Arbor review

Arbor is a cloud-based management information system (MIS) for UK schools and multi-academy trusts. It holds pupil and staff records, attendance, behaviour, assessment and progress tracking, exams, cover, medical notes and the data for the DfE school census. Higher tiers add a parent portal, the Arbor App for parents, parents’ evening booking, payments for meals and trips, and teacher tools such as seating plans and intervention tracking. Arbor also sells a separate finance system, Arbor Finance. It publishes migration guides for schools moving from SIMS and Bromcom.

Who it’s for

Arbor fits primary and secondary schools in England and Wales that want a browser-based MIS with no server in the building, and multi-academy trusts that want the same system and the same data structure in every school. Arbor also offers a version for Scottish schools.

Trust central teams get the most out of it. A trust business manager or data lead can see attendance and behaviour dashboards across every school, drill down into a single school or pupil, and help a school with its census remotely. For other options, see our student information system rankings.

What it does well

The trust view is the main reason trusts pick Arbor. Its group product has trust-wide dashboards with benchmarking against trust and national averages, and a census audit dashboard, so the central team can check which schools are ready for census day without phoning each one. Arbor runs DfE-style validation checks inside the MIS, so the office can fix errors before the return goes to the DfE.

Daily use happens in the browser. Staff can take a register or log a behaviour incident from any device, and there is no server in the school office to patch or back up. Arbor hosts the MIS in Amazon Web Services’ London data centre and handles updates.

Arbor publishes its licence prices, which makes budgeting easier than with suppliers who only quote. A business manager can work out next year’s cost from the pupil number on the October census.

On the Comms tier and above, payments, meals, clubs and trips sit in the same system as attendance and contacts. The office does not have to reconcile a separate payments app against the MIS.

Where it falls short

Migration needs planning. Arbor includes data migration and automated cleaning, but its price list charges extra for manual data cleaning, top-up training and project management. The timing has to fit around census dates and the end of your current contract. Clean your attendance and census data in the old system first, and avoid switching in the weeks before a census.

Secondary timetabling mostly happens outside Arbor. Arbor’s help centre says schools need to use Arbor, TimeTabler or Edval, and that it does not integrate with other timetabling software such as Nova T. Most schools build the timetable in TimeTabler or Edval and import it, and Arbor says it cannot train staff on those products. Its price list also says timetable modelling and options packages for secondary schools cost extra. A school on Nova T has two changes to manage at once.

The Core price is rarely the real price. The parent portal, the Arbor App, parents’ evening booking and payments are in Comms. Seating plans, intervention tracking, provision maps, online homework and staff performance management are in Perform. The trust dashboard costs extra on every tier, and parent payments carry a per-transaction charge.

Pricing

Arbor’s 2025 licence price list, published on the government’s G-Cloud 14 framework, charges a base fee plus a per-pupil fee. For a primary school the base fee is £2,100, and the per-pupil fee is £3.15 on Core, £6.30 on Comms and £10.50 on Perform. Secondary schools pay a £4,200 base fee and £4.20, £7.35 or £11.55 per pupil. On those figures, a 420-pupil primary on Comms would pay about £4,746 a year before discounts.

Schools with fewer than 150 pupils get £500 off the base fee. Trusts and local authorities buying for three or more schools get scale discounts, and schools supported by an accredited partner pay lower rates. Arbor Finance is priced separately. These figures date from 2025, so check the current list before you set a budget. Our guide to the total cost of school software covers the costs outside the licence.

Privacy and data

Arbor says it stores and processes all personal data and backups in the UK, in Amazon Web Services’ London data centre, and encrypts data in transit and at rest. It says it meets the criteria in the DfE’s cloud supplier checklist, is listed on G-Cloud, and holds PCI DSS 4.0 certification for payments and ISO 9001. Arbor’s support site has published ISO 27001 certificates, but the ones we found carry older dates, so ask for the current certificate during procurement. Its data protection page does not mention advertising. Our student data privacy checklist lists the other questions to ask any MIS supplier.

Verdict

Arbor is a strong pick for multi-academy trusts and for schools leaving an on-premise MIS, thanks to its trust dashboards, UK hosting and published prices. Budget for the tier you will actually use, not the Core headline price. Secondary schools with complex timetables should test the TimeTabler or Edval workflow first, and schools that want timetabling inside the MIS should compare Bromcom.

See the best Arbor alternatives