A large all-through school like ours is a busy place. This brings both opportunities and challenges, particularly when it comes to communicating with people and staying organised. Inevitably this will involve the use of a variety of systems and platforms. We are committed to streamlining these, but there is never one perfect tool for every job. Below you will find an outline of packages that we use.

 

 

Arbor

Arbor is our Management Information System. Parents can use it to update contact and medical information, and check student attendance. Behaviour, reporting, and assessment data is stored on Arbor.

One of the first things that you should do when logging into Arbor for the first time is check that the details that we hold for you and your child are correct. These can be updated by you directly, removing the need for you to email us separately.

The system is intuitive, but there are several help guides to assist you in getting started with Arbor:

 

Involve

This is the platform we use to timetable music lessons, track attendance and progress, set lesson notes, safeguard coming out of lessons and have all information together. There is the web based portal and the app. Students and parents can use Involve to check music lesson times. From September 2025 will be expanding our use of Involve to include PE fixtures and clubs, and the booking of student consultation evenings information regarding logging in will be sent throughout the year).

https://app.involveeducation.com/login

See also: Simon Balle Music – Music Lesson Timetabling

Online Payments

At Simon Balle, we use an online payments portal called Parent Portal to manage all of our financial transactions with parents with the exception of secondary school dinners. The links to Parent Portal and ParentPay can be found below:

Google for Education

All students have an email account in the format year of entry, surname, initial @simonballe.herts.sch.uk. This is used to log into their chromebook and the school website from another device. From here they can access the full set of google tools for education. Students will be enrolled in multiple google classrooms: these are used in a variety of ways, from simply communicating information to submitting and marking work. From September 2025 all year groups (with the exception of Reception) will be set home learning via Google Classroom.

Other online platforms

There are a wide variety of online resources available to students and teachers. These include online textbooks that a department will pay for, access to revision material and online quizzing sites. Each of these will come with its own login and password.