We have recently automated our Pre-Admissions process for SchoolsBuddy, making it quicker for us to admit new starters to SchoolsBuddy before their admission date so that they can access your holiday clubs or sign up for activities next term.
What do I have to do?
- Permissions: If we admitted Pre-admissions students for you last year, we probably have permission to access these students via Wonde already. You can check the Wonde portal to confirm if SchoolsBuddy has permission to see Pre-Admission students' details. If SchoolsBuddy doesn't yet have permission to access these students please contact the Wonde team (support@wonde.com) who can help you to give us permission.
- Check for old records: Make sure there are no old student records in pre-admissions that you do not want SchoolsBuddy to import. For example, some student records may be historical applications, that were due to join the school but never did.
- Check pre-admission students' parent records: Make sure parents are assigned with the same priority level and parental responsibility flags that you use for your admitted students.
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Ask the SchoolsBuddy team to import: Contact us at help@schoolsbuddy.com and ask us to run the import.
Please note the pre-admission students will not have year/grade levels assigned, they will be defaulted to the year group "Pre-Admissions" (if you would like them to be named differently we can customise the name). -
Check the data in SchoolsBuddy: Go to Reception > Users and review the data that has been imported. You can use our Data checks to make sure the students all have parent contacts.
If the pre-admission students need to sign up for activities, please remember to update their year/grade levels in SchoolsBuddy, otherwise they won't be eligible for the activities. - Send new parents activation emails: If the students have siblings who have been admitted to school already, the parents will already have a SchoolsBuddy account, so the number of parents to activate may be slightly slower than you'd expect.
FAQ
Q: Is it a one-time import?
A: Yes, it is recommended to wait until most of the pre-admission student data is ready before enabling the import function. While we can continue to import new students once the pre-admission data is enabled, it is advised to only import pre-admission students once a year.
This is because once pre-admission students are assigned to their respective year or grade levels (Step 5 above), any new imports will overwrite this information.
Q: What if I am not ready to set parents' priority levels in my MIS but I still want them to be activated in SchoolsBuddy?
A: We can import just the students and you can manually link the parents email address directly in SchoolsBuddy.
Q: What if students have already got Admitted status, but their start date is in the future?
A: SchoolsBuddy will not be able to import these students automatically currently. We will need an import sheet of their details including their Student ID from your system to manually import them to SchoolsBuddy.