra pressure they are all under as their customer-base has grown by over 50% in the last few months.

 

I have high hopes for what Arbor will hopefully one day become. I think the platform has a lot of promise, it just needs a lot of work as things stand.

 

I often wonder if we made the right choice as we were also evaluating Bromcom at the same time, though I can see they have had their share of issues. I think the move away from SIMS was the correct one (though it would certainly have been easier to stay with it) and fits into our cloud-first strategy, I think I was just hoping that there would be significant usability benefits for our end-users, they just are yet to be seen.

 

We are getting some further training for some of the advanced functionality (not related to the above negative points) and these have been good so far.

 

I think my point here is the question posed in the title is anyone else struggling with Arbor?, as it feels quite lonely here when everyone else seems to be saying it's the best thing since sliced bread while our staff for the most part hate it! But also, a cautionary tale that the grass is not always greener on the other side and, while we expected a certain amount of pain, the benefits we were hoping were going to offset this are yet to be realised.

 

Thanks for posting this. Everything you have said we have had the same experience.

 

I like the Arbor and I don’t want to be too negative about it.

 

Edval like you recommended to us, integration is poor and still such a manual job for the timetablers. We even sat down with Arbor and Edval at Bett to discuss the issues but haven’t seen any developments on this from either end. My other issue with is timetabler is talked a lot on Arbor development road map but nothing on Edval

 

Parent portal is poor and I agree with all your points, like you we had EduLink. Parents hate the arbor app and I have even had parents say to the school if it’s a money issue I’m sure parents would contribute to the cost.

 

Student portal isn’t great too, doesn’t really render that well on a mobile. Makes assignments tricky and we are now looking at show my homework or another

 

Clubs and trips, can’t even pull off attendance data off to analyse or use the custom report writer to dump the data into excel.

 

I do think part of the issue is getting out of the mind set, we used to be able to do this in Sims, for example custom attendance codes

 

Like I said at the start I don’t want to be too negative but I think there is some basic stuff for secondary schools that do need addressing to make life a little smoother.

 

Our primary schools love it, but looking at the feedback on payments we may hold off on this at the moment

[DavidYoung]

Thanks for posting this. Everything you have said we have had the same experience.

 

I like the Arbor and I don’t want to be too negative about it.

 

It's reassuring to hear we are not the only ones, like you, I don't want to be negative, but we do need to see rapid improvement to the product. I can't really fault the team, we have had some good discussions around improvement (though the way they work with their 3rd party support partners leaves a little to be desired). My concern is whether they have the resources to fix the things that are needed and whether they would prioritise usability issues in current functionality over announcing new features.

 

Edval like you recommended to us, integration is poor and still such a manual job for the timetablers. We even sat down with Arbor and Edval at Bett to discuss the issues but haven’t seen any developments on this from either end. My other issue with is timetabler is talked a lot on Arbor development road map but nothing on Edval

 

We haven't spoken to Edval yet but will do this half term. One of our timetablers ended up creating the timetable in Nova and then manually inputting it into Edval to import into Arbor which obviously very much defeats the purpose. Arbor works so differently to SIMS in terms of timetabling, in many ways this is a positive as it add so much more flexibility (we have a split timetable between KS3&4/5 which was not reflected in SIMS but is in Arbor), but sometimes too much flexibility is a bad thing as it is very complicated and manual!

 

Parent portal is poor and I agree with all your points, like you we had EduLink. Parents hate the arbor app and I have even had parents say to the school if it’s a money issue I’m sure parents would contribute to the cost.

 

Student portal isn’t great too, doesn’t really render that well on a mobile. Makes assignments tricky and we are now looking at show my homework or another

 

I have a long document of all the complaints from parents. The student portal is frustrating too as our sixth form in particular rely on it for timetables, etc. Simple things like the teacher name doesn't appear on the timetable so they don't know which homework they need to have ready where a class is shared between two teachers. Also, we often get students come in and say the app isn't working because they have downloaded it from the app store and can't log in and we have to explain to them that the app is only for parents.

