Move students up to start the next academic year early

This article guides how schools can move students up to the next academic year's classes early, specifically in June or July. It emphasises that the New School Year Setup should not be used for early promotions and outlines the steps for ending current enrollments, setting up new classes, and enrolling students into these classes. The article also highlights the importance of preparing for the official start of the new academic year in September.

At your school, students might start the next year early. They may move into next year's subjects, lessons and timetable in June or July of the current academic year for a few weeks before the summer holidays.

Can we use the New School Year Setup?

You should not use the New School Year Setup process to promote students early (you may have called this your End of Year procedures in SIMS). You should not end your current academic year and start the new year early.

Our New School Year Setup guides should only be used when your academic year will be starting after the 1st of August. This is because the DfE treats the academic year as starting on 1st August, and setting up earlier than this would impact on your census returns.

We usually advise schools set up their academic years to start on 1st September and end on 31st August - you can fill in extra days as holiday or inset days.

Can we move students into new registration form groups and year groups?

The steps below will show you how to move students up to the classes they'll be in, which will show on their timetables.

We recommend only updating the students' timetables and lessons, not moving students into different year groups or registration form groups. This is because during step 3 of the New School Year Setup process, you'd need to promote your registration forms for the end of this year into the same registration form for next year, which can be difficult to manage.

How do we move students up early?

Step 1 - End the enrolments into their current classes

End the students' enrolment into their current registers the day before they should start their new timetable. We recommend using the Students > Enrolment > Courses > Bulk Enrolment page - follow the instructions in our Changing enrolments into registers section in this article: Using our bulk enrolment page

Step 2 - Set up the classes they will be moving into

You might wish to name all your new top-level course subjects differently to the old ones so they will create a completely new course structure in Arbor.

If you don't use TimeTabler or Edval, you can see how to manually create your new courses here: Courses and classes

If you use Edval, you'll need to set up your new courses in Arbor first, then import them into Edval -you can see how to manually create your new courses here: Courses and classes

If you use TimeTabler, you can name all your new top-level course subjects in TimeTabler differently to the old ones.

1. 1. End your existing timetable slots by adding an end date following your mid-year import instructions: TimeTabler or Edval
   2. Import a new timetable that starts on the next day with the new classes you'll be running: TimeTabler or Edval

Step 3 - Add their enrolments into their new classes 

You can use any of our enrolment options to add students into their new classes, but the Bulk Enrolment page is often the easiest to manage. This means the new classes will show in their timetables, and the students will show in the right registers.

If you'll be using the bulk enrolment spreadsheet, make sure your classes have the current year groups assigned. So for Year 7 students moving to a Year 8 timetable, their new classes should still have the Year Group set as Year 7 - you can see how to set this in bulk here.

If you were using teaching groups and the student will still be grouped together in the same way, you can set up an automatic enrolment into your new courses to speed up the enrolment process - see step 3 here: Adding an automatic enrolment for the courses