Setting up a new academic year in the MIS is required to promote all year groups and to prepare changes to courses, groups and group memberships across the curriculum and pastoral structures. The set-up steps also support the end of academic year process in the GO 4 Schools MIS which occurs on the date set for ‘rollover’.
The Academic year set up page is accessible via School > Academic Year set up and will take you through a checklist and track progress. Some areas must be completed in the order viewed on the pages and can be set to ‘complete’ by the user completing each area. Details for each section are accessed by selecting the header title.
As users progress through each section notes can be added as reminders of any items to review prior to completion.
Permissions
Users setting up the Academic year will require specific permissions to manage data in future years as well as the permissions required to work in the data area they are preparing i.e. the curriculum. Permissions specifically required are under the school management permissions set:
- Can manage future academic years.
- Can manage the school academic year set up.
Set up management
The management page will display a progress strip as each section is marked complete for the following stages:
1. Set up the Rollover date
Add the date you wish to promote students into the new academic year - this is moving Y7 students into Y8 etc. If any of the mandatory tasks in the Academic Year set up list are incomplete rollover will not occur, however the MIS will check each following day and automatically rollover once all set to complete.
The progress indicator will show any tasks that are incomplete.
2. Academic year set up
This section must be completed to access all other areas on the page. Select the Copy previous year set up link.
A modal will appear showing the information that will be copied over from the current academic year:
These can be edited once the new academic year has rolled over. Saving will automatically update the completion of this section.
3. Student Houses - only required if a house system in place.
Click on the title to expand the section to view Houses and student counts.
Use the ‘Copy houses’ to copy over existing student house memberships. Pre-admission students can be added by using the ‘Go to House management’ link where students can be managed see article. House Management
When copying a modal will display options for each house and if memberships are to be copied. This allows Houses to be removed. Copied houses will show with student counts in the new AY of the right.
Mark as completed once all students are added.
4. Courses
All courses are set up as 1 year course from migration. Schools have 3 possible approaches depending on how they want to set up the curriculum.
- Manually set up a new course See article for Curriculum Management – Courses
- Extend existing courses to multiple year courses i.e. Y7 to Y9 for KS3. Use existing course management pages, this will also require departments to be set up in future academic years. Manage Departments (MIS)
- Manage from Academic Year set up page to select courses to move into the new academic year.
- Select from list courses to copy over AY i.e. Y7 to Y7.
- Select courses to copy markbooks and assessment data.
Before setting up courses set up departments for future academic years using the link under Courses and departments.
i. Copy courses from Academic Year rollover management page.
From the Courses section of the Academic Year set up page select the Copy courses link.
The modal will display all courses in the current academic year with the year group, start and end dates that do not exist in the new academic year or those that have already been set up.
Select courses to copy from the list and save.
The courses are now set up and ready for future academic years and ready for groups and students to be populated.
Adding groups and group memberships
See article Managing group memberships, we suggest the effective dates are set for group following the rollover date.
Using either the TT upload or the CSV group upload will create new groups, so these do not need to be added in the course management page. The CSV upload for groups will resolve 90% of cases to set up the new groups in the academic year.
Curriculum > Groups > Group upload - We suggest using the group download option for each year group on the group download page, the year group in the group code can be easily updated across all memberships and then re-uploaded with an effective date in the new academic year.
The file validation will display the updated subjects and counts of student memberships:
Select Upload to complete the process.
Go to Curriculum > Groups and change the page to Academic Year 2026 and all the groups can be viewed and further editing can be done in the MIS as required.
5. Subject markbooks
Courses must be completed and set up in the new academic year for markbooks to be copied to the course. Only courses set up for the new academic year will display on this page.
Note: Markbooks spanning 1+ academic year
Before any markbooks are copied, if you intend to extend courses over 2-3 academic years and wish to include all assessments across the life of the course you will need to add in all the marksheets and assessments required throughout the course.
For example: KS4 Maths course is set up to span 2 years ( Y10 + Y11), the current Y10 markbook has only assessments covered during this year. Add additional marksheets using the Copy marksheet tool to the Y10 markbook ( you will need to change any copied sheets to '0' weighted so they are not contributing to the current Y10 grade). The markbook is now ready to be copied into Y11 as per the instructions below.
Select Copy markbooks to access the Markbook set up page for the next academic year.
Each year group tab will show a list of courses/subjects, the copied markbook will show if it has been copied across with options to copy the markbook template, copy grades and copy assessments/marks.
The Auto-match function will copy any markbook into a subject of the same name from the current academic year to the new academic year. As you see below all the markbooks have matched to those in the current academic year.
When copying is in progress this will display - Markbooks are copied from Y7 2025 to Y7 2026:
The ‘edit’ icon allows a specific markbook to be selected and copied to the subject. This option would be used to copy the markbook from Y7 2025 to Y8 2026 to include marks and/or grades for tracking across KS3 for example.
In the example below the Art and Computing markbooks from Y7 is being selected to copy to the same subject in Y8 to include the markbook set up and all assessments.
This will now show in the markbook list.
The markbook editor can be accessed by clicking on the subject name, so copied markbooks can be edited as part of the new year set up as required. The page will show if a markbook has been copied.
6. Set leaving dates
Clicking on this section will show a quick link to the admissions page and list the number of leavers in the current academic year.
To set leaving dates see the article Leavers and Bulk off roll.
7. Timetable import
New Timetables are currently imported by our support team.
8. Pre-admission
Links to Admissions, Group admissions and the CTF import page can be found listed here with counts of all students that are pre-admission for each year group. We suggest admission dates are set following the rollover.
For more information see articles – Admissions and CTF/ATF Import Admissions and CTF / ATF Import
Important note: students need to be added to registration groups for the new academic year for them to be admitted, this can be done alongside adding to group memberships as part of the Pastoral course and group managment