Arbor Education Reviews 

One time the whole arbor system went down for our entire school! It says it is number one but it is not. Yes it may be cheaper, but the quality is so rubbish i dont get why people are switching from synergy to arbor

Unfortunately my children’s school has changed to this new platform. It is confusing and so much more difficult to use than the prior platform. It has taken me almost thirty minutes to book breakfast club and honestly I don’t know if I have as it’s not clearly showing on either of my children’s profiles. They don’t send receipt confirmation either via email. Why oh why do they make websites so frustratingly difficult to navigate. I dread having to use this moving forward.

Title: An Absolute Nightmare for Parents: Zero Communication, Constant Tech Failures, and Total Lack of Safety

I am beyond frustrated and regret ever signing up for this app; it has been an absolute disaster from day one. As a parent, you expect a level of reliability and security, but Arbor Learning fails on every single front. The interface is a glitchy mess that crashes constantly, meaning I never receive urgent notifications about my child’s schedule or school updates until hours too late. Even worse, the "support" team is virtually nonexistent—I’ve reached out multiple times regarding billing errors and login issues only to be met with total silence or generic, unhelpful automated replies. It feels like a platform built a decade ago and left to rot; it’s unintuitive, slow, and provides zero peace of mind. The data syncing is so poor that I can’t even trust the attendance or grading information I’m seeing. This app is supposed to make a parent's life easier, but instead, it has caused nothing but stress and technical headaches. Do not waste your time or trust this company with your family’s information. Stay far, far away

If you enjoy the feeling of your soul slowly leaving your body while waiting for a "Dashboard" to load, then Arbor is the app for you. It is less of a school management tool and more of a social experiment to see how much frustration a human can endure before throwing their phone into a moving river.

Navigating this app is like trying to find a specific grain of sand in a desert while blindfolded. Want to check a simple attendance record? That’ll be 14 clicks, three accidental log-outs, and a mandatory "Unexpected Error" message. The layout looks like it was designed in 1998 by someone who had only ever heard a vague description of what an app is supposed to look like.

Arbor’s notification system is a masterpiece of unpredictability. It will remain dead silent when you have a 4:00 PM detention, but will suddenly vibrate your pocket at 3:00 AM with a frantic alert that "The School Lunch Menu has been updated to include peas." It doesn’t communicate; it taunts.

Calling this app "slow" is an insult to slow things. It doesn't "load" content; it reluctantly reveals it one pixel at a time as if it’s being interrogated. By the time you’ve managed to open your child’s report card, they’ve already graduated, married, and started a family of their own.

Arbor is the only app that makes you wish for the "good old days" of carrier pigeons and handwritten notes lost in the bottom of a backpack. It is a vacuum of productivity. If I could give it zero stars, I wouldn’t, because the "Submit" button for the review would probably just crash the whole pc.

Arbor isn't the best to use . It does have positives like allowing you to check your timetable , behaviour, attendance and homework quickly . But it comes with reasons why my review is 2 stars . One reason is because you can't always log in and the system often shuts down or under maintenance. If I have homework on the day before and this happens , I can't do it . Setting up an Arbor account is almost impossible without the schools help . Even clicking Help on Arbor does absolutely nothing except from give you a page about Arbor . The Student App is actually good but the website and Parent App is not good. It expects you to put all your parent details and your child details into it which is kind of creepy. I don't recommend this

Parental perspective: it’s bitty, not at all intuitive and the log in process is extremly behind the time. Mostly us parents need to see messages from school easily but it doesn’t even send a notification, you get an email first to tell you you have message. What’s the point? scholar pack was far better.

Asking for School name but will not let me put my sons school in. Absolutely shocking system.

Appalling App. They have now changed it so if I pay in £300 and set the days my son is in Breakfast or After School it takes the whole £300 in one go then leaves each day as £0. The only time I know I need to top up is when I am emailed a few days after paying the £300 to tell me I now owe more. Not when it's for, not what's been used and when. If my son is off I can't alter the dates, I have to email the school so they can alter the dates. This App needs a complete overhaul, it's terrible. It is by no means user friendly and it takes multiple searches to find the simplest of tasks that the old App could do in a single click. I plan on changing my son to part school meals part packed lunch but not changing while the App is this bad.

Terrible company and app, stops working completely every few weeks and the coding is shit (coming from a sixth former who did better coding than that in year 9) it has actually prevented me from doing work and getting to lessons on time as the school chose this provider as the sole relied on company for everything in the school. The absolute least they could do is make sure the app is working as advertised (which it doesn't) because of the huge amount of money they are siphoning from schools who could use it on better resources. I am switching over to writing things down manually as even that is more convenient for my education than this money-hungry team of thieves.

I very much dislike having to use this app or desktop site to book and pay for my children's extracurricular activities. It is in no way intuitive, and incredibly clunky.

Just the worst app I have ever come across, I can’t even get in.

A unintuitive piece of software that is built clunky from the ground up. Missing necessary features like homework reminders, and even the ability to tick tasks off. Interface is confusing and hard to navigate. Do not recommend.

What a headache, it's so confusing there is so much on there it's not clear, things are not in the right place as to where they should be.

It's far too busy and damn right frustrating to use.

I've unfortunately had to use it for the last 18 months and quite honestly i cannot wait for my son to leave the school and move to the middle school and I'll be so pleased not to use this.

Awful experience. No interest in making it user-friendly, no interest in helping with problems (they say "data protection prevents this"). Forces me to change password every time I use it to book a parents evening. Sometimes, at random, every time you log in, it immediately logs you out ("oops" is visible in one of the fields in the background of the logout screen). Sometimes, at random, won't let me select my child's current school (the last one didn't even use Arbor at the time my child attended!). School office staff tried but couldn't get the system to understand that one child could have two parents 🙄

I like how you can submit your assignments, I like how you can see your timetable, even though it was on every other school website thing, I also like how I can see my good points/merits and bad points/be--avia points(Accent included).

I absolutely HATE that you cannot submit Physical/Other homeworks because it shows up in my overdue bar, even from all the way from last year. And also it is definutely hard to navigate through this mediocre website. it is absolute UNSENSATIONAL.

I would NOT RECOMMEND this webite/app to everyone due to my reasons.

('-_-)

A huge waste of time digging for what you want, GUI is amazingly unintuitive. App login issues, downtimes. Signing up for events is a headache. School also can't use from what witnessed since start of this academic year (massive learning curve, unintuitive for them too) likely trapped in subscription. Hopefully school will drop it and use a better school CCMS next year. There are plenty of other options who have fully completed, tested, apps.

Absolutely garbage, signed in before, now cannot recognise my email and password, yet the school swears by it. It's the perfect example of IT at its worst and it's called progress. Bollocks

Would give Arbor zero stars if I could! NO customer services for parents - everything referred back to the school. There is no way to resolve an issue if the school cannot. I really hope that this system is cheap as chips as it is unusable and rubbish.

This app offers the worst user experience I’ve ever encountered. Its interface is maddeningly confusing and convoluted. For instance, the steps to book a before-and-after-school session are deliberately confusing leaving me anxious and concerned about whether I’ve actually made a booking. It’s almost as if someone’s orchestrating shady deals to keep this piece of rubbish in use. Cronyism.