 

Clubs and trips, can’t even pull off attendance data off to analyse or use the custom report writer to dump the data into excel.

 

This is one of those things that we didn't look at too closely during the evaluation as I, clearly foolishly, assumed that having all that data in a single system would make it easy to report on. I was shocked to find that the reporting was worse than Edulink (which wasn't great for clubs but at least we could download the data into Excel/Sheets).

 

I do think part of the issue is getting out of the mind set, we used to be able to do this in Sims, for example custom attendance codes

 

We have worked to retrain our admin teams, in particular our attendance officers and in many cases you are correct that the SIMS mindset needs to change, but, those old ways of working need to be replaced with something better, not worse

 

Like I said at the start I don’t want to be too negative but I think there is some basic stuff for secondary schools that do need addressing to make life a little smoother.

 

Our primary schools love it, but looking at the feedback on payments we may hold off on this at the moment

 

Likewise, I have recommended Arbor to other primary schools and wouldn't have much hesitation in continuing to recommend the product to primaries but can't at the moment recommend it to secondary schools. The time cost for us, which, particularly when dealing with things like timetabling or census issues have fallen on very senior members of staff has been high.

 

All that said, staying on SIMS was not a good option, I just wish the move hadn't had such an impact on our stakeholders.

[DavidYoung]

Many thanks for this - the Key article was a really interesting read, but given the business relationship with RM Integris and Arbor, it would be useful to have some reassurance of the level of independence of the report. Unfortunately I don't have any direct experience with Arbor in a live environment, but I know Arbor and CEO and founder @JamesWeatherill posts here on occasions and I'm sure he would be able to address your feedback.

 

I also wonder if feedback is generally higher from primaries, perhaps in part as it is a less complex environment. If yes, the feedback for ScholarPack as a primary only system may need taking in to account.

 

Thanks. I think feedback is likely higher from primary schools, there are just so many more of them, secondary schools only make up 13% of Arbor's customers. I would have like to have seen that survey broken down by phase, and possibly also weighted by school size, I think the numbers would look very different.

[mavhc]

AIUI Arbor has no concept of data being different in the past, you can't see things from a particular date.

[DavidYoung]

AIUI Arbor has no concept of data being different in the past, you can't see things from a particular date.

 

I'm not sure I quite understand this. Many things in Arbor such as memberships to courses, etc. are set up with date ranges and the report writer lets you set date ranges for different data types.

 

Also, just a way that it is different to SIMS is that everything exists within an academic year. Has pros and cons, but just a different way of working.

[foofighterjim]

Parent App & Communications - This was an area we had high hopes for as we wanted a single portal for parents to access all their school data rather than several third-party systems. Unfortunately, the Arbor app/portal is incredibly poorly designed with little thought into usability. An example of this is that, in the app, parents can see the current lesson and the next lesson but not the whole timetable. Anyone stopping to think for a few minutes would realise this information is useless to parents as generally, they want to see what lessons their child has tomorrow, not what they currently have.

 

This is an interesting thread; however trying to be of help wherever possible: The full calendar is available for the parent portal (at least on the browser version anyway), it is immediately below the current and next lesson section, or you can view the full profile and select calendar from the menu.

[DavidYoung]

This is an interesting thread; however trying to be of help wherever possible: The full calendar is available for the parent portal (at least on the browser version anyway), it is immediately below the current and next lesson section, or you can view the full profile and select calendar from the menu.

 

Thanks. We did work out that it was possible through the web version and have been telling parents this but, by default many people will look for the convenience of an app. It generally isn't a good look.

[ful56_uk]

Thanks. We did work out that it was possible through the web version and have been telling parents this but, by default many people will look for the convenience of an app. It generally isn't a good look.

