The provisioning window and the freeze

Your window is the period each year when sync is active. It has two dates, shown on the End of year page as a timeline:

Window opens — the start of your academic year (typically 1 September).
Window closes — the end of term. From this date, sync is frozen until the new year.

What "frozen" holds {#step-1}

While frozen:

MIS changes are not pulled in and not written to Realsmart. Leavers, class changes and roll-overs happening in your school office over the summer are held, not applied.
Nothing MIS-driven is pushed to Google or Entra. The whole-school Google and Microsoft Entra syncs are held for the frozen period, so live accounts aren't disturbed.
Admin actions you take by hand still work. The freeze is about MIS-driven change; it doesn't lock you out of the admin tools.

The freeze protects your live accounts during the noisiest time of the year, then lifts automatically when you resume.

One exception you can choose to use. "Nothing is pulled in while frozen" holds for everything the freeze exists to protect — but not for people who are only arriving. While frozen you can still create accounts for new members of staff (including September starters) and accepted pre-admission students, on demand, from the Release early accounts card on the End of year page. It is preview-then-confirm, it never runs on its own, and it creates only those people: leavers, class changes, updates to existing accounts and mid-summer in-year admissions all still wait for resume. Released accounts get their role groups only — class, year and subject groups arrive at resume. See Release early accounts during the freeze.

Changing the window dates {#step-2}

You set both dates yourself only when a school has no window configured yet — choose Set up the window on the End of year page and enter the opening and closing dates.

Once a window exists you don't edit those dates by hand: the window rolls forward on its own each year. Use Automatic resume to control when that happens — see Resuming sync for the new year. As you change the resume date, the page updates live to show the effect, including a plain-English summary of what will happen.

End of year provisioning window timeline with editable first and final provision dates

Because these dates control whether MIS changes reach live accounts, changes are server-side and admin-only, and each edit is logged.

The closing date also sets your academic year {#step-3}

The window's closing date does one more job: it's what tells sync which academic year your data belongs to. Usernames that include a year number — the "09" in jbrown09 — take that number from it.

The year your closing date falls in is your current academic year, and it moves on by a year when your window rolls forward at resume. So the year in new usernames changes over at the moment your new-year data actually starts arriving, rather than on a fixed calendar date:

Resume in June or July (MIS rolled early) and September's intake is provisioned straight away as next year's students.
Still frozen past 1 August and new accounts keep this year's number until you resume — correct, because while frozen nothing new has been pulled in and your year groups are still this year's.
Inside a normal window, nothing looks any different.

The one thing that is pulled in while frozen is a release you ask for yourself: new staff and accepted pre-admission students, through Release early accounts (above). An applicant released that way is given the school year they are joining in, not the one that is ending — and like every username, theirs is permanent once created. See Release early accounts during the freeze.