Import pre-admission students

Pre-admission (pre-enrolment) students are future joiners held in your MIS who haven't been formally placed yet. Switching pre-admission on lets you see these applicants in Realsmart and choose the ones you want set up ahead of time.

These settings live on the Sync tab of School settings. Choosing who to import is done on the Incoming learners page.

Before you start

• Pre-admission is set up per school. In MAT overview the Incoming learners page asks you to switch to a school first.
• You need to be an admin with sync settings permission to switch pre-admission on and set the year group.
• To see the Incoming learners page you need the View MIS (Wonde) data permission. To tick pupils and create their accounts you also need Manage users & groups. Release early accounts (during an end-of-year freeze) needs Run syncs & provisioning.
• Your school must be connected to its MIS through Wonde. Without that the page says "This school is not connected to Wonde."

Nothing is imported until you choose it

Pre-admission pupils are never added on their own. You pick the ones who are genuinely joining, set the year group they'll be in, and the next sync creates their accounts.

This changed in July 2026. Until then, an applicant your MIS had marked accepted was imported overnight without anyone doing anything. That no longer happens — including for accepted applicants. If you were relying on it, your future joiners will sit and wait until somebody chooses them, so it's worth checking the list at the start of each intake. Once pre-admission is on, the notification bell reminds you: "N future pupils are waiting to be set up" (counted once a night).

Why the change: pre-admission lists are rarely a single tidy intake. They mix genuine joiners with applicants who'll go elsewhere, and they often span several year groups at once — a few into Year 7, a couple into Year 9, a mid-year arrival in Year 4. Importing all of them and sorting it out afterwards created accounts for children who never arrived.

Your MIS's application status (Applied, Offered, Accepted, …) is still shown next to every pupil, so you can use it to decide. It just no longer decides for you. If your MIS marks somebody withdrawn, rejected, declined, cancelled or refused, that overrides your choice and they are not imported.

Pupils are grouped by the year they were born

A UK school year runs from 1 September to 31 August, so every child belongs to a year group by date of birth. The list groups your applicants that way — one group per birth year, youngest first, each headed like Born 1 Sep 2015 – 31 Aug 2016 — and you set the year group for a whole group at once.

Where we can, the year group is filled in for you. We look at your own current pupils born in that same year and copy whatever year group they're in — so if your Year 6 is recorded as year-06, that's exactly what your new pupils get, not a near-miss that would put them in a separate group in Google or Microsoft. The group header tells you where a suggestion came from ("Matches your current year-06 (24 of 25 pupils born in this year)"), and warns you when your existing pupils don't agree with each other ("Your pupils born in this year don't agree on a year group — the commonest is … Please check it.").

Two groups won't get a suggestion, and both say so:

• A brand-new intake. If you have no current pupils born in that year, there's nothing to copy — normal for your youngest joiners. Choose the year group they'll be in.
• Pupils with no date of birth in your MIS. They're grouped together under No date of birth in your MIS, still fully selectable, and just need a year group choosing.

You can also override a single pupil inside a group, for the occasional joiner who isn't with the rest of their age group — use the Year group drop-down on that pupil's row (it starts on Same as group).

See the username before you commit to it

The list shows the username each pupil will get (the Username they'll get column), worked out with your school's own username policy — and it updates as soon as you change a year group, for a whole group or one pupil. That matters because the year forms part of the username and a username can't be changed afterwards except by renaming the user, one at a time.

If somebody at your school already has that username, a warning triangle appears: the sync adds a number to the end. We can't say which number, because it depends on who else is created in the same run — so treat the column as what to expect, not a promise.

If your school has no username policy we can read, a note above the list says the preview isn't available — you can still choose who to import.

When pre-admission sync runs (the annual pause)

Pre-admission is picked up by the normal MIS import, which runs on weekdays. It runs most of the year but pauses for a few weeks each autumn — roughly 28 August to 30 September — resuming on 1 October. This pause is deliberate: at the very start of term your MIS can briefly list the same pupil as both a pre-admission student and a live student, which would create duplicate accounts. Sitting out that overlap avoids the duplication.

While paused, the School settings card and the Incoming learners page show a Pre-admission sync is paused right now notice with the dates, and the Logs record an intentional skip — so a paused sync is clearly working as designed, not broken. Only pre-admission sync pauses; your live students sync as normal throughout. Pupils already set up are not suspended while the pause is on, and they are picked up again when it lifts.

Why the year group matters, and which year to give

Pre-admission students haven't started with you yet, so the MIS gives them no year group. The sync uses the year group you set to assign their cohort year, and username policies need a year to generate usernames. Because of this it is required when pre-admission is enabled — and the sync will not import pre-admission students at all while it's unset (it logs the misconfiguration instead, rather than guessing a year).

The year to enter is the one these pupils are in now, not the one they are joining. They are still at their current school and will move up in September, so a school taking its intake into Year 7 enters 6. Entering the joining year instead makes their usernames a year out, and usernames can't be changed afterwards.

The year group they are in now setting in School settings is now only a fallback, used for any group you don't set yourself. The per-group choice on the import screen is the main control.

Pupils held because your MIS hasn't said when they start

Part of a username is the year a pupil joins, and a username can't be changed once it exists. Where your MIS gives no admission date, we normally hold the pupil rather than guess.

You can override that. When every held pupil is held for that one reason, the Release early accounts card offers a tick box — Also create the N pupil(s) with no admission date — to create them anyway, on the year group you chose, which is shown on the list along with the username each pupil will get.

The tick is remembered for the current freeze and clears itself when your provisioning window rolls forward, so a decision made one summer can't quietly still be in force the next. After ticking it, rebuild the preview — the list is worked out by the sync, so it won't show the change until it's rebuilt.

Without it these pupils aren't lost. The normal sync creates them when the freeze lifts; the tick creates them now.

What you can't override is a pupil whose admission date disagrees with the year their username would carry. That usually means the year group is one out, and it's the mistake worth catching — so those pupils stay held until it's fixed. See Release early accounts during the freeze.

Reception and your youngest joiners

Reception joiners work, as long as your school records that year group under a name. If your current Reception pupils are stored as Reception, Year-R or similar, that value appears in the list like any other and you can pick it.

The one thing that doesn't work is a year group recorded as a bare zero. The sync has nowhere to store a cohort year of 0, so the pupil would be created without a username and could never sign in or reach Google or Microsoft. If that's how your Reception year is recorded, add those children from Users → Add user instead — and let us know, because it's worth correcting at the source.

Preview who currently qualifies

The preview shows what your MIS is holding right now — real names, pulled live from Wonde. Open it in either place:

• Data → Incoming learners and mentors → Learners in the sidebar — the preview box is always on this page, above the list you tick from; or
• Preview on the Pre-admission card in School settings → Sync.

It has two lists. currently qualify (application accepted) shows applicants your MIS has marked accepted — a label from your MIS, not a promise they'll be imported, because nobody is imported until you choose them. not accepted yet shows everyone else, with a count per application status (for example 3× applied). It works whether the toggle is on or off, so you can check "if I turn this on, who is there?" before committing, and it reports plainly if it can't run yet (for example, no year group set). Recompute reads your MIS again. The preview itself changes nothing — it's read-only.

Steps