 

Same as us, problem is when your promoting the use of the in app messages, no one uses the web version as app is the main way of communicating apart from email messages. The app needs a verst improvement, students also get confused as they think the app is for them as well which it isnt.

[RobFuller]

Watching this thread with interested, our planned migration date is January.

 

Anyone considered using Edulink Arbor version, we cannot go without online parents evening which will force our hand!

[JamesWeatherill]

Hi David,

 

Very sorry to hear you’re struggling with Arbor, I just saw this post so thought I’d respond to see if I can help.

 

I’d start out by saying the survey you reference above is accurate, it’s from 1,482 schools and The Key ran the same survey last year with the same result, which is true across primaries and secondaries. However, even though on average we have happy customers, that doesn’t mean we always get it right, and it can also be tough particularly at the start when you’re in implementation.

 

This is often due to a mix of training gaps in knowledge, staff having to adapt existing processes to a new (and hopefully better) way of working, and also some product gaps compared to some specialist solutions. I’ll be upfront and hold my hands up that we aren’t trying to replicate SIMS like-for-like, as otherwise there would be little point in you switching, and we also aren’t trying to replicate all the functionality in all of the systems you currently use. Our philosophy is to work well with the systems you love so you have choice in what you deploy in your school.

 

To respond to your specific points:

 

Timetabling: we are aware of an issue with the Edval integration and are working hard to fix. We have an agreed solution, this requires work by both parties to fix, and should be in place this term.

 

Parent app & comms: the benefit is having comms tagged to the student/parent/staff profile for easy searching and logging, as well as being able to integrate data into comms to stakeholders to personalise and automate messages. Fully accept there are some drawbacks compared to specialist solutions; ultimately it depends how sophisticated your use cases are, so I’d need to know a bit more to point you to the best solution

 

Payments: would be keen to hear more here so I can understand better. We aren’t authorised to store card details, but are releasing Google/Apple pay so anyone can pay in one click without having to re-enter details

 

I understand you have a call booked with your Account Manager for 14^th at 2:30. I can’t make that time but if you could switch I’d be happy to join? Alternatively I’ll get a download from them and will be CC’d into future comms. I’ll pop you an email so you have my details and can come to me direct if you have other questions (I appreciate I'm not the quickest to respond on forums!).

 

I’m confident we can work with you to resolve your issues. I won’t pretend it will be all plain sailing, but you have my commitment we’ll work hard to ensure your staff are happy in the end and you feel the decision to switch was justified.

[gh5000]

Am in agreement about the parent and student portals being poor. Especially when parents were used to Edulink.

The one I don't get about the portals is some of the differences between parent and student. The only answer I have is someone at Arbor has their primary student head on when configuring their side.

For example, why can parents see their child's whole attendance record and even download an attendance certificate and a student can only see their percentage attendance.

Why can parents see all of the child's behaviour incidents and the reason, given by teacher, etc whereas a student only sees their total incident count.

We really expect the girls here to take ownership of their school life and the portal doesn't allow it so I've built a dashboard for them on their internal Google site.

 

I've also had to do some custom reporting through the API to get proper reports for clubs and staff development.

[ful56_uk]

Watching this thread with interested, our planned migration date is January.

 

Anyone considered using Edulink Arbor version, we cannot go without online parents evening which will force our hand!

 

Yes, but waiting for EduLink to develop there integration with Arbor a bit more. I believe they are working on bits for the future.

[DavidYoung]

Hi David,

 

Very sorry to hear you’re struggling with Arbor, I just saw this post so thought I’d respond to see if I can help.

 

I’d start out by saying the survey you reference above is accurate, it’s from 1,482 schools and The Key ran the same survey last year with the same result, which is true across primaries and secondaries. However, even though on average we have happy customers, that doesn’t mean we always get it right, and it can also be tough particularly at the start when you’re in implementation.

