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Academic year changeover

The data held in GO 4 Schools for your school is held in 'blocks', with one block for each academic year. Data held for the current academic year is editable whereas, with a few exceptions which are detailed below, data held for past academic years is frozen. We manage the transition to a new academic year for you by running a year-end process.

A little advice prior to the academic year changeover

Please note that many of the 'settings' in GO 4 Schools (including grade names and settings, homework tasks, behaviour classifications, comment banks and report attributes) are carried forward from one academic year to the next as part of the year-end process. With this in mind, please note that any setting changes made prior to the academic year changeover will be saved for the current academic year as well as the next academic year.

When can we start working with data for the new academic year?

For all MIS's except for iSAMS/Ed:gen, we automatically start receiving data for the new academic year when the students' year groups are promoted, AND they are timetabled for classes. There is no way (at present) of extracting data ahead of this.

If your school uses iSAMS/Ed:gen, please let us know once your students are promoted into their new year group and they are timetabled for their new classes and we will manually move your school to the new academic year.

Are you doing a real year end or a timetable change in your MIS?

The academic year changeover in GO 4 Schools is triggered only when your students move into their new year group (Year 7 students become Year 8 students, etc.) If you are making timetable changes where your students move groups/subjects, but remain in the same year group, a GO 4 Schools academic year changeover will NOT take place, but we would recommend that you lock any of your current subjects that are changing, to retain visibility of data already entered for your students. We would advise that you find out exactly when the real year end takes place in your MIS, as this may not be at the same time as you make large timetable changes.

Timetable changes

The timetable is changed but students stay in the same year group.

This typically happens when year 11 students leave (at Easter, or later). When year 11 students leave, teachers have free lessons that are often reallocated to other year groups, e.g. to start teaching GCSEs to year 9 students. By default, year 11 subjects will disappear from GO 4 Schools when they disappear from the Year 11 timetable in your MIS. This is often not desirable as it means the data for Year 11 is no longer visible! The facility to “lock” subjects in GO 4 Schools can be used to circumvent this. When locked, the students, teachers and groups belonging to the locked subjects in GO 4 Schools do not change even if they change/disappear in your MIS. Please note that only school managers can lock and unlock subjects. They can do this via the “Feed Rules” page, this process is covered in the School Manager’s Guide. Schools may want to use feed rules to create additional subjects too. For example, they may want to lock “Year 9 Maths” and then add a subject such as “Year 9 Maths GCSE” to record the start of the Maths GCSE course. This can happily sit alongside the KS3 subject “Year 9 Maths” that will contain the assessments from the KS3 Maths course. Please read the article for more information on locking subjects.

Real year end

Students moving to new year group (year 7 students to year 8 etc.)

Most MIS's (except iSAMS/Ed:gen) We can't access your new academic year data until the new year is live in your MIS. When we start receiving the new timetable we run a year-end process for the school, so GO 4 Schools is ready to receive the new list of subjects. If we receive your feed in the early hours of the morning (ideally 01:15 - once the year end process has happened in your MIS) on the first day back, GO 4 Schools will show your new academic year information on that day. If we receive the feed before midnight, then we will not reflect the new year information in GO 4 Schools until the next feed is processed overnight.

Once done, the year end CAN NOT BE REVERSED. The first feed following the year end will result in a new set of subjects being created in GO 4 Schools. Markbooks created in previous years can be copied across (e.g. by curriculum leaders) into the new subjects and can carry across target grades, the list of assessments and even the individual marks for students.

Group Membership - Setting students' group membership in your MIS to the start of term rather than to the first day back for students, will mean that students appear in groups in GO 4 Schools on the training days. You may even want to have your academic year start on or before 1st September and have students group membership start from that date also. Then as soon as the first feed from your MIS is processed in GO 4 Schools students will appear in their new groups. The days before the start of term can be marked as holiday and the professional days as training days in the same way as they are at other times in the year.

iSAMS/Ed:gen - Please let us know once your students are promoted to their new year groups and their timetable for the new year is complete, and we can manually trigger the year end process.

 

Will we see the new year’s data immediately?

When we receive the new year’s data, we run a year-end process for you that freezes last year’s data, and then we import the first data for the new year. The year end process in GO 4 Schools is automatic and should happen upon receipt of the first set of the new year's feeds. However, if this is not the case please contact the support team as soon as possible.

 

What to do at the start of a new academic year

What should the School Manager do at the beginning of the new year?

