For many schools, work doesn't stop at the end of the academic year. Some prepare to run holiday clubs and want to have new starters available in SchoolsBuddy, before they are admitted in their MIS/LMS. Some schools want to hide grade, class or house changes until they are ready to release them to the whole community. Others want their leavers to still have access to holiday activities.
There are a few ways SchoolsBuddy can help with your rollover procedures. Firstly, we recommend a good tidy up from the year before; see our webinar about Rolling Over Your School Year Data here. This contains information about archiving containers and groups, removing staff members who have left and keeping your accounts up to date. You will still be able to use old containers and groups to clone or copy for next term, and still see historical data about them in reports. It will make navigation in the Reception > Groups menu easier so that you can quickly locate your current groups.
For Wonde schools, see: Adding Pre-Admission Students to SchoolsBuddy via Wonde
Manually adding Pre-admissions students to SchoolsBuddy
We can manually import Pre-Admissions students to SchoolsBuddy using a CSV UTF-8 import template (see attachment). Then we can import everything to SchoolsBuddy so that you can send their SchoolsBuddy activation emails.
As it is a manual process we do this as a one-time import, so please let us know when is the best time to do it (when you have as many students as possible in Pre-Admissions).
Step 1: SchoolsBuddy provide a data import template for the new starters. You must complete this template using the SIS IDs that the students will have when they are admitted.
Step 2: Return the data import to SchoolsBuddy. We will review the data and import into SchoolsBuddy. We will confirm that the information has been imported and you are ready to send Activation emails.
Before returning the import sheet to SchoolsBuddy:
- Please check that all the names are on the sheet.
- Please do not change the column names or remove/alter data supplied from the import template.
- Please add in the parent/guardians' information next to the student; There is space for two contacts; 'Parent 1'(Red) and 'Parent 2' (Yellow).
- If they do not have an email address or telephone number please leave the cell blank.
Please note: If the child already has a sibling in the school the parents may already have active SchoolsBuddy accounts. They will immediately be able to login and see activities for both pupils and will not need a second activation email.
Changing Grades / Years and Subjects / Classes
Depending on the MIS/LMS in your school, we can either stop all updates, or stop some updates, such as grades / years, subjects, and classes or houses.
For iSAMS, we can also prevent leavers being removed on request in case you would like them to remain active on SchoolsBuddy for a while.
Please contact us before your rollover date to discuss the best option for you.
If we are not receiving data from your MIS/LMS and your school uses the Manual CSV import method you can download an export of the student and parent data we hold from Reception > Reports. You can make updates and return this to us to be reimported.
- You must use the same IDs that are downloaded in the export - this contains our SchoolsBuddy unique ID that we will use to make updates as well as your MIS ID.
- Please take care not to create additional groups by using different spellings or extra spaces; e.g. "Year 2" and "Year 2"
- All leavers / alumni details must remain in the sheet, but mark a '1' in the end column (Is Deleted). Their information will be kept for historical records.
- All the details apart from IDs are editable.
- Please use a separate template to import new starters (see sample attached with minimum required fields)