 

This is often due to a mix of training gaps in knowledge, staff having to adapt existing processes to a new (and hopefully better) way of working, and also some product gaps compared to some specialist solutions. I’ll be upfront and hold my hands up that we aren’t trying to replicate SIMS like-for-like, as otherwise there would be little point in you switching, and we also aren’t trying to replicate all the functionality in all of the systems you currently use. Our philosophy is to work well with the systems you love so you have choice in what you deploy in your school.

 

To respond to your specific points:

 

Timetabling: we are aware of an issue with the Edval integration and are working hard to fix. We have an agreed solution, this requires work by both parties to fix, and should be in place this term.

 

Parent app & comms: the benefit is having comms tagged to the student/parent/staff profile for easy searching and logging, as well as being able to integrate data into comms to stakeholders to personalise and automate messages. Fully accept there are some drawbacks compared to specialist solutions; ultimately it depends how sophisticated your use cases are, so I’d need to know a bit more to point you to the best solution

 

Payments: would be keen to hear more here so I can understand better. We aren’t authorised to store card details, but are releasing Google/Apple pay so anyone can pay in one click without having to re-enter details

 

I understand you have a call booked with your Account Manager for 14^th at 2:30. I can’t make that time but if you could switch I’d be happy to join? Alternatively I’ll get a download from them and will be CC’d into future comms. I’ll pop you an email so you have my details and can come to me direct if you have other questions (I appreciate I'm not the quickest to respond on forums!).

 

I’m confident we can work with you to resolve your issues. I won’t pretend it will be all plain sailing, but you have my commitment we’ll work hard to ensure your staff are happy in the end and you feel the decision to switch was justified.

 

Hi James,

 

Thanks for getting involved. I appreciate the concern you have for your customers and, as I think I said earlier, have generally received good support from your team. It is just frustrating when the product seems to put barriers rather than solutions to certain issues that would have been simpler in SIMS or other platforms.

 

I think we have managed to rearrange our meeting so you can join and I look forward to speaking to you.

 

David

[nickjelly]

Yes, but waiting for EduLink to develop there integration with Arbor a bit more. I believe they are working on bits for the future.

 

I contacted Edulink and they were good enough to provide a list of modules already developed for Arbor compatibility and those on the roadmap for development. I won't post the list here as it will date quickly and wouldn't be fair to them but I would summarise it as encouraging.

[gszech]

That's correct.

It's worth noting that the move to Arbor will not be a migration, but a new installation, so no data will be carried across from the old Edulink One SIMS system this includes messages, forms, homework, clubs etc.

If using manual accounts for parents these will also be recreated so will have new credentials that will need sending out to parents.

There is no cost associated with the new installation for existing customers.

 

I'm positive about the migration, but not happy that parents would need to create new credentials for EduLink One, I don't really understand why since the EduLink App will be the same ?

[mavhc]

Why would a company volunteer to store credentials, the only thing that'll happen is one day they'll leak, just sign in with Google/Microsoft and match the email to the one on file.

[gszech]

Good advice, I will enable Sign in with Google option for our parents... Just after adding them all to our Google domain first

 

Since this is a migration from SIMS to Arbor, I've assumed that EduLink One would just read the data from Arbor APIs and keep the system as it is. I didn't expect them to offer a new installation, which as mentioned before it's not ideal for parents. I'm not worried about staff, we disable password login and are using Google option only.

[mavhc]

They can sign in with their own email accounts surely, you'd just need to say, if [email protected] logs in, give them access to the data associated with their child.

[Tajbhambra]

We have had problems with the 2nd upload and (new) training portal. This has delayed our migration. I wouldn't agree to a Christmas migration period with a start date of January again. Not even sure why it was ever scheduled to be honeest as we are a heavy SIMS user and presumably, Arbor would have known this. The product does look good and we remain positive! Edited December 3, 2022 by Tajbhambra
TYPO

[RichP]

Hi,

 

Just to add to this thread we've been with Arbor for nearly two years now. As a large (1550 pupils, 11-18) secondary we've struggled too.

