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How group, cohort and house names are formatted from the MIS

2 steps 4 min Updated 4 November 2026

When the sync imports your school from the MIS (via Wonde), it turns each class, group, cohort, house, year group and registration group into a safe group name — one that Google Workspace and Active Directory will accept as an identifier. It does this in two steps: it sorts the group by type (adding a short prefix where it helps), then it cleans the text into a safe form.

Nothing here changes what a group is or who's in it — only how its name is written.

Step 1: Sorting by type

The MIS exposes several kinds of group. Realsmart routes them so they don't collide:

  • Year group — a year your MIS gives as a plain number (7, 11) becomes year-7, year-11, and so on. (The pupil's own year is also stored as just the number.) A year your MIS gives as words — such as Year 7 or Reception — isn't renamed this way; it is just cleaned by the rules in Step 2, so Year 7 becomes Year-7 (capital letters are kept).
  • House — a house becomes a group named house- followed by the house name, for example house-Oak, for pupils and for staff. (For staff this needs Fetch groups from MIS on in School sync settings.)
  • Registration group — kept as the pupil's registration group.
  • Teaching classes — brought in under their class name. A class whose name is the same as the pupil's house, year or registration group is dropped, so you don't get a duplicate.
  • Staff type — staff are also tagged teaching-staff or non-teaching-staff (when that option is switched on for your school).

Subject groups (a teacher's subjects, as their own groups) are not part of this automatic formatting — they're a separate opt-in feature, named subject- followed by the subject in lower case. See Provision subjects as groups. Likewise the "Teachers of" groups are always named tof_ followed by the pupil's username — see Teachers of groups.

If your school has a group prefix set, it is added to the front of every group name the MIS import creates — and to the core role groups (learners, mentors, governors, and so on) — unless the name already starts with it. A prefix lets a trust keep every school's groups distinct. It is a school-wide setting that Realsmart support configures; it isn't on a settings page you can edit.

Step 2: Cleaning the text (making it a safe name)

Each name is then normalised into a Google/AD-safe identifier. In order:

  1. Accented letters become plain ASCII — é → e, ü → u, ñ → n, ø → o, ß → Ss, and so on.
  2. Leading and trailing spaces are trimmed.
  3. Slashes / become hyphens -.
  4. Full stops . become hyphens -.
  5. A spaced hyphen - becomes a single hyphen -.
  6. Any remaining spaces become hyphens -.
  7. Anything that isn't a letter, number, hyphen - or underscore _ is removed — so apostrophes, brackets, &, #, commas and the like are stripped out. (Full stops have already become hyphens by this point, so none survive.)
  8. The name is capped at 64 characters.

Capital letters are kept: the cleaning never changes case.

Worked examples

Name in the MIS Becomes
7 (year group in the MIS) year-7
Year 7 (year group in the MIS) Year-7
Oak (house) house-Oak
7 History/RE (class) 7-History-RE
St David's House St-Davids-House
Café Club Cafe-Club
Set 1 - Maths Set-1-Maths

Group types (used by Entra's group-type sync)

Alongside the name, every group is also classified into one of seven types — this is separate from name formatting (above) and is what Microsoft Entra's group-type sync selector uses to decide which kinds of group to push:

Type What falls into it
Teachers of The automatic "teachers of" groups (when that feature is on).
Houses House groups (learner and staff).
Registration groups Registration groups.
Role groups The core role groups — learners, mentors, teaching staff, non-teaching staff, governors, observers and Ofsted.
Year groups Year groups (year-7, and so on).
Subjects Subject groups, when Provision subjects as groups is on.
Groups Everything else — teaching classes and any group you create yourself.

A group's type is set automatically as it's created or updated by a sync, so this isn't something you configure directly — it's what makes the group-type checkboxes on the Entra settings page work. A group you create manually is always a Groups type.

Why this matters

Google and Active Directory won't accept spaces or most punctuation in a group's address, so this cleaning is what lets your MIS groups sync at all. It's also deterministic — the same MIS name always produces the same safe name — so groups match up reliably on every sync instead of duplicating.

Troubleshooting

  • "My group name lost its punctuation / apostrophe." That's expected — apostrophes, brackets and other symbols are stripped so the name is valid in Google/AD. The group and its members are unaffected.
  • "Two MIS classes ended up as one group." If two names clean to the same safe name (for example they differ only by punctuation), they resolve to the same group. Rename one in the MIS if they should stay separate.
  • "A long class name looks cut off." Names are capped at 64 characters. Shorten it in the MIS if the tail matters.
  • "A class didn't appear as its own group." A class whose name matches the pupil's house, year or registration group is deliberately dropped as a duplicate.
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