Importing students

Bulk import takes a spreadsheet of students and turns it into accounts, enrolments and invitation emails in one pass. This article is the file format, the limits, and how to read the result — because a partially successful import is the normal outcome and it tells you exactly what to fix.

The file

• CSV or XLSX — Both are accepted. A spreadsheet exported straight from your student system usually works untouched.
• A header row — The first row names the columns. It is how the importer finds your data.
• An email column — required — The only field that must be present and valid. A row without a usable address is skipped and reported.
• A name column — optional — Used for the account name. Without it the address becomes the name, which is workable but ugly.
• A class column — optional — Enrols each student into a class by name or invite code as they are created.

Five hundred rows at a time

Each import handles up to 500 valid rows. A larger cohort is several imports, which is also easier to verify — a failure in a batch of 500 is findable, and one in a batch of 3,000 is not.

Split by class or by year group rather than arbitrarily, so a re-run is a meaningful unit.

What each row does

1. An account is created, or reused — A new student account in an invited state, or the existing account if that address is already here. Existing accounts are never overwritten.
2. They are enrolled — Into the class you named on the row, or the one you chose for the whole import.
3. An invitation is issued — Valid for seven days. The student uses it to set their own password and claim the account.
4. An email goes out — After the import has committed, so a mail failure cannot roll back a successful account.

Reading the result

You get five numbers and a list of errors, and it is worth reading all of them rather than the first:

• imported — Accounts created.
• enrolled — Students placed into a class. Lower than imported means some rows named a class that did not resolve.
• skipped_existing — Addresses already on the site. Not an error — they were reused rather than duplicated.
• errors — Per-row reasons. Almost always a malformed address or a missing email column.
• sent — Invitation emails that went out. Lower than `imported` is normal and not a failure — the accounts exist either way, and you can resend.

Before running a big one

1. Import five rows first — Your own address among them. It costs a minute and catches a wrong column mapping before it affects a year group.
2. Check the addresses are ones students read — A school address nobody logs into produces 200 accounts and no students. This is the commonest cause of a "nothing happened" import.
3. Create the classes first — So the class column resolves. An unmatched class name imports the student without enrolling them.
4. Warn the students it is coming — A first email from an unfamiliar domain lands in spam. One line in a school newsletter fixes most of the non-arrivals.