Teachers of groups

A Teachers of group is one group per pupil that holds every member of staff who teaches that pupil. Each one is named tof_ followed by the pupil's username — for example tof_jack.walker.

They exist so you can reach a pupil's whole teaching team in one go: message them, share a document with them, or make them the audience for something in Google or Microsoft.

It is a per-school setting and is off by default. You need to be an admin with sync settings permission to change it.

Turning it on or off

1. Go to School settings → Sync.
2. Find the Teachers of groups card (or use the Teachers of groups jump chip at the top, which shows On or Off).
3. Tick or untick Create Teachers of groups. When it is ticked, a note reminds you that this creates one group per pupil — a school of 1,000 pupils gets about 1,000 groups.
4. Select Save Teachers of groups. You'll see "Teachers of groups are on. The next sync builds them." or "Teachers of groups are off. Existing groups are left as they are."

The next sync run builds or refreshes the groups — they're built as part of the weekday MIS import. Nothing is created the moment you save.

Preview before you switch it on

Select Preview on the card. It works out — from your current groups and staff, using exactly the rules the sync uses — four numbers: Groups it would keep (one per pupil who has at least one teacher), Typical size (the median number of teachers per pupil, with the largest), Groups now (how many Teachers of groups the school already has) and Source groups (the active groups the teachers are read from). Below them it lists the largest groups with the actual staff who would be in them, and flags groups that no longer match a pupil, groups with no members at all, and groups that are expected but don't exist yet (the next sync creates them).

The preview works whether the setting is on or off, so it answers "if I turn this on, what do I get?" It changes nothing; it only reads. Recheck works it out again.

Seeing every Teachers of group

Select See all on the card. That opens Groups filtered to the Teachers of group type.

You can reach the same list from Groups at any time: open Filters, and under Group type tick Teachers of. The Type column in the list shows the type of every group.

How the membership is worked out

For each pupil with an account that is active or protected, the sync:

1. takes the groups that pupil is in, that are Active (a group marked Protected isn't used);
2. ignores any group whose name contains year, learner or mentor — these are year and role groups, which would otherwise pull the whole staff body into every pupil's group;
3. collects every member of staff in the groups that are left;
4. replaces the Teachers of group's membership with those staff.

So the membership is rebuilt on each run — it is never added to incrementally. A teacher who stops teaching a pupil drops out on the next run.

The groups are created as Protected, so the end-of-term tidy-up leaves them alone. Each run also sets Who can post message on them to All in domain, so anyone in your Google domain can email a pupil's teaching team; a different value set by hand is put back on the next run. They never get a Google Classroom.

Do they sync to Google or Microsoft?

That is a separate decision. Creating the groups in Realsmart is this setting; whether they then reach your cloud platform is the group types selector on that platform's own settings page — see Google groups and Microsoft Entra. Untick Teachers of there and the groups still exist in Realsmart but are not created in the cloud.

Why a Teachers of group can look wrong

Two causes account for nearly every report.

The pupil has left, been deleted, or been renamed. Historically the sync only ever created and refreshed these groups — it never removed one. So when a pupil left, their tof_ group stayed behind, frozen with the teachers it had on its last run, and carried on syncing to your cloud platform. A rename produced the fault twice over: the pupil's new username got a new group, and the group under their old username was stranded.

The sync now clears these up on its own, in two steps spread over separate runs:

1. it empties a group whose pupil is gone — so on the next sync to Google or Microsoft, those staff are removed from it there;
2. on a later run, once the group is empty, it retires the group (status Deleted), so it stops syncing altogether.

There is a limit on how many it handles per school per run, so a large backlog clears over a few nights rather than all at once. The Preview counts how many are still outstanding.

The group itself is not deleted from Google or Microsoft — it is left empty. Deleting a cloud group is never automatic; it stays something an admin confirms.

A group name that does not look like a class. Because year and role groups are filtered by name, a teaching group whose name happens to contain the word year, learner or mentor is skipped — its teachers will not appear. Conversely, a whole-school or all-staff group that does not contain one of those words counts as a teaching group, and every member of staff in it lands in every pupil's Teachers of group. If a group looks far too big, that is almost always the cause: check the Preview, which shows the largest groups first, and rename the offending group. See how group names are formatted.

Turning it off

Turning the setting off stops the sync maintaining these groups — including the clear-up above, which runs as part of the same pass. The groups already created stay exactly as they were on the last run and keep syncing to your cloud platform. If you want them gone, delete them from the Groups list after switching the setting off, or ask us to run the clear-up for the school once.