 

We started out with Edval but no longer use it due the integration issues. We tried the very first iteration of that and it was clear that while it showed potential, neither side were clear on the requirement. Timetable integration is better, but lacks the approach the T6 had and still requires a lot of manual tweaking. On the plus side, the less rigid approach to the structure allows for interventions, detentions and other ad hoc things to be included on a students timetable. The recent inclusion of the ability to deal with clashes, albeit in quite a clumsy and time consuming way is an improvement. More frustrating is changing a students enrolments and waiting a seemingly indeterminate amount of time for it to be reflected on a calendar. Or then trying to print a new student timetable and trying to find a two weeks that are in the future and don't have a holiday in it.

 

We came from using InTouch for comms, over which Arbor is a huge improvement but that's a low bar to compare it to!

 

Payments is improving but still needs work.

 

We still have integration issues - things that worked well with SIMS are still not working properly with Arbor. Firefly and Inventry top the list. I've been back and forth with Arbor and Inventry but that fact that it fundamentally doesn't work seems to be both accepted by Arbor but relegated to the roadmap.

 

Arbor have a seemingly robust roadmap and RICE prioritisation, but I think it gets dominated by primary needs not secondary. I've lost count of the times I've been told by support to contribute to the roadmap for something that clearly needs to be fixed not improved.

 

I won't get started on the Post-16 census element of Arbor either, because it makes me cry.

 

I've yet to be convinced the system is scaled to cope with large data sets. Want an attendance summary for a half-term? Nope. Want behaviour exported for a few weeks. Nope. Want a live feed to power bi? Nope.

 

We were sold Arbor as the solution to replace our third party integrations, but the opposite seems to be true.

 

Account Management has improved, but still seems focussed on upselling add-ons (another bug bear) over understanding customer need.

 

Richard

[CAM]

Having used Arbor for the first time for about a year, I found it already performs better than SIMS in most areas. SIMS is still stronger in timetable for example as Arbor doesn't quite get that bit right when it comes to changing classes, presenting enrolment information clearly, etc. But there are many areas like changing student details or adding events and interventions that show it to be miles ahead of it's ESS counterpart.

 

However, as an all-through school I have seen the gap between Primary and Secondary first-hand. Primary it is fantastic and much of the system is designed around that. Secondary it still needs lots of maturing. Assessments for Secondary can get very complex with the additional needs SLT impose on KS3 and KS4, with effort and predicted grades etc instead of just one grade per class through the year. Secondary is also much more volatile and sometimes assessments and carefully laid plans need changing part-way through the year which isn't always possible without deleting the assessment and it's data and starting again. The workflow for GroupMIS also needs work as it is rather unintuitive.

 

Exams however it is very good. If you have ever tried to set up domestic basedata in SIMS you will love the In-House exams module that beats Exams Organiser hands down. Actually you don't have to play with basedata for the real thing either as Arbor handle that for you.

 

Just remember whatever system you use, you will need to make some alterations to how you approach working with it with different methods, menu routines etc to your former one. That tends to cause the most grind when adopting a new system.

[DavidYoung]

Hi,

 

Just to add to this thread we've been with Arbor for nearly two years now. As a large (1550 pupils, 11-18) secondary we've struggled too.

 

We started out with Edval but no longer use it due the integration issues. We tried the very first iteration of that and it was clear that while it showed potential, neither side were clear on the requirement. Timetable integration is better, but lacks the approach the T6 had and still requires a lot of manual tweaking. On the plus side, the less rigid approach to the structure allows for interventions, detentions and other ad hoc things to be included on a students timetable. The recent inclusion of the ability to deal with clashes, albeit in quite a clumsy and time consuming way is an improvement. More frustrating is changing a students enrolments and waiting a seemingly indeterminate amount of time for it to be reflected on a calendar. Or then trying to print a new student timetable and trying to find a two weeks that are in the future and don't have a holiday in it.

