Import pending mentors
Import pending mentors
Pending mentors is the staff equivalent of pre-admission. Just as pre-admission pulls in accepted students before they enrol, this pulls in members of staff before they officially start — so you can set them up, add them to groups and hand over their sign-in before day one.
It is a per-school setting and is off by default.
Seeing who is coming
Open Data → Incoming learners and mentors → Mentors in the sidebar to see, live from your MIS, exactly which incoming staff currently qualify. The page appears once this setting is switched on.
What it does
- Off (default): the sync imports a member of staff only once your MIS lists them as a current employee — i.e. once they've actually started.
- On: the sync also imports staff who aren't current yet but who are due to start soon — a pending (incoming) mentor. They're brought in ahead of their start date.
Staff who are already current are always imported either way — this setting only changes whether future-starting staff come in early.
What counts as a "pending mentor"
Straight from the sync logic, a member of staff is treated as a pending (incoming) mentor when all of these are true in your MIS:
- they are not a current employee yet, and
- they have an employment start date recorded, and
- that start date is in the future, and
- it's within roughly the next 20 months (about 600 days).
If any of those isn't true they're not brought in by this setting. In particular, a future starter with no start date recorded, or one starting more than ~20 months away, is skipped — as is anyone who has already left. So if a new starter hasn't appeared, the usual cause is a missing or too-distant start date in the MIS.
Preview who currently qualifies
Select Preview on the Pending mentors card to see exactly who qualifies as an incoming mentor right now — real names and their start date, pulled live from your MIS using the same criteria above. It works whether the toggle is on or off, so you can check "if I turn this on, who gets brought in early?" before switching it on. Nothing on the preview changes anything — it's read-only.
What happens to them once imported — read this before turning it on
This is the important part, and it's worth being precise about:
- A pending mentor is imported as a normal, active, fully-provisioned account — the same as any other member of staff. That means, if the relevant services are on for your school, they get a Google/Microsoft account, email, and group memberships straight away, ahead of their start date. They are not held back in a limited or "pending" state.
- Internally they carry a "pending" marker, but that marker isn't used to restrict anything — it doesn't delay provisioning or block sign-in. It only records that they came in as a not-yet-started starter.
So the trade-off is: turning this on gives you future staff, ready to configure in advance — at the cost of live accounts existing for people who haven't started yet (and, occasionally, for someone whose start is later cancelled, until your MIS drops them).
When to use it
- Turn it on if you like to prepare accounts ahead of a start date — add new staff to teaching groups, get their email working, hand over credentials at induction.
- Leave it off if you'd rather an account only exists once someone is actually employed.
Interactions
- It affects staff only — it's completely separate from pre-admission (students) and has no blackout window and no year group setting; it's a simple on/off.
- Like the rest of the MIS import, it respects the End-of-Year provisioning freeze: while sync is frozen for the summer, nothing is fetched — pending mentors included — until you resume.
Where to find it
School settings → Sync, directly below Import pre-admission students.
Related
- Import pre-admission students — the student equivalent
- How syncing works
- A user isn't syncing