Arbor School Management Suite (MIS)

Arbor Education is a London-based provider of management information systems (MIS) and school management software, part of The Key Group. Launched in 2011 to reduce the non-teaching workload that the company says takes over 60% of a school's time, it reports more than 12,500 schools and trusts using its software.

The Arbor School Management Suite combines a cloud MIS for student and school data with Arbor Finance for school accounting, TimeTabler for timetabling and SAMpeople for HR. Separate editions serve single schools, multi-academy trusts (MAT MIS) and local authorities, with add-ons for school payments, SMS, auto absence calls, a BI connector and a custom data warehouse. Arbor AI and Arbor Labs add generative features such as Ask Arbor and text suggestions. Users are school leaders, office staff, teachers, trust central teams and parents.

• School MIS: cloud records for students, attendance, behaviour, assessment and report cards.
• MAT and Local Authority MIS: cross-school views, permissions and reporting for trusts and councils.
• Arbor Finance: school accounting software for local-authority schools.
• TimeTabler and SAMpeople: timetabling and HR management in the same suite.
• Document Manager and BI Viewer: central document handling and embedded Power BI or Looker Studio dashboards.
• Arbor AI and Labs: beta tools such as Ask Arbor, suggested text and custom report creation.

A multi-campus private school group in Vietnam could use a trust-level MIS to compare attendance and assessment across campuses. A school's office team could combine fee collection, meal payments and parent messaging in one portal. Group headquarters could feed MIS data into Power BI dashboards for board reporting.

Brings student, staff, finance and timetable data into one place instead of separate legacy systems. Reduces administrative time for office staff and teachers through workflows, automated absence handling and bulk report-card actions. Gives trust and local-authority leaders cross-school dashboards and embedded BI reports. Lets parents pay and manage meals through a parent portal with safeguards against meal debt.

Schools and school groups are moving from on-premise legacy MIS to cloud platforms that combine student data, finance, HR and parent payments, and are starting to add AI assistants for reporting and communication. In Vietnam, private school systems and multi-campus groups face similar needs to consolidate data across campuses and reduce administrative load on teachers.

Arbor Education, Floor 4, FORA, 21-33 Great Eastern St, London; part of The Key Group. Launched in 2011; the suite was relaunched in October 2024 after adding Arbor Finance, TimeTabler and SAMpeople. Focused on state and publicly funded schools; East Midlands Academy Trust has been a user since 2023.