Arbor Education Anmeldelser 131

From a school’s POV I am finding Arbor the worst MIS ever (and I’ve used a few) Spending hours and hours going round and round in circles. Just about ready to pack my lovely job in, all thanks to Arbor. Some of the people helping are lovely BUT they know very little.

Loads of the wrong information was on arbor for example my child’s middle name and loads more that I am unable to edit I think parents should of more editing control on the app.

Honestly the worst ever app I have used.
Not family friendly. Confusing. Can’t even find simple things.
UC is unable to work with it, so if you have support with childcare to work-you can’t get an invoice, you can’t get money!
They mix food, outings and wraparound care together and only show the daily price. No monthly invoice.
Who on earth managed to lie through their teeth to sell it to schools goodness knows. What a waste of money.

Booking Breakfast Club through Arbor was genuinely one of the worst app experiences I've ever had. The app is utterly confusing and impossible to use effectively, and the website is just as terrible. Such awful design and frustrating user interaction for something so straightforward is simply unacceptable. Even giving this app one star feels far too generous. Hugely disappointing.

Awful app. awful
Support.
Have asked the school to stop using them. Forces to use it this year and the kids have missed out on clubs, ee’ve missed out on parents evenings, payments are restrictive, amounts owing are wrong and or confusing and there is zero support from
Arbor for parents (hide behind gdpr and add workload ONTO the school office) Don’t touch unless you they have matured (a lot) or your school lnow how to/when to use them.

Horrible App

This app is beyond awful. Arbor is the worst. As a student, I should be able to do my work from another country, right? But no — Arbor blocks you with a firewall.

Say you have one week off during half-term and you go to France. You’d expect to be able to do your homework. But nope. You get hit with this:

"This request has been blocked by Arbor's firewalls due to matching security filters. If you feel this is in error, please contact Arbor at myteam"at"arbor-education.com."

Seriously? An 11- or 12-year-old is supposed to email Arbor and wait 4–5 days for a response? By then you’ve got 2 days left to do all your work. And that’s if they even respond.

So what are your options?

Don’t do your homework and get in trouble — even if you show proof that it wasn’t your fault.

Wait days for support.

Spend money on a VPN and risk viruses, phishing, and dodgy data tracking.

All because of a broken, inflexible, poorly designed platform. If the people behind Arbor actually cared, they’d fix this. But clearly, they don’t — otherwise, they’d reply to reviews and have better ratings.

Parents, imagine your workplace app (like Slack or Teams) refused to work just because you were on holiday abroad. Would you just accept that? Or would you demand change?
Disgraceful

This app is shocking. I wish my daughters school didn't insist on us using this app. Messages are difficult to access, payments due for morning club is horrendous! Just a poor app overall

Terrible website - I really wish my son's school hadn't decided to sign us all up to it. Looking around the site it appears that there have been no updates for four years!

Every time I log in it says none of my details have been recognised but then sends me a 'reset password' link to my email address. It's frustrating and a waste of time.

Customer support is non-existant. As a parent, there is no way to contact the website - you are advised to contact the school. I'm sure the school regrets paying for this service as they are tasked with handling complaints.

Literally if I could give it zero stars, I would. It's so terrible. It has no redeeming features. Every parent I have spoken to thinks its terrible, the school are constantly apologising for it, the kids hate it.

Some of the consistent problems:

- It still lists my kids as being at their primary schools, so every time I log in, I have to select their secondary school. They are in years 8 and 10.
- Homework assigned often doesn't show up
- It is SLOW. Really slow. I've been waiting 2 mins to log in so far
- It supports biometric login, but then makes me enter my password anyway. WTF?
- When the school sends a message, it's something like 8 clicks to get to it. So much so I've often forgotten what I'm looking for by the time I get there.
- I have two kids, but the message alert doesn't mention which kid the message is for. So I have to take pot luck and select each in turn to see whether it's about them. Surely there's a better way of managing messages!

This is just the stuff I can think of of offhand. It's TERRIBLE. I mean have you ever seen an app with a 1.4 out of 5 review? I can only assume that it's cheap, and it's been foisted on the school by the local education authority as a means to save money. If not, then someone has seriously done a bad job of due diligence.

Slow. Pages are from the 1990's.
Dreadful app.
When I log in if shows various schools which my children do not attend.
Scrolling through the pages takes as long as the good old days of dial up.

I can't actually understand why any school would use it.

Absolute rubbish un-user friendly platform causing endless stress and frustration, if I could give it zero I would.

Absolutely not user friendly, overwhelming, no thank you

Genuinely rubbish platform, website, and usability.

I wish schools would do some better research and consultation before forcing their users (especially parents!) to use all the various platforms they foist on us. All I'll say, is Arbor must have some seriously good sales team working for them, to get schools to sign up to this godawful service.

I honestly don't know where to start. There's no redeeming features. The look is dated, navigation is non-intuitive, the functionality is poor. For example, pay options are ancient, and require adding card details for every transaction. It's 2025 and there is no Apple / Google Pay, or ways to save payment details. Whoever threw this site together gave no thought to the actual user experience and what parents need to do. You'd better get used to drop-downs as they are pretty essential to finding most major features. No companion app for mobile devices. I keep expecting a friend request from MySpace Tom.

Arbor, sort your house out. The front end is a horrible experience.

My school moved to arbor because apparently "it supported our needs better and was larger" but it's just terrible, there is hardly any options for students to see anything like check grades or reports, you can't click a button to show you've done your homework (like go4schools) so you end up with loads of "overdue" assignments. And when you can actually find something it is unnecessarily complicated to find it. I think the real reason my school moved to this platform is because it is cheaper and it's cheaper for a reason... It's terrible

Really not liking Arbor. School previously used Parent pay which was working great. We could set up auto top up for school meals, payments were a simple one click. Now we have to enter card details for every payment and keep getting emails from the school asking us to top up the school meal account as we've forgotten. As parents I'm sure we can all agree that we need things to make our lives easier, not harder! Just took me ten minutes to find the right place to pay for an up coming school trip, really not easy to navigate at all.

Difficult to use, I can see what club my kids did three years ago but can't see what club they are doing now.
Also I keep getting loads of spam emails from my children's school and when I contacted the school about this they said emails are controlled via Arbor and there is no way they can filter what emails they send; I either get all the emails or none! So thanks to Arbor I am getting emails about what is happening in every single school year and adverts about private clubs I have no interest in. Schools need to stop using this app it is not fit for purpose and I would like to know how the decision to use this app was taken.

Really not as straight forward as people made out! SIMS was so much better and clearer. Arbor is just a mess and I’m really not liking it at the moment! Yes, I am still get used to it but I think my love will always be with SIMS.

SHOCKING! Absolutely appalling probably the most hopeless app we ever used, too much hassle for booking clubs let alone to cancel one without contacting the school! How is this app still being used around school is amaze me and to say on their web ‘the most popular school management software’ you are having a laugh! Nothing was wrong with the previous app so why change something that’s not broken??