  • Check the allocation of subjects to departments using the departments page. We will maintain the link between departments and subjects where we can but this may not be possible in all cases.
  • Set up the school calendar. The academic year dates will be populated with approximate dates based on previous years' data, but it is the responsibility of the school to check that these dates are correct and amend them if required.
  • Set target grades for the subjects that students are studying this year.
  • Review and if required, set the mapping from student accounts onto UPNs using the Student access control page. This is most likely to be required for the new year 7 students. (Note that you only need to do this if/when you want students to log on to GO 4 Schools.)
  • Upload KS2 actual grades for the new students.
  • If you used feed rules last year, you will need to re-create them for the new academic year. Unfortunately it isn’t possible for us to copy the rules automatically from the previous year as they may not be reliably relevant to the new year’s timetable, subjects or students. There is a link at the bottom of the feed rules page which will allow you to download the current rules to a CSV file. This should help you to re-create any feed rules you need to. This is particularly significant for primary schools, as subjects are not usually timetabled in the MIS, all are created using feed rules. On the first day of term, only registration groups will be in GO 4 Schools. Once the feed rules are created to copy the registration groups into subjects, the subjects will appear in GO 4 Schools when the next feed runs overnight.

What else should the School Manager consider at the beginning of the new year?

  • You may wish to consider uploading baseline grades for new students if required.
  • If you link this year's subjects to those in your last academic year in GO 4 Schools, you can create chronological strands of learning. This will allow the flight path chart to display students' progress over time, and the linking will also find previous actual and report grades for the linked subject and present them in the markbook popout for the subject. This linking can be done from the subject settings link at the top of the subject page.
  • Review the student access page where year group visibility settings as well as student access are managed.
  • Review the parental access page, as parents will not have access to the new academic year until you enable it here.

Attendance - For schools using the GO 4 Schools attendance module to record session and lesson attendance

Depending on your school processes, your new intake students may not be enrolled in your MIS until they actually enter the school on the first day of term. If that's the case, your feed will have processed without your new intake students included and they will not be present in GO 4 Schools yet. You could consider using paper registers for the first day for your new intake, then once the students appear in GO 4 Schools the following day the attendance officer can retrospectively complete the registers.

 

Alternatively, SIMs schools can, on the feed settings page, select a checkbox to include pre-admission students whose start date has been reached.

 

If you end up with students in GO 4 Schools who are subsequently deleted from your MIS then please raise a ticket to advise us that you have deleted a student. (We only need to know students that you have deleted, not those who have gone off-roll or were never admitted.)

 

What happens to the markbooks we created last year?

The markbooks that you created last year still exist, but are not automatically copied into the new year. We don’t copy the markbooks automatically because we can’t do it with 100% reliability; subject names change from year to year, as do the qualifications being taught etc.

 

What we have done is make it really easy for curriculum leaders to copy markbooks manually from last year into this year when it is appropriate to do so.

 

Curriculum leaders may want to create new markbooks from scratch and they can do that, but copying is helpful if:

 

  • They want to re-use a markbook that they created for Year 10 Maths last year for the new year’s Year 10 Maths subject.
  • They want to copy the Year 10 English markbook that they created last year and use it as the basis of the Year 11 English markbook for this year. This will allow two years worth of assessment information to be used when calculating the current working grade. This is particularly useful for vocational qualifications.

Please note that when copying AS markbooks into A2 subjects, because AS grades are A-E whilst A2 grades are A*-E it is not possible to copy the markbook with marks and grades. In this instance you will need to copy just the structure of the markbook and then download marks/grades from last year and upload to the new markbook.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I access previous data?

If your school has more than one year's worth of data in GO 4 Schools you will see an Academic years menu. This will give you access to previous year's data.

 

What is editable in previous years?

School Managers can change grades for students in previous academic years, through the Curriculum menu and accessing the appropriate grade type. School managers can also make changes to students' grades in markbooks, and also to the grade settings. Staff can edit report comments and attributes for reports in the previous academic year, if the report is In progress and the option has been enabled by a school manager.

 

Can I still download information from the previous academic year?

Yes, all of the download links are still available to allow you to produce CSV files of your old data.

 

Can parents still access GO 4 Schools during the summer break?

Parents will be able to log in as usual during the holidays. However, once the new timetable is uploaded to the schools MIS and the year end procedure is run on GO 4 Schools, parents of students who are not on roll this academic year will no longer have access. It is important to note that parents of the year 11/13 leavers will not be able to access GO 4 Schools after the date which has been entered as the student's leaving date. It may be beneficial to advise parents of this so that they can download and print any reports they would like to keep.