Skip to content
Safeguarding
Student Intranet

    • Be your best


  • Community
  • Accountability
  • Resilience
  • Empowerment
  • Sisterhood

    • New MIS & Communications System

    We are moving our IT and communications systems to a different provider, Arbor, over the February half term break. This will bring together our core school data and systems in one place. As well as being more efficient for the school it will allow us to communicate more efficiently with families. 

    Some of our school systems will be retired at the start of next half-term, and we will introduce other Arbor features gradually over the remainder of this academic year, to ensure a smooth transition.  

    An Arbor Parent Portal and a Parent App are due to be rolled out on 16th March. These will enable you to manage your child’s school information, including tracking attendance, reporting absence, viewing behaviour and paying for school trips and meals.  

    Until the portal and app are launched there will be an interim period that affects several processes for parents and carers to be aware of:  

    Attendance 

    From Wednesday 25th February Class Charts and School Gateway will no longer be in use, and it will not be possible to report absence on them. We have put the following temporary procedure in place for reporting absence. 

    Any student absences should be reported by 8.30 am on the day of absence either by one of the following: 

    The child’s name and tutor group with a brief reason for absence should be included in the message with any medical evidence for our records. Please only use these methods to report absences and there is no need to inform the School Office or Year Team separately. 

    If a student is absent from school and we have not received notification from their parent/carer, an email will be sent asking the parent/carer to contact us with the reason for their absence.  

    Homework 

    From Wednesday 25th February homework will be set on Microsoft Teams for students in Years 9-13. All homework will be posted in the student’s Teams class area, where they can view tasks and deadlines as usual.  

    Arrangements for Years 7-8 remain unchanged, students will continue with Home Learning booklets. 

    Behaviour 

    All behaviour and rewards policies will continue unchanged. From Wednesday 25th February notifications regarding detentions will be sent via email. When the Arbor parent portal goes live, we expect it to operate in a similar way to Class Charts for behaviour and rewards notifications and updates.  

    Payments 

    ParentPay will continue to operate until 9.00am Thursday 12th March for school meals. There will be no online system for payments from then until Monday 16th March when Arbor Pay, our new payment system, will launch. This means there will be a four-day period balances will not be able to be topped up.  

    All existing ParentPay balances will be transferred to Arbor Pay and we will send further details about this change after half term. 

    Communication 

    From Wednesday 25th February, our communications will move across to Arbor. Emails from the school will come from a new sender address. Please add no-reply@mail.arbor-education.com to safe senders lists and check junk/spam folders regularly. Please ensure contact details are up to date so that you continue to receive all relevant information. 

    We will continue using the email address already provided to the school. We will send a test email on Tuesday 24th February. If not received by the end of the school day, please check junk folders and then contact the school if not received. 

    We will share more information about the Parent App and Portal after half term. There is no need to download or register for them yet, and we will give guidance on this, including how to register, closer to the time. 

    We are confident that the introduction of Arbor will be smooth, but if any of the above plans change, we will let parents/carers know.