How it works: Automatic student import at the start of the year

🎉  Good news! From the 2024-25 academic year onwards, STEER will start automatically importing your data for the new year. The manual yearly imports you are used to are now a thing of the past!

 

How does it work?

✅  The Short Answer:

At the start of each year, we'll automatically import all your students via Wonde between the 7th and 14th of September. We'll send you (all admin and IT users) an email when we do letting you know how it went. If you want to import your data early, then you can import manually.

💬  Frequently Asked Questions

What if we don't want to import automatically?

Exactly what kind of results will I get sent?

How should we check the data?

Why aren't you including staff?

 

What if we don't want to import automatically?

No problem! Go to Admin --> Data Management

Click here to pause Auto-Syncing. This will exempt you from the automatic import. Just remember to either do a manual import or switch it back on at some point. You will also want to inform any other staff who may be expecting the data to populate automatically.

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Exactly what kind of results will I get sent?

We'll send all Admin and IT users one of the following emails:

✅  If we successfully automatically imported students:

Note that getting this email doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't an issue with your import, it just means that we were able to sync it without issue. We strongly recommend that somebody at your school reviews the totals on the email, views the imported students and any students we were unable to import due to data errors. If needed, you can resolve the issues and re-run your import using the "sync now" button the data management page.

❌  If we were unable to automatically import students:

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How should we check the data?

The first step would be to check if any errors have been flagged. You'll see these on the data management page.

To do a further check, look at your update history. Click on the most recent import to see a summary of the data. If it's your first import of the year, there will be quite a lot of it, it's best to just check a few records to see if they match your expectations.

Here's a checklist:

✅ Are there any errors flagged? We'll flag any errors in your confirmation email. Usually these don't stop the import running, it simply results in some students being excluded. We'll also flag them on the data management page.
✅ Do the totals in your confirmation email match your expectations? Its best to start with a quick sense check. For example if there are 1000 new students and 1000 leavers, it suggests that something has gone wrong and students haven't been linked correctly to their existing accounts!
✅ Have all the correct data types been imported? The easiest place to check this is on the filters (however this is not available to IT users who don't have access to student data). You can also check in the update history.
✅  Have the correct year groups and houses been imported? Again it's easiest to check this using the filters, but you can also use update history.

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Why aren't you including staff?

We are still reviewing whether to start offering automatic syncing of staff at the start of the year. For the time being, after consultation with schools we decided that it would not be suitable. Due to our strict control of which data types staff members can see, new staff need to have permissions added. This means that automatically added staff would be unable to access student data until an Admin user did this. On balance, this is likely to create more confusion than efficiency.

Additionally, many Senior Practitioners prefer to introduce newly joining staff to STEER in a specific way, at a time that suits them. Some schools may not even want to add all teaching staff to STEER.

However, we are always open to feedback and so would appreciate it if you signalled your interest in potential future optional automatic staff syncing.

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