 

We came from using InTouch for comms, over which Arbor is a huge improvement but that's a low bar to compare it to!

 

Payments is improving but still needs work.

 

We still have integration issues - things that worked well with SIMS are still not working properly with Arbor. Firefly and Inventry top the list. I've been back and forth with Arbor and Inventry but that fact that it fundamentally doesn't work seems to be both accepted by Arbor but relegated to the roadmap.

 

Arbor have a seemingly robust roadmap and RICE prioritisation, but I think it gets dominated by primary needs not secondary. I've lost count of the times I've been told by support to contribute to the roadmap for something that clearly needs to be fixed not improved.

 

I won't get started on the Post-16 census element of Arbor either, because it makes me cry.

 

I've yet to be convinced the system is scaled to cope with large data sets. Want an attendance summary for a half-term? Nope. Want behaviour exported for a few weeks. Nope. Want a live feed to power bi? Nope.

 

We were sold Arbor as the solution to replace our third party integrations, but the opposite seems to be true.

 

Account Management has improved, but still seems focussed on upselling add-ons (another bug bear) over understanding customer need.

 

Richard

 

Hi Richard,

 

Your story sounds very similar to us but about 1 ¹/₂ years ahead. We're particularly interested in your journey with Edval and what you are using now (Timetabler?). We are struggling to get a working timetable out of Edval, regardless of the integration problems.

 

Your comment about primary school functionality being prioritised over secondary school is fair and much of the system feels very much like it is focussed on how primaries work and the complexity of secondaries doesn't fit that well. I think part of this issue is that there are 6 times the number of primary customers (~3,000) compared with secondary (~500) so relevant features will get higher upvotes. It is also my issue with the survey linked in my first post from The Key as it does not split the data out by phase or perform any statistical weighting based on staff/pupil numbers, so the view from primary schools will always hold more weight.

 

I also became so frustrated with being directed to the roadmap where functionality doesn't work (not feature requests but simply broken or implemented in an unworkable manner) that I preempted this response on one of my support tickets with our support provider (we are partner supported) that I would 'loose it' if Arbor came back telling us to raise something on the roadmap (I think that may have been around the time I started this thread...).

 

I too had to do the post-16 census for two schools this year and it took days and days of work. I have never done it in SIMS (I am told it was a pain there too) but there are many ways that the Programmes of Study area in Arbor could be improved. We virtually had to manually go into each sixth form student to check and fix their programme enrolments.

 

We are also finding the system unresponsive when dealing with large amounts of data, with more and more being added now we are entering assessment and behaviour data. I see the 'Sorry, something went wrong' message probably about 5 times an hour when using Arbor and I don't use it that much!

 

Arbor as the solution to replacing external solutions is a sore point with us as they market the system as being able to replace all of the third party add-ons (we dropped ParentPay, Edulink One and Behaviourwatch), there is even a section in the onboarding process when they'll go through the apps and tell you which ones not to renew, but when we met with James a few weeks ago, the message was that they were not trying to be the best payments platform, parent app or behaviour management system, they are trying to be the best MIS (though with a fair way to go) and recommend integrating with external providers for 'best-in-breed' functionality.

 

I'm going to send you a DM if you don't mind, it would be great if we could connect directly.

 

David

[Cath]

Again, thanks for posting. We are also having many of the same issues. Never felt so stupid when dealing with a piece of software as all we were hearing was how wonderful a product it was, and we thought it must be us.

We went with TimeTabler (simply because it was considerably cheaper) and I am glad we did. Not perfect but doesn't seem to have the issues that Edval has caused.

We have delayed the parent or pupil portal because we were having so many issues, we didn't want to open up more difficulties.

Again, the primaries like it, but for a secondary, it had caused a lot of extra work and we have things we are having to use other products for or can no longer do.