Using the Arbor parent portal and app

St James' uses Arbor as our student management system to hold information on each child such as their full name and address, their attendance and their medical requirements. We record details such as your wishes regarding web publication and who can collect your child/ren from school. All this helps us to respond to your child/ren's needs quickly and effectively.

We have now decided to extend this use to enable parents to logon to Arbor through a parent portal (on a browser) or via a downloaded app. This will allow the primary guardian to update some details and notify consents directly to school. By downloading the app and turning on notifications, you will be aware when there are new requests needing your attention.

Furthermore, we are starting to use the Arbor app to book trips, clubs, parent-teacher consultations and eventually, our Breakfast & After-School Club sessions at Old Jamaica Road. This will be a gradual transition and will slowly phase out the use of SchoolsBuddy, our current online booking system. 

In the future, all our school interactions will be administered through Arbor and it is therefore important to get all our parents to download the parent app and signup without delay. Follow the instructions below and spend time to familiarise yourself with what it can offer you. More features will be added in time but as a starting point you can:

- check the medical information we are holding on your child and notify us of any changes;

- check that we hold the correct address and DoB for your child;

- see the attendance statistics on your child;

- add details such as previous school attended;

- notify us of your consent wishes regarding web publication of documents & images.

Thank you for helping us streamline our administrative processes and making it easier for you to book clubs, trips and parent consultations in the future. Furthermore we hope in the future to be able to enable in app messaging to communicate with you directly, so do enable notifications to be able to see when a setting or message has been updated.

See the attached flyer below to tell you how to download the app or access the parent portal through a browser. We will be sending out an invitation for you to sign up very soon.